So it's become apparent that there's something wrong with modern morality. There is something

wrong with what we think in which the good life consists, and in the very nature of how we describe

what is and is not moral. And this was the fundamental thesis of

Alastair Macinty's book After Virtue, in which he posits a thought experiment. I want to take

you through this, because I really think there's something to this. He suggests that imagine

there was a complete collapse of science. And not only was science not done, there was an anti-science movement that spent its time

trying to tear up what science had discovered and cast it to history, so it's completely lost.

And then once this madness had passed, people tried to reconstruct the lost science. They would find parts of

textbooks, they would find old recordings, they'd find certain studies, and slowly but surely

begin to reconstruct what science was out of the ashes of these ruins. But they would only be

partial. There would never be a full understanding of the theories.

And so they would use words like atomic theory or whatever.

I'm not a scientist.

They would use scientific words,

but they wouldn't really have a full understanding of those scientific words.

And so once they'd at least partially reconstructed all of this,

would you be able to call that science?

And the answer is, of course, no, because these, the new reconstructed scientific theories

would probably not have the same qualities and effects that actual proper science does.

And Alistair McIntie's contention was that this is what has happened to morality in the modern world

at some point in the last few hundred years. Morality has actually been under attack. It has been

deconstructed. It has been essentially lost to history. And we still now, in the modern era,

...