Practice (MacIntyre)

In the AI Story

MacIntyre's 1981 definition is deliberately dense: a practice is "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended." Each clause does work. "Socially established" rules out private hobbies; "cooperative" rules out merely competitive activities; "internal goods" distinguishes practices from mere techniques; "standards of excellence" embeds the practice in a tradition that judges performance.

The concept cuts across the vocabulary of contemporary work. When a company speaks of "skills," it means capabilities — discrete, transferable, measurable units of productive capacity. When MacIntyre speaks of a practice, he means something that cannot be decomposed into skills without remainder, because the practice includes the practitioner's relationship to the tradition, her capacity to perceive internal goods, and her development of practical wisdom. A skill can be transferred to a machine. A practice cannot, because the practice is constituted by the moral development of its participants.

This is why the AI moment presents a qualitatively different challenge from previous automation. When the loom replaced the weaver, a craft was destroyed but the practice of textile-making continued in new forms. When AI replaces the implementation work of software engineering, the question is whether the practice survives the removal of the activities through which its virtues were cultivated. The answer is not predetermined — it depends on whether communities deliberately preserve the conditions for practice — but the question itself requires MacIntyre's vocabulary to be asked.

The practices framework also exposes the poverty of the emotivist vocabulary that dominates AI discourse. Talk of "disruption" and "transformation" treats all changes as equivalent in kind. The practices framework distinguishes between transformations that preserve a practice through new conditions and transformations that destroy a practice by eliminating the conditions of its internal goods. The two look identical from outside; only participants can tell them apart.

Origin

MacIntyre introduced the concept in Chapter 14 of After Virtue (1981), drawing on Aristotle's distinction between techne and praxis and on Newman's account of the university as a community of inquiry. The concept has since become foundational in virtue ethics, business ethics, education theory, and professional ethics. Its application to software engineering and to AI-mediated work is a more recent development, carried forward by scholars including Shannon Vallor, Pablo García-Ruiz, and the contributors to Human Flourishing in the Age of Digital Capitalism.

Key Ideas

Internal vs. external goods. Practices realize goods recognizable only through participation; techniques produce outputs that markets value but internal goods that markets cannot see.

Standards of excellence. A practice carries its own internal criteria of what counts as doing it well — criteria that practitioners extend and revise through tradition.

Virtue cultivation. Practices are the sites where virtues like courage, honesty, and practical wisdom are developed, not because the practice requires them instrumentally but because the pursuit of internal goods demands them.

Tradition-dependence. A practice is unintelligible apart from the historical argument about its goods and standards — the tradition that carries it forward.

Institutional tension. Practices require institutions to sustain them but institutions are oriented toward external goods, creating permanent structural tension.

Debates & Critiques

The most pressing debate is whether AI-mediated activities like prompt engineering and human-AI collaboration themselves constitute genuine practices with their own internal goods, or merely techniques that produce external goods without cultivating virtues. MacIntyre's framework is neutral on this question — it provides the criteria by which it could be answered, but the answer depends on whether communities of practitioners develop the features of genuine practices around these new activities.