CONCEPT
Practice (MacIntyre)
A coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which internal goods are realized — the conceptual pivot of MacIntyre's ethics and the unit of analysis for understanding what AI threatens.
MacIntyre's concept of a practice is the keystone of After Virtue and of this book's application to AI. A practice is not merely something people do; it is an activity with internal standards of excellence, its own history of development, and its own characteristic goods — goods that can only be realized through participation. Chess, medicine, architecture, farming, and (the argument goes) software engineering qualify. Bricklaying, throwing a football, and planting turnips do not, taken in isolation. The distinction matters because practices are the sites where virtues are cultivated — and because AI systems that produce the outputs of practices without requiring participation in them threaten to hollow out the conditions of moral development.
In The You On AI Field Guide
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