The hypothesis I wish to advance is thatthe language of morality is ingrave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have--very largely if not entirely--lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.
Alasdair MacIntyreI can only answer the question โWhat am I to do?โ if I can answer the prior question โOf what story or stories do I find myself a part?โ
Alasdair MacIntyreWe are waiting not for a Godot but for another-doubtless very different-St. Benedict.
Alasdair MacIntyreThe bureaucratic manager, the consuming aesthete, the therapist, the protester and their numerous kindred occupy almost all the available culturally recognizable roles, the notions of the expertise of the few and of the moral agency of everyone are the presuppositions of the dramas which those characters enact. To cry out that the emperor had no clothes on was at least to pick on one man only to the amusement of everyone else; to declare that almost everyone is dressed in rags is much less likely to be popular.
Alasdair MacIntyre