Apart from a unifying whole, virtues are like lifeless limbs severed from the body that once gave them purpose. Severed from an understanding of human purpose, virtue becomes mere emotivism. MacIntyre describes emotivism as the belief that “moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.”24 In other words, without an external, objective source of meaning and purpose, we are left with only our internal and subjective feelings. Emotivism isn’t simply having and expressing emotions but being overwhelmingly informed and driven by them. And because
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