Alasdair MacIntyre:

“Dialogue returns us to our condition as reflective questioning and self-questioning animals, rather than as those helplessly in the grip of their own particular beliefs. Philospohical dialogue is a remedy for that loss of questioning and self-questioning which characterises so much of belief in secularised societies, whether it is the unreflective and complacent unbelief of those who are tacitly and complacently dismissive of religious belief or the unreflective and complacent loudmouthed belief of fundamentalists of every faith.”

“It is not always possible to find… common ground and sometimes this is a consequence of the fact that no one engages in philosophy without being influenced by their extraphilosophical allegiances, religious, moral, political and otherwise. What is important here is twofold: first, not to disguise such allegiances as philosophical conclusions and secondly, to make their influence on one’s philosophical work explicit. The first is a danger that threatens those who fail to recognise, for example, that atheism requires an act of faith just as much as theism does and that physicalism is as liable to be held superstitiously as any religious view. The second is necessary, if one is to clarify the relationship between one’s philosophical and one’s other commitments.”

Jonathan Lear:

“MacIntyre claims that genuine political life requires shared agreements not only about goods, but also about standards of rational deliberation. If there is to be such agreement, this must, he argues, occur in small communities, where people can be held directly accountable for their beliefs and acts. The structures of modernity, however, are incompatible with all of these requirements. This leads him to a premature pessimism about the possibility of virtue ethics in the modern world, as well as to an unjustified nostalgia for bypassed political structures such as the ancient polis and the medieval commune.”

“[L]ocal communities which share a common sense of the good life regularly purchase that solidarity by also having an excluded and reviled other. Whatever problems modernity may pose, one of its virtues is that it has regularly disrupted local structures of prejudice.”

Source: “Can the virtuous person exist in the modern world?” - Jonathan Lear, London Review of Books, Volume 28 Number 21