If a human life is understood as a progress through harms and dangers, moral and physical, which someone may encounter and overcome in better and worse ways and with a greater or lesser measure of success, the virtues will find their place as those qualities the possession and exercise of which generally tend to success in this enterprise and the vices likewise as qualities which likewise tend to failure. Each human life will then embody a story whose shape and form will depend upon what is counted as a harm and danger and upon how success and failure, progress and its opposite, are understood and evaluated. To answer these questions will also explicitly and implicitly be to answer the question as to what the virtues and vices are. The answer to this linked set of questions given by the poets of heroic society … reveals how belief in the virtues being of a certain kind and belief in human life exhibiting a certain narrative order are internally connected.
– Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue (3rd ed., 2007)