Lessons from MacIntyre (1):
On Practices and Internal Goods
I’ve taught a senior level philosophy class called “Virtue Theory” in alternate years for about thirty years. The main text for this course has been Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. Thus, I’ve had years to read, re-read, and think about MacIntyre’s influential book. I’ve learned much from MacIntyre, though I’m sure there are insights in the book I haven’t noticed yet. A short essay, even a series of essays, can only explain a few of MacIntyre’s ideas.
First, internal goods of practices are real. “Practices” are cooperative social activities in which people strive to achieve excellence. Examples help understand this notion; I often ask students to think of driving, playing and instrument in an orchestra or band, architecture, or surgery. These and hundreds of other activities have standards of excellence baked into the concept of the activity. That is: we only understand the concept of driving by reference to the concept of good driving. The same relation exists between farming and good farming. You can’t do anything you like and call it “farming”; your actions as a “farmer” will be more or less like ideal farming, and if your actions are sufficiently unlike good farming, you not really farming at all.
“Internal goods” are goods made possible by some practice or a practice very like it. Band members who strive for excellence in playing music will sometimes report a kind of satisfaction or excitement or pleasure when the band plays well. (Notice that we very often struggle to give a name to the internal goods of a practice. Many of us find “pleasure” in biting a cookie. But the “pleasure” of excellent cooperative music playing is hardly the same.) Also, the internal goods of a practice are acknowledged and judged only by persons competent in that practice. Those of us on the outside might guess about the internal goods of architecture, but since we haven’t been trained in skills and standards of excellence appropriate to architecture we don’t really know.
“External goods,” things like money, prestige, and power are also real. Very often, persons can win external goods by participating in practices. External goods are controlled by “institutions.” All practices persist over time, and institutions grow up around the practices to enable the participants to cooperate. For example, the practice of driving is made possible by car manufacturers, auto insurance companies, the state patrol, traffic courts, gas stations, and so on. Institutions are necessary, and external goods are real goods. But if a person pursues only the external goods of a practice (e.g., prizes for the band, promotions for the architect, profit for the farmer, prestige for the editorial writer), the person can lose touch with the internal goods of the practice. MacIntyre calls this “corruption.”
Because internal goods are real, radical subjectivism of values must be false. In moral philosophy, the most sophisticated version of moral subjectivism is called “emotivism.” Emotivists, such as A.J. Ayer or Charles Stevenson, taught that normative moral judgments (for example, “stealing is wrong”) are really nothing more than expressions of feeling (“I don’t like stealing, and I don’t want you to like it either”). MacIntyre devotes several chapters of After Virtue to exploring the rise and decline of emotivism in modern moral philosophy. Most philosophers agree that emotivism is false as a theory of the meaning of moral words, which is how the theory was proposed. But MacIntyre points out that while emotivism fails as a theory of moral meaning, it gives a pretty good description of much of our moral behavior and arguments. That is, people assume there is no rational way to persuade groups who disagree with us, so we adopt non-rational methods of “persuasion”: protests, de-platforming, insults, threats, manipulation, and all the techniques of propaganda.
Now, consider radical subjectivism in regard to a practice like driving. There are in fact internal goods of driving, and competent drivers experience them. Not yet competent drivers—imagine an enthusiastic 15-year-old who has his permit—may well have strong feelings and opinions about driving. The fifteen-year-old apprentice driver may think, for example, that the key to good driving lies in perfect vision and/or quick reflexes. He may believe, given the movies he has watched about race cars, that he knows more than his aged aunt. If subjectivism were true, the not yet competent driver’s feelings and beliefs would count just as much as the aunt with her thirty years of safe driving record. But subjectivism is not true. Those of us who are competent in driving insist—and we use powerful institutions like the state patrol and drivers training classes to make our insistence effective—that the would-be driver learn the virtues of driving. Only a virtuous driver can come to acknowledge and judge the internal goods of driving.
