MacIntyre: Virtue, Practice, and Internal Goods

Quote

"A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods."

— Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, Chapter 14 (1981; 3rd ed. 2007)

Author

Alasdair MacIntyre, born in Glasgow in 1929, was a Scottish-American philosopher whose After Virtue (1981) ignited the late-twentieth-century revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics. Arguing that modern moral discourse had become fragmented and incoherent, MacIntyre urged a return to the teleological framework of Aristotle. See MacIntyre.

Source

After Virtue (1981; third edition, University of Notre Dame Press, 2007) diagnoses the failure of Enlightenment moral philosophy and reconstructs virtue around the concepts of practice, narrative, and tradition. Chapter 14 offers MacIntyre's definition of virtue in terms of the internal goods of practices. For the Aristotelian background MacIntyre recovers, see the Nicomachean Ethics.

Context

MacIntyre wrote After Virtue against a modern moral landscape he judged terminally fragmented: the inherited vocabulary of rights, utility, and duty had lost the shared teleological background that once made it intelligible, leaving moral debates interminable because the contestants spoke from incommensurable premises. Recovering Aristotle, and reading him through Plato, Confucius, and even Nietzsche's critique of modernity, MacIntyre sought to re-anchor ethics in the practices and traditions within which character is formed. His definition of virtue is the hinge of this project.

Meaning

The definition is built on a prior distinction between two kinds of goods. External goods — money, fame, power — can be achieved in many ways and are objects of competition; if one person wins them, another loses them. Internal goods are different: they can be had only through participation in a particular practice, and their achievement enlarges the practice itself for everyone. The standards of a craft, a science, or a game are sustained by internal goods; excellence in chess, for example, is a mode of strategic understanding that enriches the tradition of play.

A virtue, then, is a quality of character — acquired, not innate — that enables an agent to secure these internal goods and without which they cannot be secured. Honesty in inquiry, courage in the face of risk, justice in cooperation: these are virtues because their possession lets one participate well in the relevant practices, and their absence defeats that participation regardless of talent or ambition. The cunning cheat may win external goods, but lacks the internal goods of the practice and so lacks the relevant virtue.

This is a sharp departure from modern moral theories. For Kant, morality is a matter of maxims and universal law; for the utilitarian, of outcomes measured in welfare. For MacIntyre, neither can make sense of virtue, because both sever conduct from the teleological context of a practice and the formation of character over time. Virtue is neither a rule to be applied nor a consequence to be calculated; it is a disposition built through practical wisdom within a tradition that gives actions their point. This aligns MacIntyre with the virtue-ethics tradition and with the broader Greek account of the good life.

The definition is also deliberately anti-individualist. Virtues are cultivated in communities that sustain practices, and they cannot be understood by abstracting the agent from the traditions that form them. This is why MacIntyre's account reaches across traditions — finding in Confucius a parallel concern with the cultivation of character through ritual and relationship — even as it remains rooted in an Aristotelian teleology. The possession of virtue, courage, and wisdom is, on this view, the condition of achieving any genuinely human good.

Related Wisdom

This definition is central to what virtue ethics is and to the comparison of Aristotle and Kant. It speaks to virtue, practical wisdom, ethics, and courage, and belongs to the traditions of virtue ethics and Greek philosophy, drawing on the store of ancient wisdom.

Sources

1. "Virtue Ethics." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/
2. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue (1981). 3rd edition. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007, Chapter 14.
3. "Aristotle's Ethics." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/