MacIntyre, Alasdair

"To understand a practice is to understand the standards of excellence it embodies."

"A tradition is alive insofar as it remains capable of generating debate and revision from within."

"The narrative unity of a human life is only achieved through struggle and development."

"Virtues are excellences which enable human flourishing within shared traditions."

"The unity of human life is the unity of a narrative quest."

"I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'"

"Moral disagreement in modernity is often disagreement about what objective there is to morality itself."

"We are never simply our own, but we are always partly constituted by our relationships."

"Justice cannot be understood apart from the concept of a practice within a tradition."

"Modern moral discourse is the debris of the moral language of the Enlightenment."

"The concept of virtue cannot be adequately understood in isolation from its social and cultural context."

"We inherit our roles and find ourselves already embedded in practices that precede us."

"The narrative unity of human life means that each episode of our lives has meaning within the whole."

"Traditions are living bodies of thought and practice that possess their own rationality."

"To understand a human practice is to understand its history and the virtues it embodies."

"Modern liberalism tends to assume that principles of justice can be determined independently of conceptions of the good."

"The Enlightenment promise of a universal rational morality failed because it severed morality from its traditional contexts."

"Practices are coherent forms of human activity established by long periods of history."

"We cannot be fully rational unless we understand ourselves as part of a history."

"The virtues are not merely individual character traits but social and political achievements."

"A practice is a cooperative human activity with internal goods and standards of excellence."

"Modern capitalism dissolves the internal goods of practices in favor of external rewards."

"The Aristotelian project must be recovered and reinvented for our contemporary world."

"Human beings, as narrative creatures, construct their identities through the stories they tell about themselves."

"Goods internal to a practice can only be recognized by practitioners of that practice."

"Moral reasoning requires that we locate ourselves within a tradition and understand our role within it."

"The coherence of a human life consists in the coherence of a narrative."

"We inherit traditions and vocabularies that enable us to understand ourselves and our world."

"The virtues of a given practice are those that sustain and extend that practice's capacity to achieve its goods."

"Modern individuals often lack the narratives necessary to understand their own lives as unified wholes."