Contemporary moral experience as a consequence has a paradoxical character. For each of us is taught to see himself or herself as an autonomous moral agent; but each of us also becomes engaged by modes of practice, aesthetic or bureaucratic, which involve us in manipulative relationships with others. Seeking to protect the autonomy that we have learned to prize, we aspire ourselves not to be manipulated by others; seeking to incarnate our principles and stand-point in the world of practice, we find no way open to us to do so except by directing towards others these very manipulative modes of relationship which each of us aspires to resist in our own case. The incoherence of our attitudes and our experience arises from the incoherent conceptual scheme which we have inherited.
— Alasfair MacIntyre, After Virtue. 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 68.
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