MacIntyre’s assessment of modern ethics is that it broke due to a lack of a shared background and foundation for discourse that religion provided, and that the projects to provide a secular, rational vindication for morality (such as was attempted by Kant) failed due to all of them tearing at the negatives of one another. Philosophy as a result became less and less mainstream, something more for academics than the average man. This is why we now look at morality and virtue and claim to know it, but instead are unable to truly understand it.

This is absolutely untrue. I disagree with his assertion that the break with the foundation happened as he said it did and when it did. I would instead point to the collapse of Rome for the true break in morality. When the last Roman Emperor of the West was removed from his throne, virtue was dying. Embers of it burned for a while longer, but the fire had been smothered decades to centuries earlier in a slow process. The successor states of the west simply snuffed out the last bits over the next several generations. Virtue broke when the society that came up with the word itself no longer believed in its virtues. A new morality had emerged, devoured it, and took its place, wearing the same clothing and speaking the same language, but at its core, different. The rise of Christianity offered an entirely different and subversive ethical code of conduct. The distinction between public and private ethics, a key part of the idea of not only being a roman, but a virtuous one, was eliminated. Even our word virtue was scavenged from the wreckage, emblazoned on the chest of this new universal code. Everyone knew it was something good, even if they didn’t know what it actually meant anymore.

Virtus, to be a man, was a nebulous concept, but covered many different angles and aspects of Roman public life. It was primarily associated at first with military service and doing your duty as a citizen soldier to Rome, but as the Republic started to expand, and wealth and power started to accumulate in Rome, it took the meaning more of being a good person. It was a very public, very important thing for Roman men, especially politicians, to possess virtus. In fact, it was almost exclusive to Roman men. It was the quality of a leader, of a general, of someone skilled and important. Through it you gained other public virtues, such as gravitas, glory, dignity, and piety. Piety is the virtue seized upon by the ethics that replaced Rome’s virtues, and by the collapse of it took a new, different meaning from the original. In the loss of pietas, a core tenant of the Roman virtues, one can see the collapse of an ethical system, and like MacIntyre alludes to, the use of a word and claiming to understand it and know it, while being ignorant of it.

Pietas was loyalty to the state, to your parents, and to your family. Along the centuries, it morphed, and was consumed by the nascent Christianity in a very logical way, becoming piety as we understand it. After all, if God is our Father, then are we not obligated as good Christians to be loyal to him, and put him above all else? As the Christian religion embedded itself into Roman society, over time it slowly changed other moral aspects to better suit this view, discarding bits and pieces of the Roman morality as either unnecessary or blasphemous.

By the end of Rome in the west, these new virtues had replaced the old, wearing the clothing of the old, and trying their best to reconcile what they could of the old and claim it was always this way. This was the death of virtue in the west, a death that was unexposed until the modern era. Now, slowly, a new system of virtues is in fits and starts taking the place of the void left by the collapse of the old. MacIntyre is too used to the universal, and as much as he decries the loss of philosophy to the general public, he himself wrote this in a book intended for other scholars of a narrow field.