Virtue, practices, and traditions › Institutions make practices possible and vulnerable

Practices need material support. An orchestra needs arrangements for rehearsal and performance; scientific inquiry needs institutions capable of supporting it. MacIntyre distinguishes the practice from the institution that houses it. Institutions must attend to resources, status, and power. These concerns can sustain a practice, while also drawing its participants away from the goods they originally sought.

Return to the hypothetical hospital. Its finances cannot simply be ignored: a service that cannot support its activity has a problem. But increased appointment counts do not by themselves establish better care. A serious discussion must identify the good being sought, the constraints on achieving it, and the evidence needed to evaluate a change. This illustration supplies questions for deliberation; it does not demonstrate that a particular scheduling policy is clinically harmful.

MacIntyre connects the virtues to sustaining relationships within this tension. Honesty matters when participants must acknowledge what they have and have not achieved. Justice concerns how they treat one another in pursuing the practice's goods. Courage may be required when defending those goods puts rewards or standing at risk. These qualities are more than techniques for performing a task efficiently. Their exercise can cost a person an external reward rather than secure one.

The distinction gives us a more exact criticism than the claim that institutions corrupt everything they touch. We can ask how a particular institution supports its practice, where its incentives conflict with that support, and whether participants can challenge its decisions. The answers require attention to the actual institution. MacIntyre's framework supplies an approach to those questions, not their answers in advance.