by Carla Martorello

Created on: September 16, 2008

Alasdair MacIntyre's "After Virtue" begins by stating the different conceptions of virtue there have been throughout the years, as conceived by certain people. But these differences are not only in what virtues are themselves, but there is also a difference in the rank order of importance to them.

He explains exactly what Homer, Aristotle, The New Testament, Jane Austen and Benjamin Franklin believed virtues were, all of these ideas being different one to another. Homer based virtues on physical strength and to him they were dependent on a person's social role; Aristotle thought they "came from the mind", that they were available only to the rich and that they came from man as a species; The New Testament praises faith, hope and love; Jane Austen goes with constancy as the main one; and finally Franklin considers cleanliness, silence and industry to be virtues, all these being means to the end of happiness, what makes him somehow utilitarian.

After taking this into account, MacIntyre says that clearly there is not a core conception of a virtue that has a universal value, but he argues that he can in fact discover such a thing. To attain this, we have to go through three stages in the development of the concept: the first one requires a background account of a practice, the second one is the narrative order of a single human life, and the third one is a good deal of a moral tradition.

Next, he provides us with his definition of a practice. He uses this definition to explain how to arrive to the core concept of a virtue, and this is what he says: a practice is a human activity such as football, architecture, chess, etc., but a practice is not throwing a football with skill, bricklaying, etc. So, basically, what he means is that a practice is something like the activity itself but not the moment in which you are "applying" it, not the moment in which you put the activity into practice. Then he goes on by saying that taking part in a practice will derive in the acquisition of goods, either internal or external. The external ones would be such things as prestige, status and money (we could say that external goods are "material" things), and the internal ones are those that result from the mind somehow, they are things that make us feel good about ourselves when taking part in a practice (these would be like spiritual things). In fact, the difference between these two types of goods is that when we achieve external goods, "they are always some individual's property

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