and action...in which moral judgments were understood as governed by
impersonal standards justified by a shared conception of the human good’.^6
The Canadian philosopher George Grant, who made a similar point a few
decades earlier, observed that prior to modernity, people generally assumed
an order in the universe that human reason can discern and according to which
the human will must act so that it can attune itself to the universal harmony.
Human beings in choosing their purposes must recognize that if these purposes
are to be right, they must be those that are proper to the place that mankind holds
within the framework of universal law. We do not make this law, but are made to
live within it.^7
Conscious of its participation in a larger intelligible cosmic order that it did
not create, the self is measured by something greater than itself. Within this
world view, both self and state are bounded by a natural order that they
transgress at their peril.
MacIntyre has shown what happens to moral reasoning when this tran-
scendent reference point is lost. For one, having lost a holistic view of human
nature, we tend to reduce morality to ethical actions that are no longer
connected to a comprehensive vision of human well-being. Moreover, we
continue to use moral language as if a universal ethical consensus still existed,
but our failure to acknowledge an objective horizonde factoreduces moral
statements to merely subjective assertions uttered with the emotional vehe-
mence that often accompanies the loss of a rationally defensible, universal
framework.^8
Charles Taylor has more recently added to MacIntyre’s criticism of mod-
ernity by noting the difficulties secular humanists encounter when advocating
for visions of humanflourishing without common horizons of significance.
Taylor describes this dilemma accurately, if not briefly, inASecularAge:Western
ideals of humanflourishing developed precisely because within the religious
frameworks giving rise to them humanflourishing was not a goal in itself. In
the case of Judaism and Christianity, at least, communion with God and self-
renunciation were the goal of belief, from the attainment of whichflowed,
paradoxically,flourishing of self and others.^9 Ironically, when secular human-
ism excludes religion, and humanflourishing becomes an end in itself, the
fullness of human experience can become dangerously narrowed and the door
(^6) Alasdair MacIntyre,After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd edn (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), x.
(^7) George Grant,Philosophy in the Mass Age(Toronto and Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto
Press, 1995), 27.
(^8) MacIntyre,After Virtue, 12. MacIntyre argues that the supposedly rational, universal moral
values discovered by moral philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were deeply
dependent on inherited Christian ethics.
(^9) Charles Taylor,A Secular Age(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2007), 17.
Christian Humanism and Contemporary Culture 139