I think during the episode we were too busy trying to understand After Virtue to just say straight out that the attempt to ground morality solely on cultural narratives just doesn’t work, at least not to any more determinate degree than some of the other moral theories that MacIntyre suggests. In the Kant episode, I suggested that we need to use the principle of charity to apply the categorical imperative intelligently. One might well use Aristotle’s term phrónēsis (practical wisdom) instead. In short, no rule can determine its own applications; we need smart people to do that, and in tough ethical dilemmas, wise people won’t always make the same call. MacIntyre saw that underdetermination of actions by rules and declared that people will abuse that to then make the rules justify whatever they wanted to do anyway, i.e. as emotivists. In the episode, we really couldn’t see how his own system got around this problem such that “the right thing to do” would be objective, even for one person embedded in a particular culture and circumstance, such that everyone with the relevant competence would judge the same way. The nagging threat of existentialism remains, i.e. that all such choices involve a creative act and not just astute obedience to an objective prescription.

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