There ought not be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one … - Alasdair MacIntyre

On Kant’s view it can never follow from the fact that God commands us to do such-and-such that we ought to do such-and-such. In order for us to reach such a conclusion we would also have to know that we always ought to do what God commands. But this last we could not know unless we ourselves possessed a standard of moral judgment independent of God’s commandments by means of which we could judge God’s deeds and words and so find the latter morally worthy of obedience. But clearly if we possess such a standard, the commandments of God will be redundant.

The manager treats ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern is with technique, with effectiveness … The therapist also treats ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern also is with technique, with effectiveness …Neither manager nor therapist, in their roles as manager and therapist, do or are able to engage in moral debate. They … purport to restrict themselves to the realms in which rational agreement in possible—that is, … to the realm of fact, the realm of means, the realm of measurable effectiveness.

[M]y present point is not [the liberal-universalist one] that patriotism is good or bad as a sentiment, but that the practice of patriotism as a virtue is in advanced societies no longer possible in the way that it once was. In any society where government does not express or represent the moral community of the citizens, but is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity on a society which lacks genuine moral consensus, the nature of political obligation becomes systematically unclear. ...Loyalty to my country, to my community - which remains unalterably a central virtue - becomes detached from obedience to the government which happens to rule me.