Violence, Law, and Ciceronian Ethics in Chaucer's Tale of Melibee

Not only the suggestion that different societies have had widely different moral beliefs, but also the more radical suggestion that the conceptual schemes embodied in their moralities have differed widely, would appear as a banal truism to any anthropologist. . . . But the notion of a single, unvarying conceptual structure for morality dies hard; and from the eighteenth century to this day, the English utilitarians and idealists, logical empiricists and analytical philosophers, have all been willing to discuss moral philosophy on the assumption that there was something to be called ‘‘the moral consciousness’’ or, in a later idiom, ‘‘the language of morals.’’ The questions ‘‘Whose moral consciousness?’’ or ‘‘Which language?’’ have rarely, if ever, been raised. —Alasdair MacIntyre, Against the Self-Images of the Age, p. 136