Virtue, practices, and traditions › Using the questions carefully

Choose an activity you know well and distinguish its rewards from what counts as doing it well. A musician might ask whether the desire for recognition is supporting patient rehearsal or encouraging an impressive but careless performance. The example is hypothetical; its purpose is to make the distinction inspectable in a particular choice.

Then ask what the activity demands of relationships. Whose judgment can correct yours? What would honesty require when acknowledging a limitation is costly? Which obligations outside the activity ought to constrain your pursuit of excellence? These questions connect a practice to the wider life in which it takes its place. They do not promise that all the resulting demands will fit comfortably together.

The same approach can sharpen an institutional disagreement. Identify the decision under discussion, state the goods each proposal claims to serve, and ask what would count as evidence of achieving them. A performance measure may contribute useful information without deciding what is worth measuring. Participants still need to justify how it relates to the purpose of their activity.

MacIntyre's proposal is demanding because it joins questions that are easy to separate: what an activity is for, what qualities its participants need, and how their commitments can belong to a worthwhile life. Reading After Virtue means testing those connections. Its argument invites us to defend the ends that give excellence its point, as well as the standards by which excellence is judged.