“At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.”
In this statement, MacIntyre is explaining a vital truth about true morality: it is based upon principles that the moralizer trusts are correct without evidence to prove it. Any kind of system of ethics must have some kind of foundation, and if not absolute truth, philosophers are forced to call these principles intuitions (as do Sidgwick and Wewell). Others might argue that any sort of moral philosophy at all requires some superhuman Truth or Goodness, often stemming from a God. Regardless, this quote speaks to the fact that value judgments must have some sort of accepted basis.
"There is no way to understand the character of the taboo rules, except as a survival from some previous more elaborate cultural background ... Why should we think about our modern use of good, right and obligatory in any different way from that in which we think about late eighteenth-century Polynesian uses of taboo?"
In this quote, MacIntyre is explaining and applying his example of King Kamehameha II and his abolition of the Polynesian taboo rules (a tradition across those islands). When Kamehameha abolished these taboo rules, he met with very little resistance despite generations of strict observance of these cultural traditions because, by that time, the people's ideas of what the taboo rules meant and represented had long faded away. MacIntyre argues that the state of the Polynesians with regard to their taboos is exactly the same as the state of people in modernity with regard to morality: we have the vestiges and an appearance of a complete theory, but its foundations have long since faded away.
"If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us."
In this quote, part of the last paragraph of the last chapter of the original edition, MacIntyre provides a course of action for the enlightened reader living in the modern/postmodern era. We are living in a moral dark age, and we must fight to preserve morality despite its erosion in popular society. To combat this darkness, we must construct forms of community for the stabilization and preservation of morality and the intellect, waiting for the arrival of the new St. Benedict.
