He got the disease right and the cure wrong, and almost nobody noticed, because the disease was so well described that the listener arrived at the prescription already grateful.

Alasdair MacIntyre spent forty years arguing that our moral vocabulary is salvage—words rescued from a wreck and used with conviction by people who no longer possess the framework that made them mean anything. He then proposed a remedy: that a human life has the unity of a story, and that we become answerable by knowing which story we are in.

This book accepts the diagnosis without reservation and takes the remedy apart, using tools MacIntyre himself supplied. His great question about any moral term was: what would establish that it applies? Put that question to the unity of a narrative and no answer comes back. Every life can be told as a coherent quest—including the lives of people who did terrible things competently—and a test that nothing fails has told you nothing.

What replaces it is not a deeper interior. It is the claim that there was never one self to be fragmented in the first place. A person is not a single thing appearing in many settings; a person is where several communities overlap, and what belongs to him alone is not a hidden core but the crossing between them. Being different with different people turns out to be very old, very ordinary, and shared with creatures that have no culture whatsoever. What is not ordinary, and what deserves every bit of the suspicion we usually waste on mere inconsistency, is conduct that would not survive being shown at the border between one world and the next.

The difference between the diplomat and the fraud is not sincerity. It is whether the crossing closes.