3 - After Virtue

Summary

One of the most discussed theoretical innovations in After Virtue is the distinction that Alasdair MacIntyre draws in its fourteenth chapter between ‘practices’ and ‘institutions’. The distinction is both sociological and ethical. Whereas Wittgenstein, Rawls and others use the terms as synonyms, MacIntyre specifies by ‘practices’ shared activities ordered to common, ‘internal’ goods and by ‘institutions’ formal organisations structured in pursuit of ‘goods external to practices’. In this, he aimed to identify ‘sociological’ grounds for teleological reasoning, including that of personal narratives, intellectual traditions and an ethics capable of apprehending rules, consequences and virtues. Whereas Hegelians and Marxists socialised reason in the state, MacIntyre separated shared reasoning directed to common goods from reasoning motivated by a will to power, money or status, whether institutionalised in states or in capitalist corporations. In this way, he provided an ethical critique of all existing power structures, which has been described as a ‘revolutionary’ Aristotelianism. In contrast to external goods and institutions, practices tutor individuals in the virtues by presenting non-instrumental goods to which they may re-orientate their desires and actions in conformity with shared reasoning and standards of excellence. Whilst MacIntyre’s subsequent journey into Thomistic Aristotelianism has added to what After Virtue says about teleological reasoning, his idea of social practices remains central to his account of how plain persons become independent practical reasoners.