Where do you think your moral values come from?

Moral disputes abound

It is the 'moral ' thing to do

What do you mean by that?

It is a  'good' thing to do'  claims the person who believe they are acting 'morally'.

When asked how it is 'moral' they may retort it is 'moral' because it is rational

 However to claim moral consensus on the basis of an ideal of rationality, having "incommensurable" moral notions there arises the problem that  'value'; can not be reduced to a common measure

There was a failed attempt by various Enlightenment thinkers to furnish a final universal account of moral rationality this led to the rejection of moral rationality altogether by subsequent thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, and Friedrich Nietzsche. On MacIntyre's account, it is especially Nietzsche's utter repudiation of the possibility of moral rationality that is the outcome of the Enlightenment's mistaken quest for a final and definitive argument that will settle moral disputes into perpetuity by power of a calculative reason alone and without use of teleology.

By contrast, MacIntyre is concerned with reclaiming various forms of moral rationality and argumentation that claim neither ultimate finality nor incorrigible certainty (the mistaken project of the Enlightenment), but nevertheless do not simply bottom out into relativistic or emotivist denials of any moral rationality whatsoever 

More generally, according to MacIntyre, it is the case that moral disputes always take place within and between rival traditions of thought that make recourse to a store of ideas, presuppositions, types of arguments and shared understandings and approaches that have been inherited from the past. Thus even though there is no definitive way for one tradition in moral philosophy to vanquish and exclude the possibility of another, nevertheless opposing views can call one another into question by various means including issues of internal coherence, imaginative reconstruction of dilemmas, epistemic crisis, and fruitfulness.

The task of MacIntyre in his seminal book, After Virtue is to account both for the dysfunctional quality of moral discourse within modern society and rehabilitate what MacIntyre takes to be a forgotten alternative in the teleological rationality of Aristotelian virtue ethics. .

MacIntyre's second major work of his mature period takes up the problem of giving an account of philosophical rationality within the context of his notion of "traditions," which had still remained under-theorized in After Virtue. Specifically, MacIntyre argues that rival and largely incompatible conceptions of justice are the outcome of rival and largely incompatible forms of practical rationality. These competing forms of practical rationality and their attendant ideas of justice are in turn the result of "socially embodied traditions of rational inquiry."

 Although MacIntyre's treatment of traditions is quite complex he does give a relatively concise definition: "A tradition is an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined" in terms of both internal and external debates.

MacIntyre argues that despite their incommensurability there are various ways in which alien traditions might engage one another rationally – most especially via a form of immanent critique which makes use of empathetic imagination to then put the rival tradition into "epistemic crisis" but also by being able to solve shared or analogous problems and dilemmas from within one's own tradition which remain insoluble from the rival approach.

MacIntyre's account also defends three further theses: first, that all rational human inquiry is conducted whether knowingly or not from within a tradition

Can we gound ground virtues in an account of biology for are we not dependent rational animal

MacIntyre identifies the human species as existing on a continuous scale of both intelligence and dependency with other animals such as dolphins. One of his main goals is to undermine what he sees as the fiction of the disembodied, independent reasoner who determines ethical and moral questions autonomously and what he calls the "illusion of self-sufficiency" that runs through much of Western ethics culminating in Nietzsche's Übermensch.^[18] 

In its place he tries to show that our embodied dependencies are a definitive characteristic of our species and reveal the need for certain kinds of virtuous dispositions if we are ever to flourish into independent reasoners capable of weighing the intellectual intricacies of moral philosophy in the first place.

ather than focusing on practice-independent obligation of a moral agent (deontological ethics) or the consequences of a particular act (utilitarianism).

firmation of virtues as embedded in specific, historically grounded, social practices.