For Work / Against Work
Debates on the centrality of work

References for Theme: On MacIntyre

  • Beabout, Gregory R
    • "MacIntyre and Business Ethics" (2020)
      (p.217) To a significant extent, MacIntyre’s criticisms of the Weberian manager are written in a tone that challenges, sometimes in a mode that is strident or even shrill: “Wake up!” MacIntyre aims to awaken his reader to the degree to which the manager’s life requires pretense and duplicity while undermining the ability to join with others in a quest for worthwhile goals.  “The manager treats ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern is with technique, with effectiveness in transforming raw materials into final products, unskilled labor into skilled labor, investment into profits.” In other words, the manager operates as if...
    • "MacIntyre and Business Ethics" (2020)
      (p.219) MacIntyre sometimes expresses a sort of concern for those who find themselves trapped in a life of self-alienation in which conflicting roles—as professional, citizen, parent, and so on—are compartmentalized, such that one’s life lacks narrative unity. Armed only with measurable metrics, especially money and profits, the manager’s quest for efficiency and effectiveness unwittingly becomes part of a large-scale, impersonal system that destroys small-scale communities of virtue.
    • "MacIntyre and Business Ethics" (2020)
      (p.220) ...MacIntyre is critical of those who hold that ethics “has as its subject-matter morality as such.” This way of doing ethics “moves at a level of abstraction and generality which detaches its concerns and its formulations from all social particularity.” On this approach, “society is understood as an arena of rival and competing interests and what morality supplied are rules which from a neutral and impartial point of view set constraints upon how these interests may be pursued.” Any neutral and impartial individual who is able to detach him or herself from the distorting influence of his or her interests would assent...
    • "MacIntyre and Business Ethics" (2020)
      (p.227) ...after Moore brought into focus MacIntyre’s claim that practices need institutions, and institutions require people who can organize things in a way that sustain and advance those practices housed in the organization, a series of questions came into focus as to whether it is possible to manage in a virtuous manner. On the one hand, it seems clear that the bureaucratic manager criticized by MacIntyre, the type who focuses solely on external goods, is unable to practice the virtues. On the other hand, given that, as MacIntyre states, the making and sustaining of institutions has “all the characteristics of a...
    • "MacIntyre and Business Ethics" (2020)
  • Breen, Keith
    • Under Weber’s Shadow: Modernity, Subjectivity and Politics in Habermas, Arendt and MacIntyre (2016)
      (p.168) MacIntyre takes care to note that external goods ‘genuinely are goods’, that practices such as fishing or farming are simultaneously directed towards internal and external ends, and that all practices require external goods to endure, a feature of his thought which will be emphasized below (Chapter 7.1), yet the meaning of practical activity transcends products, power or wealth. Hence the third feature of practices, their being activities where actors’ ‘achieve something of universal worth’, ‘transform ... and educate themselves through their own self-transformative activity’. Within practices, actors do not just attain extrinsic ends, but exhibit, actualize and extend their innate...
    • Under Weber’s Shadow: Modernity, Subjectivity and Politics in Habermas, Arendt and MacIntyre (2016)
      (p.169) Just as flourishing individual lives take the form of a ‘narrative quest’, an underdetermined search for the best ordering of one’s activities, so, too, do robust cultures seek to coherently order their collective existence. Here the concept of ‘tradition’ has application. The intelligibility of actions depends not only on their being identifiable within specific practices and the broader narrative of individual lives, but requires understanding these practices and lives as embedded within larger histories and inheritances. A vibrant tradition, MacIntyre argues, ‘is an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that...
    • Under Weber’s Shadow: Modernity, Subjectivity and Politics in Habermas, Arendt and MacIntyre (2016)
      (p.185) MacIntyre, we saw, possesses powerful arguments against that assumption arising from the fact of Fortuna or unpredictability, but he is careful not to devalue the possession of skill and technical knowledge. Practices are quintessentially intersubjective activities whose meaning goes beyond skilfulness to incorporate the realization of specific ends, yet this realization is impossible without the employment of skills. Skills or technai constitute, as Aristotle argued, the subordinate but nonetheless integral means to achieving internal and external goods. Inserting technical skills as constitutive elements within an inclusively conceived praxis, MacIntyre thereby effects an analytic melding of the value-rational and instrumental-rational that prevents...
    • Under Weber’s Shadow: Modernity, Subjectivity and Politics in Habermas, Arendt and MacIntyre (2016)
  • Dobson, John; Libri Publishing
    • "Utopia reconsidered" (2008)
      (p.67) When a MacIntyrean practice functions well, participants therein pursue internal goods of excellence by cultivating cardinal virtues of character such as wisdom, justice, integrity, and constancy; and by nurturing virtues of acknowledged dependence, such as just generosity, that bind the community. In addition, the key to healthy practices is to have them supported materially by institutions that, while supplying the external goods of material support, do not interfere with the practice’s pursuit of the internal goods of excellence.
    • "Utopia reconsidered" (2008)
      (p.73) Rather than simply destroying community as such, there is evidence that the modern firm is simply creating different types of community: more fluid, more all-embracing, more virtual, and no less virtuous. For example, in Global Microstructures: The Virtual Societies of Financial Markets, Cetina and Bruegger find evidence of the emergence of ‘virtual’ communities among foreign exchange traders: ‘..social forms are bound together by electronic information technologies . . drawn together as if they were in one place’. In their extensive empirical study the authors find foreign-exchange traders – typically characterised as the most red-in-tooth-and-claw-type of financial agents – developing their...
    • "Utopia reconsidered" (2008)
  • Higgins, C
    • "Worlds of practice: MacIntyre's challenge to applied ethics" (2010)
      (p.240) 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...
    • "Worlds of practice: MacIntyre's challenge to applied ethics" (2010)
      (p.243) There is also a downward dependence across the three levels of valuation. For MacIntyre, individual and communal ethical reflection depend on the existence of practices in three ways. First, communities rely directly on practices such as parenting, teaching, and city planning to pursue their communal goods. Second, these overarching goods are themselves ‘integrative of and partly structured in terms of the goods internal to particular practices, and never to be understood as wholly independent of them’. Third, ‘the work of integrating those [internal] goods into individual and communal lives itself has the structure of a practice’.It is worth elaborating on...
    • "Worlds of practice: MacIntyre's challenge to applied ethics" (2010)
      (p.245) Without the generativity of practices, we would inhabit a shrunken and gray moral universe with only a couple of known things worth striving for and these existing not as palpable purposes but as prosaic ideals. Practice, MacIntyre teaches us, is the poetry of the moral life.
    • "Worlds of practice: MacIntyre's challenge to applied ethics" (2010)
      (p.248) In addition to excellences of character and the good of a biographical genre, MacIntyre occasionally evokes a third sub-type of goods internal to practices located in practitioners. When MacIntyre discusses the goods internal to chess, for example, he speaks of ‘the achievement of a certain highly particular kind of analytic skill, strategic imagination, and competitive intensity’. While the first two items in MacIntyre’s list probably fall into the category of excellences of character, the third points toward what I will call a practice’s ‘moral phenomenology’. Just as Thomas Nagel famously asked of bats, we can ask, What is it like...
    • "Worlds of practice: MacIntyre's challenge to applied ethics" (2010)
      (p.249) The distinctive moral phenomenology of a practice offers its practitioners an insight into how it is excellent to be in the world by teaching us how to be in a particular world.
    • "Worlds of practice: MacIntyre's challenge to applied ethics" (2010)
      (p.250) ...practices offer their practitioners distinctive goods of at least four types: outstanding works or performances to appreciate, a rich moral phenomenology to experience, excellences of character to display and on which to rely, and a biographical genre through which to shape a meaningful life.  In contrast to Plato’s utopia, where we emerge from the cave of culture to behold the good itself, MacIntyre’s view is that we learn substantive if partial intimations of the good inside the various human practices. This primary, multifarious ethical education is where we find the raw resources, as it were, for answering the basic ethical...
    • "Worlds of practice: MacIntyre's challenge to applied ethics" (2010)
      (p.251) For MacIntyre, practices are not simply local contexts where general dispositions may come in handy; they are themselves moral sources. They are sites, perhaps the key sites, of our moral education. For MacIntyre, we learn the point and substance of the virtues within particular practices. If we are interested in goodness, MacIntyre avers, then we must turn to the contexts of practices for insight. The alternative, meanwhile, is an emotivist culture and an arid, technical moral philosophy…
    • "Worlds of practice: MacIntyre's challenge to applied ethics" (2010)
      (p.252) ...internal goods are goods for the practitioner. In practices, we not only have occasion to do good, but to encounter (aspects of) the good and pursue our eudaimonia. Inside each practice are singular resources for answering what MacIntyre calls ‘that most fundamental of questions, ‘‘What sort of person am I to become?’’’.….. Many practices are focused on the welfare of others and all practices direct their practitioner’s attention to something beyond their own ego needs. It must feel wonderful to win a chess tournament or create a magnificent painting, but one achieves such things by an intense absorption not with...
    • "Worlds of practice: MacIntyre's challenge to applied ethics" (2010)
  • Keat, R
    • "Practices, Firms and Varieties of Capitalism" (2008)
      (p.84) Putting aside the claims about incremental innovation, what is important for my purposes is that these characteristics of work in CMEs [Coordinated Market Economies] – the use of high levels of skill, combined with the absence of close supervision and opportunities for initiative - correspond closely to those identified in numerous studies as the key sources of so-called intrinsic work satisfaction. By contrast, when work is unskilled, repetitive and closely monitored (especially when this is connected to ‘payment by results’ reward systems), there is little possibility of such intrinsic satisfaction, and hence of work being valued in anything other than...
    • "Practices, Firms and Varieties of Capitalism" (2008)
      (p.86) So what is institutionally favoured in LMEs is for individuals to conceive of their career as something very much ‘their own’, in that it has no essential reference to any specific kind of practice or any particular organisational location, and depends on skills that can be transported and adapted to many different contexts. The career trajectory is highly mobile and fluid, and what counts as success will have to be defined independently of any practice-specific criteria, and hence perhaps primarily in terms of MacIntyre’s external goods of money, status and power. This does not  imply the absence of intrinsic work-satisfactions,...
    • "Practices, Firms and Varieties of Capitalism" (2008)
  • Knight, Kelvin
    • "Goods" (2008)
      (p.114) MacIntyre’s argument is that habituation into the virtues accompanies education in skills in pursuit of the goods internal to practices. For example, if one cheats in chess one may win candy, or money, or prestige, but one will only learn how to become a better chess player by cultivating personal excellence in the emulation of standards established by others. And such internal standards can only be emulated if one cultivates the virtues of self-control (or self-management), of friendship towards one’s co-practitioners, of justice in acknowledging their achievement, of truthfulness to both oneself and others in appraising one’s own achievement or...
    • "Goods" (2008)
      (p.118) MacIntyre’s primary structural critique of modernity is now that institutional domination and compartmentalisation prevent practices from adequately educating people in the virtues. Institutional domination denies individuals the opportunity of learning how to become independent practical reasoners. Compartmentalisation prevents them from coherently relating their different activities within their own lives, just as it prevents those activities from being coherently related in society as a whole. Given his stipulative definition of practices, this entails that what most people do in their working lives cannot be understood as participation in a practice, and his refusal of any ethic of ‘my station and its...
    • "Goods" (2008)
      (p.122) MacIntyre’s metaphysics of good is more modest than that of Hegel but more ambitious than that of Whiting. Goods are intentional objects, and goods internal to practices are non-aggregatively common goods that have an objectivity for individual actors. One cannot do more than idealise the common good as a universal, but one can act in pursuit of these more particular goods. Through participation in practices, especially at the local level, one learns to emulate standards of excellence, including skills internal to practices but also moral virtues internal to one’s character. In this way, goods of effectiveness subserve goods internal to...
  • Knight, Kelvin; Libri Publishing
  • Mendus, Susan; Horton, John
  • Moore, Geoff
  • Sinnicks, Matthew
    • "Practices, governance, and politics: Applying MacIntyre’s ethics to business" (2014)
      (p.230) For MacIntyre a practice is the first of three stages in his conception of a virtue, the second and third being the narrative unity of a human life and an account of what he calls a moral tradition respectively. So while there is more to virtues than practices, indeed virtues are ultimately grounded in distinctive human needs and capacities so that they contribute to our flourishing qua human beings (MacIntyre 1999, see especially chapter 7), MacIntyre holds that practices provide a basis for the virtues.
    • "Practices, governance, and politics: Applying MacIntyre’s ethics to business" (2014)
      (p.231) Practices are not only intrinsically worthwhile, they are also perfective of those who engage in them. Practices then, are the ‘schools’ of the virtues. If MacIntyre is right, then in addition to the inherent dignity of, say, working to support one’s family, work that is practice-based will further contribute both to the good of the agents who partake in it, and to our wider common good, which will be served by activities that are inherently morally educative. ….. For MacIntyre, internal goods are those goods which cannot be achieved in any way other than engaging in the activity in question, and...
    • "Practices, governance, and politics: Applying MacIntyre’s ethics to business" (2014)
      (p.232) According to MacIntyre’s account of moral education, it is the pursuit of internal goods that allows us to develop the virtues….The goods internal to the practice thus provide the initial motivation for virtue acquisition. The virtues enable agents to achieve internal goods and to participate in the community of practitioners. In time, the virtues come to be valued in themselves, and once properly acquired can be and are exhibited outside of the context in which they were learned.
    • "Practices, governance, and politics: Applying MacIntyre’s ethics to business" (2014)
      (p.236) In a world in which every chess grandmaster were motivated only by money and prestige, chess would still possess the features required for practice status, but none of the great chess players would be genuinely engaged in that practice: they would have no reason not to cheat, and no reason not to abandon chess if greater external rewards were available to them elsewhere, and so would miss out on the intrinsic joys of chess as well as the opportunity to cultivate the virtues. This obscuring of internal goods is a danger whenever practices are not adequately safeguarded by institutions. Because...
    • "Practices, governance, and politics: Applying MacIntyre’s ethics to business" (2014)
      (p.245) Politics in MacIntyre's sense requires virtues such as prudence, diligence, justice as without those virtues, participation in any practice or community will be threatened. Work within contemporary organizations can, when the relationships within them are allowed to develop over time, and when the relationships possess a degree of security, become sites of genuine deliberation and pursuit of common goods.
    • "Practices, governance, and politics: Applying MacIntyre’s ethics to business" (2014)
    • "Moral education at work: On the scope of MacIntyre’s concept of a practice" (2019)
      (p.105) One of the main reasons MacIntyre’s concept of a practice has been appealing to business ethicists is that it, potentially at least, seems to “offer the best understanding of the promise of work” and provides a model of what human production could be like at its best. This is because it is, again potentially, able to show how good work can be both intrinsically satisfying and morally educative. Indeed, this potential is why it is worth exploring the scope of MacIntyre’s concept. 
    • "Moral education at work: On the scope of MacIntyre’s concept of a practice" (2019)
      (p.106) I argue that even a relatively minimal engagement in a practice can, in principle, be morally educative.…. practices are not to be regarded as esoteric activities available only to a few, but rather as a ubiquitous feature of human societies, and present in every human life. Even if practices are central in some societies and relatively marginalised in others, all of us engage in practices of one sort or another. While, as Keat (2008) points out, MacIntyre’s account of the good is not comprehensive, something MacIntyre readily admits, his concept of a practice nevertheless provides a powerful basis for an account...
    • "Moral education at work: On the scope of MacIntyre’s concept of a practice" (2019)
      (p.107) Practices require us to acquire the virtues because it is only through virtue acquisition that we can properly experience the internal goods practices make available. On MacIntyre’s view, our attempts to improve ourselves so as to master some rewarding activity are more effective as a moral education than any formal ethics course could be (see MacIntyre 2015)...As MacIntyre says, “the exercise of the virtues is something learned in the context of practices... those who engage in practices need the virtues if they are to achieve the individual and common goods internal to practices”. So, not only are practices intrinsically satisfying...
    • "Moral education at work: On the scope of MacIntyre’s concept of a practice" (2019)
      (p.108) The intrinsic joys provided by practices give us a reason to attempt to acquire the virtues. Moreover, once a virtue has been properly acquired, it can be exhibited outside of the context in which it was learned, and ultimately valued in itself.
    • "Moral education at work: On the scope of MacIntyre’s concept of a practice" (2019)
      (p.110) We may well want to privilege historical creativity, i.e. the kind of creativity which leads to new ideas arising for the first time in human history, when accounting for what is most valuable overall, but it is the psychological experience of creatively engaging in an activity, of discovering its ends and goods for oneself, that is both intrinsically satisfying and most important to an account of moral education.
    • "Moral education at work: On the scope of MacIntyre’s concept of a practice" (2019)
      (p.111) Productive practices are compromised by necessity. They must necessarily aim at something other than the excellences and goods characteristic, and indeed partially definitive of, the practice itself. This is the essence of MacIntyre’s critique of market economies. The necessary focus on success, understood in terms of external goods, serves to undermine the extent to which devotion to internal goods is possible. However, it need not destroy such devotion. Indeed, there is significant scope for individuals who are appropriately committed to goods internal to productive practices to pursue them. 
    • "Moral education at work: On the scope of MacIntyre’s concept of a practice" (2019)
      (p.112) While practices are cognitively closed to some degree, partial engagement means that those who have not mastered a practice can have some understanding of that practice, and write meaningfully about it for an audience of non-masters. Lovers of great paintings who do not themselves paint can be morally educated by their role as practitioners, diners as well as chefs can derive more than aesthetic pleasure from excellent cookery, and “the high school physics teacher and the analyst of the data provided by the Large Hadron Collider are contributing to one and the same enterprise” (MacIntyre 2013, p. 209). Those at...
    • "Moral education at work: On the scope of MacIntyre’s concept of a practice" (2019)
      (p.116) MacIntyre offers the example of a child learning to play, and ultimately to appreciate, chess (2007, p. 188). In this example, the child initially plays to be rewarded with candy, but eventually comes to experience the internal goods of chess, and no longer needs the extrinsic reward. The case of work as an object of consumption is similar. What work is done for the sake of will be telling. If it is engaged in solely for the sake of payment, it will not be engaged with as a practice irrespective of whether the activity itself satisfies the requirements of MacIntyre’s definition,...
    • "Moral education at work: On the scope of MacIntyre’s concept of a practice" (2019)
    • "“We Ought to Eat in Order to Work, Not Vice Versa”: MacIntyre, Practices, and the Best Work for Humankind" (2020)
  • Stolz, Steven A
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