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One needs basic goals and principles to orient one’s life. One can’t just get lost in the shifting sands or the given storms of life. Your focus and direction needs to have a True North and a lighthouse. The disco light is mesmerizing, but an insufficient one to see one’s ways through the hard parts of your life, your communities life, or the lives of those around you, like husband, wife, kids, friends, and wider family relationships.Tolerance and my gut are rather relativistic stands. Not to mention, its just a matter of externals which keep me accountable in the least. It ends up being not much different than whatever is popular or conveinient. Whatever might be selling on television or my friends are doing or culture is doing. Love trumps all of the above. Every. Single. Time.It’s a hodgepodge without much of roots, center, or a coherent source. Relativism and tolerance aren’t enough. That’s hyper-individualistic and hyper-subjective. Subjective hodge-podge assemblies are not enough. There isn’t much of a consensus, in contrast to other systems of virtue ethics which are sets. I can point to a half dozen Bible verses on the question of Christian virtue, which give you a solid and coherent target.Not to mention, the ethical and character is sourced in the heart. Your heart and your intentions is the source of your actions in the world. And in particular your habitual actions. These are in fact often referred to as being intentional or wise about one’s decisions. Taking on the long view that transcends immediate pleasure or even immediate self-interest. That there are ethical principles—including respect, dignity, truth, and integrity which trump momentary feelings or passing pleasures.Existing only at the level of utilitarian, efficient, or productive, or pragmatic is problematic. For instance toxic toys were efficient and productive for companies in China, but not for kids in America who contracted diseases or who died from their use. Same goes for the environmental critique of the oil economy. Life has to be something more then GNP based productivity. Because elsewise, all our ethical considerations are commodified and dehumanized before we even get started.Some notion of the intrinsic value of values as well as the intrinsic value of human beings, in the form of dignity and respect is necessary. Intrinsic value is precisely incalculable. It’s certainly more than a million dollars, but it doesn’t fit in the neat equation of a Microsoft spreadsheet. The loss of humanity or dignity fundamentally can’t be accounted for in simple numerical or quantitative terms. This ostensibly is professor John Rawls core argument in Theory of Justice. “The rights secured by Justice are not subject to political bargaining or the calculous of the social interest.”In fact, deontology and utilitarianism are not enough. Which is to say in its academic forms it seems to only include negative ethics, not positive ethics.:I will not attempt a full genealogy of the problem here: The exercise too often proves facile and unconvincing. Somewhere along the way the traditional scheme of virtues was greatly flattened. Morality was collapsed into justice and justice reduced to its political dimensions: Prudence came to be conceived as cleverness, tem-perance as a lifestyle choice, fortitude as an admirable but not a moral thing. General prohibitions and political action items became the substance of everyday moral thought: Do not rape; end global warming. We lost sight of the truth that chastity is no more about avoiding rape or even adultery than kindness is about avoiding murder: Certainly the two are incompatible, but cultivating the virtue goes far beyond avoiding its most flagrant violation.Some blame may be laid at the feet of moral philosophy, which in the anglophone world has been dominated by utilitarian and Kantian theories, and, whatever their merits, the first tends to focus us on the grand social problems—a thing is good in proportion to the quantity of goodness it produces, so that the everyday actions of a life matter not at all in relation to large social currents—and the second has the popular effect of destroying any positive category for moral action, sorting everything into prohibited and permissible with little room for the startling, splendid, and wonderful.Source: The Beauty of the Ethical | Ross McCulloughIn fact, similar arguments are made elsewhere in philosophers Williams and MacIntyre:Like Williams, MacIntyre is deeply skeptical of the dominant modes of moral philosophy. This is because these approaches lack historical, social, and cultural awareness, and because they take as their subject “Morality”—an unwieldy product of modern social and ideological changes, given intellectual standing by three centuries of unwitting theorists. Like Williams, MacIntyre thinks “Morality” is a serious distortion of the proper concerns of ethics, namely living well as a human being. Though they disagree about what that means.In some sense it ends up approaching a heroic kindness and virtue and something akin to the Golden Rule:Moreover, Williams is unable to address the kind of question that for MacIntyre is central to ethical thinking: I know what I feel, or desire, or am drawn to identify with, but what ought I to do? Are these feelings, desires, and tendencies good? Which is to say, are their objects good? To answer these questions we need a standard beyond desire and commitment. For Williams, human nature, to the extent that we can assume there is such a thing, is only a source of value-free biological and psychological facts, while for MacIntyre it provides a factual and evaluative ground. “What ought we to do?” is ultimately a question about what it would be good to do given the kind of (common) nature we have, about what pertains to it as conducive to or constitutive of human flourishing. I know my good in so far as I know the kind of thing I am, and unlike an angel, I am not a species unto myself. So the standard by which to determine what to do is “common” twice over, being the good of a common human nature and being a good that is realized and shared in common.Source: MacIntyre Against Morality | John Haldane