Virtue and Practice

A practice, in MacIntyre's sense, is a coherent, socially established cooperative activity with its own standards of excellence — chess, architecture, medicine, farming, enquiry. Practices have both external goods (money, status, power, which can be achieved by other means) and internal goods: goods that can only be achieved by participation in the practice itself and that can only be recognised and evaluated by practitioners. The internal good of chess is not the prize money but the achievement of a certain kind of excellence in play — a good that does not exist independently of the practice and cannot be obtained any other way.

Virtues are the dispositions required to achieve the internal goods of practices. Without justice, courage, and honesty, practices collapse: the dishonest chess player who cheats obtains the external goods while destroying the internal good; the cowardly surgeon who will not operate under difficulty fails the internal goods of medicine. Virtues are therefore not arbitrary cultural values but natural necessities of any complex form of human cooperative activity. This gives virtue ethics a non-relativistic foundation: the virtues required for practices are the same across cultures, even if their particular expression varies.

MacIntyre extends the account beyond individual practices to the whole of a human life. The virtues required for multiple practices cohere only if they are unified by a conception of the good for a human life as a whole — a narrative unity in which the different chapters of one's life are intelligible as parts of a single story. Practical wisdom (phronesis) is the master virtue that achieves this unity: the capacity to know which goods to pursue in which circumstances, and how to balance the demands of different practices and roles over a lifetime. Without this narrative unity, the virtues of different practices pull in different directions and the self fragments.

The account of practices and their internal goods is the philosophical centrepiece of After Virtue, chapters 14–15. MacIntyre draws on but significantly extends Aristotle's account of virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics. The account has been enormously influential in applied ethics — especially medical ethics, business ethics, and education theory.