system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why does MacIntyre hate modernity so much anyways?

I've read a comprehensive summary of *After Virtue* and it piqued my interest, so I'm now currently going through AV for real (for the admittedly un-virtuous reason of putting off study for my Integrative Neuroscience test).

However, I can't help but wonder why exactly MacIntyre thinks that the liberal humanist tradition is so utterly unsalvageable, to the point that we should all just admit that the Catholics were right and everything after 1517 was a mistake. 

He criticizes the Enlightenment for attempting an incoherent project of trying to radically reject community and tradition, and instead striving to reconstruct our understanding of the world and morality from undoubtable first principles. I think he's absolutely right that this research program inevitably collapses into solipsism, relativism, and/or contradiction, which is indeed what happened to Logical Positivism (the apex of this project) in between world wars, and what happened to ethics once Nietzsche came along.

However, it is my understanding that practically nobody believes in that kind of naive "first principles" stuff anymore. That part of the Enlightenment tradition is as good as dead, and post-structuralism and postmodernism have indeed rehabilitated the understanding of intellectual inquiry as being embodied in particular historical and social contexts and concerned with their particular problems (Kuhn, Lakatos). And outside the world of analytic philosophy, natural science is doing just fine, and people are still perfectly capable of making moral decisions in their everyday lives, using combined deontic, consequentialist, and virtue ethical systems. 

It seems like post-modern natural science and academic ethics are their own traditions, that they are passed down and innovated upon to resolve problems in very much the way MacIntyre says robust traditions ought to work, and that they sustain a modern Western society that, even if it isn't perfect, is still pretty damned successful. So what is it with all the accusations of doom and degeneracy and the irritation with therapists and managers and condemnation of democratic politics as "civil war by other means"? It's not like the Ancient or Medieval worlds with their virtue ethics were any better; in fact they were significantly worse.
gpt
So, one thing is: he's often talking about the intellectual foundation of ethics. He thinks modernity can't meet this challenge, and this creates various tensions. One of his big complaints is the central incommensurability of modern moral theory. Ethics, on his story, was originally at home within a certain sort of conception of the world that is no longer tenable. In trying to articulate the former without recognizing the loss of the conception of the world that underwrote it leads to failure. Hence his attempt to reconstruct a more social teleology (as opposed to a metaphysical one....though he was somewhat wavered on this as the years have gone by).

>And outside the world of analytic philosophy, natural science is doing just fine, and people are still perfectly capable of making moral decisions in their everyday lives, using combined deontic, consequentialist, and virtue ethical systems.

Four things: First, he's a big fan of "ordinary" folks and communities. Tight-knit fishing communities in Massachusetts are like the pinnacle of ethics for him. Second, the fact that philosophers and people with a little philosophy engage in, say, consequentalist reasoning isn't really an objection to him. He's more concerned about the justification for such things. He thinks that modern morality lacks the capacity to suitably provide such a justification. And so you can this incoherent mishmash of moral positions that are fundamentally unable to reach a convincing answer in the way that, say, math can. Third: you gotta remember that "virtue ethics" was pretty sparse in academic philosophy when he wrote the book. Fourth: he doesn't seem to have a problem with science.

>So what is it with all the accusations of doom and degeneracy and the irritation with therapists and managers and condemnation of democratic politics as "civil war by other means"?

The general idea here is that instrumental reason is all people can appeal to; we lack a more robust sense of reason to appeal to. We lack the resources to *justifiably* condemn certain forms of life. Hence the "therapist" is a stand in for a sort of character in modern culture who just makes you feel okay with your choices. Hence the "manager" is a stand in for a sort of character that has no idea how to evaluate the goodness of ends; they can only assess the efficiency of means and whatnot. The general idea is that we can learn something profound about contemporary culture by recognizing these sorts of archetypes around us.