MacIntyre – The Concept of a Practice and the Origin of the Virtues
There is an element of what is missing in modern life through MacIntyre’s use of the concept of a practice. He illustrates this with the example of a person wishing to teach a disinterested child how to play chess.
The teaching process may begin with the teacher offering the child candy to play and enough additional candy if the child wins to motivate the child to play. It might be assumed that this is sufficient to motivate the child to learn to play chess well, but as MacIntyre notes, it is sufficient only to motivate the child to learn to win- which may mean cheating if the opportunity arises. However, overtime, the child may come to appreciate the unique combination of skills and abilities that chess calls on, and may learn to enjoy exercising and developing those skills and abilities. At this point, the child will be interested in learning to play chess well for its own sake.
There are two kinds of goods attached to the practice of chess-playing and to practices in general. One kind, external goods which are goods attached to the practice “by the accidents of social circumstances.” In the example, the candy given to the child is typically money, power, and fame in the real world. Internal goods are the goods that can only be achieved by participating in the practice itself. The two kinds of goods differ in their nature and internal goods are competed, “but it is characteristic of them that their achievement is a good for the whole community who participate in the practice.”
A well played chess game benefits both the winner and loser, and the community as well. Politics should be a practice with internal goods, but as it is now it only leads to external goods. When individuals first start to engage in a practice, they have no choice but to agree to accept external standards for the evaluation of their performance and to agree to follow the rules set out for the practice: “ A practice involves standards of excellence and obedience to rules as well as the achievement of goods.” So he might point out that an important part of becoming a grand master at chess is studying records of games, examining their philosophies, practice regimens, and the psychological tactics they employed on their opponents. The rules and standards have developed in the past and are binding on the present, and although they can sometimes be changed by the community as a whole those changes should be consistent with the principles of the game as it has developed in the past.
Practices are important because it is only within the context of practices, such as money and power, can be achieved in a variety of ways, some good and some bad. But achieving the goods that are internal to a practice, we acquire the presence of the virtues in terms of practices: A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and the exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices. The necessity of virtues like honesty, courage, and justice follow logically from the definition of a practice, virtues and morality can only make sense in the context of a practice: they require a shared end, shared rules, and shared standards of evaluation. The virtues are those goods by reference to which, whether we like it or not, we define our relationships to those other people with whom we share the kind of purposes and standards which inform practices.
Members of a community must be honest with each other when they instruct others in the principles of the practice, when they explain the rules to them, and when they evaluate their performance. Courage, MacIntyre says, is a virtue “because the care and concern for individuals, communities and causes which is so crucial to so much in practices requires the existence of such a virtue.” Practitioners of a shared practice come to genuinely care about each other, and genuinely caring about others means a willingness to risk harm or danger on their behalf and that is what courage is.
Justice requires that we treat others in respect of merit or desert according to uniform and impersonal standards.” So virtues such as honesty, courage, and justice have meaning in the context of a practice.
Why does MacIntyre care so much about practices? It is because he believes that there are a number of things that have been practices in the past, currently are not, and chief among these is politics. It is possible to think of politics as a practice within a community that has a shared aim, same standards of excellence, the same rules, and the same traditions. Indeed, in MacIntyre’s view, politics is a sort of meta-practice, because it is the practice of determining the best life for human beings, a life which will include engaging in other practices. Here MacIntyre parallels Aristotle’s language about politics as the science ordering the other sciences. The benefits of a practice would then flow to those who participated in politics. In fact, certain important benefits could only be achieved by political participation and politics would make people more virtuous rather than less virtuous as it now does.
Bibliography
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtues. 2nd edition. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.
Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross. New York: Oxford
UniversityPress, 1925.
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