Virtue, practices, and traditions › A living tradition can argue with itself

Practices and lives have histories. A new participant inherits achievements, standards, and unresolved questions. MacIntyre calls attention to traditions in which people continue arguing about the goods that organize their common activity. On this account, being part of a tradition involves more than preserving what predecessors happened to do.

A dispute about how a piece of music should be performed can draw on inherited forms while challenging an accepted interpretation. This is a modern illustration of the general point: shared history can make disagreement more specific by giving people something to contest. Agreement about everything is not the condition of a living tradition. What matters is the continuing inquiry into what its goods require.

This also changes the force of the question about external criticism. Does reasoning from within a tradition make it impossible to learn from a rival? MacIntyre denies that inference. In After Virtue's postscript he acknowledges that a fuller account of rational justification is needed; his later Whose Justice? Which Rationality? develops the comparison of rival traditions. Tradition-dependent reasoning is meant to remain reasoning, with claims that can fail and problems that require answers.

That response should not be mistaken for a completed solution to every conflict. A reader still needs to ask whether a proposed comparison gives the rival a fair hearing. Explaining another tradition in your own vocabulary may reveal a problem, or may conceal what its participants regard as important. The account must show why accepting a criticism would be rational, beyond the fact that it came from one's own group.