What’s wrong with society? Part 2.

We’re morally impoverished while thinking we’re morally wealthy.

Most of our moral reasoning is tribal. Our lives matter but your tribe’s lives don’t.

What makes one tribe’s moral reason superior to another? What the leaders say is moral and whichever group is stronger.

Much of our moral reasoning is a cover story for power plays.

Jesse Nigro summarizes the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s work.

Here’s some key insights.

- MacIntyre’s “disquieting suggestion” is that our capacity for ethical discourse is long gone, even if we never noticed its absence.

- Nowadays, we have a lot of people making appeals to “objective” ethical standards that are incompatible.

- Emotivism is the theory that all moral speech is actually just a disguise for arbitrarily asserting one’s opinion or will.

- This is the default position of societies where competing ethical theories render moral terms (like “just” or “good”) meaningless.