"Worlds of practice: MacIntyre's challenge to applied ethics"

by Higgins, C (2010)

Key Passage

MacIntyre considers practice the primary moral context because it is only through learning to pursue the good qua doctors, dancers, and diplomats that we acquire enough moral knowledge to begin reflecting on the good as such. Reflection on the shape of one’s individual life or on the human telos is a later, synthetic activity which makes use of the more determinate tele—the philosopher’s quest for wisdom or the pitcher’s ‘perfect game’—that we encounter as members of this or that practice.  If virtues are dispositions to act for the good and the good reveals only aspects of itself through the prism of practices, then we should expect to find the virtues similarly refracted at the level of practices. Indeed, it is MacIntyre’s position that in each genuine practice the moral virtues put down roots, flourishing in distinctive ways. Honesty, for example, takes on new meanings in the contexts of parenting, portraiture, and psychotherapy. Specifically, MacIntyre suggests that at the level of practices the virtues are those dispositions which enable practitioners to cooperate and maintain the integrity of the practice in the face of institutional expediency. In serving these functions within particular practices, the virtues gain further definition and particular inflections. (p.240)

Keywords

Macintyre. Applied Ethics, Business Ethics, Practice, Worlds Of Practice, Virtue

Themes

On MacIntyre

Links to Reference

• https://experts.illinois.edu/en/publications/worlds-of-practice-macintyres-challenge-to-applied-ethics
• https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9752.2010.00755.x
• http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.2010.00755.x

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