practice(s) cannot remain immune from external influence. If the institution comes
under pressure to reduce its costs then expensive (that is, non-wealth producing)
practices will be expected to adopt, at least some aspects of, the goods of effectiveness
and will be forced either to accept cuts in funding or find ways of producing income.
While the goods of effectiveness are not necessarily incompatible with a practice there
will be a point at which, if the goods of effectiveness become the major focus of
activity, the practice will have become so corrupted that it is no longer identifiable as a
practice as such. That is, it will no longer offer the goods of excellence to those who
participate in its activities.
There remains the problem of how we are to come to recognise internal goods if those
goods are not obvious to us before we understand an activity (such as chess) to be a
practice. MacIntyre addresses (but does not explain) this as follows. If an adult already
immersed in chess as a practice wishes to initiate a child into playing chess as a practice
then it is likely that the child will need to be ‘bribed’ to play - MacIntyre suggests in his
example this might take the form of the external reward of sweets. Chess is a difficult
game in so far as it requires a good deal more of a player than many other games and it
is not clear why a child would want to engage with chess as a practice rather than as just
another game. However, if the child begins to recognise that there is something in this
game of chess that is appealing beyond the promise of the external reward of sweets
then MacIntyre would say that the child has begun to engage with chess as a practice.
As the child becomes engaged with chess as a practice then she or he will come to
recognise that access to these internal goods (those goods which are not otherwise
available) is dependent on playing in ways that are consistent with chess as a practice.
To play solely in order to win is to reduce the possibility of achieving those internal
goods. And while winning by cheating is possible the point of chess is not merely to
win but, if winning is to be an aim, to win by excellence in playing the game.
From this we might suppose that MacIntyre is suggesting that we do not necessarily set
out to become engaged with activities as practices. In the first instance we may be
motivated by external goods or by immediate satisfactions and it is only as we become
aware of the possibility of internal goods that we start to participate in activities as
practices as we recognise the value of those activities as practices. This is not to say
that all activities are, or have the potential to become, practices and one of the criticisms
OfMacIntyre relates to the problem of ‘evil practices’, that is activities which would
67