presupposed; and the lack of social contact between theism and contemporary morality is
at least partly to be explained by the lack of logical connection between theistic beliefs
and modern moral beliefs.”
Rather then celebrating such moral hybridity as Connolly does and Taylor is
receptive to, Macintyre laments the point that fewer and fewer citizens have appeal to an
“unambiguous and single moral form within which they could work out their lives.”
Macintyre freely admits that in our pluralist age, we cannot do with Christianity in the
modern world “but often cannot do without it entirely either, because we have no other
vocabulary in which to raise certain kinds of [moral] questions,”
like those alluded to
above. Christianity can no longer serve as the basis for public reason given contemporary
pluralism. Yet “what is put in its place is not a new and relevant morality but (is often in
its new fangled variants) an entirely vacuous one.”
Within this fragmented moral culture citizens find themselves on the one hand
with a muddled Christian vocabulary and on the other a lack of any alternative
vocabulary through which to engage in a substantive discussion of the ends of collective
political action like social or economic justice rather than mere assessments of the means
by which action is carried out. Echoing Arendt’s concerns about the loss of tradition in
the demise of durable forms of political authority, Macintyre sees the loss and non
replacement of a shared Christian moral vocabulary as anathema to effective political
action as contemporary political actors are left without a common language by which to
raise and contest the goals and aims of collective political actions.
what Macintyre has recently labeled as intellectual disability, the inability to imagine
alternative realistic futures to the present, to feel compelled to take features of a present
17
Alasdair Macintyre, The Religious Significance of Atheism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1969) p.
44.
18
Secularization and Moral Change p. 49. This point is also revisited throughout After Virtue and Whose
Justice? Which Rationality? For the most concise re-articulation of it see Whose Justice? Which
Rationality? p. 397.
19
Ibid p. 69.
20
Ibid p. 71.
21
Ibid p. 36.
9
Convention