BOOKS
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philosophy from heroic societies through the classical age and the
medieval period towards the modern dislocation.
The account culminates in two remarkable chapters (14 and
15), which give a systematic explanation of the necessary back–
ground to moral thinking and action. What the Aristotelian tradi–
tion allowed for, and what we have lost, was the notion ofa virtue –
a characteristic which is both a means to and a component part of a
good life for a man. To see how virtues relate to the lives they serve,
MacIntyre introduces the notion of a practice. A practice is a "form
of socially established cooperative human activity through which
goods internal to that form of activity are realized." A crucial notion
is that of "internal good" - we can specify it in terms of the practice,
and can identify and recognize it through participation. To take
MacIntyre's example: portrait painting is a practice, and there are
goods in it which cannot be explained without reference to it. The
internal goods result from the attempt to show the truth of something
like Wittgenstein's dictum: "The human body is the best picture of
the human soul." But besides these, the portrait painter may attain a
whole host of external goods: fame, wealth, social status, perhaps
even power. These are goods which can exist, and be intelligibly
sought, even if painting had never come to be a human practice .
This is the first niche for the notion of virtue . Virtues single
themselves out, insofar as they are qualities which enable us to
achieve the goods internal to a given practice. And MacIntyre makes
clear that they must involve more than qualities of individual ex–
cellence. By acquiring competence in a practice, and its mainte–
nance through time, practitioners must have qualities such as
courage, honesty, and justice, a sense of which also determines their
relations with each other.
But how do the virtues related to practices impinge on what we
think of as moral virtues? Aren't some of the virtues of practices
morally irrelevant, in our ordinary understanding? And couldn't a
man's life fall into incoherence because of the incompatible demands
of different practices? His thesis is much too rich and difficult to
summarize easily . It is one of Aristotle's key ideas, to which he has
given his own, extremely interesting justification. The Aristotelian
idea is of the necessary unity of human life, so that we can speak not
just of
goods,
but of
the
good life .
MacIntyre's twist is to ground this in the thesis that our lives
must be understood as having the kind of unity that a narrative has.
