A few responses, bearing in mind Anthony's comments below:
1. Rejection of predictive social sciences and acceptance of virtue ethics.
On reading Anthony's rebuttal, I briefly can't remember why we thought our objection worked, but I'll try one more time: doesn't virtue ethics require some claims about what human nature is like (i.e. virtues are virtues because they help us fulfill our destiny/nature/telos)? I guess the laws of virtue that come from that are normative, not prescriptive, but this still seems awfully similar to what social sciences claim to know about us (and then know how to tell us how to act).
2. Roles in a virtue ethics society and democratic values.
I can see how MacIntyre seems like a Marxist, and I shall ruminate on that one for a while. A side note though - I am really more concerned with our democratic values more than our democratic government, in this case. I take MacIntyre to be rejecting the modern understanding of individualism in the strong sense, which he should given his proposal that (different, and hierarchical) societal roles made sense of virtue ethics in ancient Greece. Currently strong individualism supports our idea or rights (which MacIntyre openly rejects) and our theories of the democratic worth of all people. This is the very reason why, on a close inspection, Aristotle's Greece seems to us to be very oppressive. I am worried that is we give up strong individualism, we won't have a basis for democratic worth, and I am not prepared to do that with MacIntyre.
Having said that, I think there would be a reasonable argument for the successive fall of our theories of democratic government as well, but not necessarily to an authoritarian/totalitarian regime.
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It's true that virtue ethics is based on claims about human nature. But MacIntyre doesn't have a problem with that; it's the attempt at a predictive, law-based, quantified science of human behaviousr that he objects to. So I still think he manages to avoid getting caught in his own trap as it were.
As for the anti-individualist, or anti-egalitarian worry, it's not clear how he does deal with that in After Virtue. A number of his critics have claimed that he is really relying on the lberalism he officially rejects in order to support a less authoritarian view than Aristotle's. His moving from Aristotle to Aquinas in his later work complicates matters; he has a very interesting discussion of human vulnerability, as something that is neglected by both Aristotle and modern liberalism in his 'Dependent Rational Animals'.
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