MacIntyre&#x27;s work was incredibly interesting to this layman.  The main point I took away from it is that earlier moral theory asserted that the moral good was the same as in the sense of &quot;this is a good chair&quot;.  Looked at this way, the ancients had much simpler answers for moral questions than we do, because they all boiled down to &quot;is this person fulfilling their purpose by this action?&quot;.  Virtue ethics, which he&#x27;s famously associated with, then brings back that question, with an intermediate step of &quot;what are the traits of a person who is fulfilling their purpose as a person?&quot;, as a way of reducing the original question to a heuristic than can be applied to situations.<p>Where I think this has a problem is that people may disagree about the purpose of a person, or people in general.  Just as a chair&#x27;s purpose is most clearly set by the chair&#x27;s builder, talking about a person&#x27;s purpose intuitively implies a person&#x27;s builder, or &quot;Builder&quot;, if you will.  A rock shaped by water and accident to look like a chair may serve as one, and so be a good chair, but being a good chair doesn&#x27;t have any apparent bearing on whether it&#x27;s a good rock.  Without design and intent, purpose is a little fuzzy.   Hence (I believe), MacIntyre became religious a while after writing _After Virtue_.<p>So, even though virtue ethics, if accepted as better than consequentialist ethical theories, makes moral questions simpler, it seems a bit arbitrary with regard to the actual answers, and two virtue ethicists might disagree on which are the important virtues without either being more correct than the other.  Without a creator, virtue ethics is on only slightly firmer ground (in my opinion) than consequentialism, but <i>with</i> a creator, it provides strong moral guidelines while not requiring that those guidelines apply to the universe at large, or to said creator.  That is, for a virtue ethicist, believing in a creator god grounds moral theory for humans in a way that neither deontology nor consequentialism can.