Moral Philosophy: Fred Clark puts my objections <braddelong.substack.com/p/hoisted-from-…> to Alasdair MacIntyre and company much more eloquently and cogently than I can:

Fred Clark: : ‘One of my favorite things about the whole Aquinastotelian school of “virtue ethics.” It’s all about practice, practice, practice. That “teleological vision of the good”? That’s supposed to come from working at it like Tony Gwynn in the batting cage, keeping at it until your callouses bleed. So it’s more than a little strange to realize that the lingering legacy of MacIntyre’s attempt to revive virtue ethics is the complaint that self-government requires us to do such work ourselves…. Richard Beck’s post seems more like his attempt to summarize those critiques than his full endorsement of them, but many of the critics he’s summarizing do not share Churchill’s preference for liberal democracy over “all other forms.” Today, these rehashed recitals of those Grunge-era critiques are coming from Orbanists and “Catholic integralists” and Bartonites and dominionists and other authoritarians who explicitly seek the end of liberal democracy…. Authoritarianism can! It can answer all of those questions so you won’t have to! It can answer all of those questions so you won’t be allowed to. And so can Orbanism, and Trumpism, and Catholic integralism, and every other form of fascism. Liberalism can’t tell you what determines a good human life, but the king or dictator or strongman can tell you that. And they will, as hard as they can…. Imagine a teleological vision of the good stomping on a human face. Forever…. To be fair, many of those pushing this Neo-Mahathirite MacIntyre-Hauerwas two-step are not calling for the end of liberal democracy and the establishment of some explicitly authoritarian religious autocracy. Most of them aren’t Adrian Vermuele <lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/02/how-mu…. But their complaint with secular government is—wittingly or un-—a call for sectarian government, which is a terrible idea with a monstrously high body count… <patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2024/02/1…>