appear to fit his definition yet be generally harmful. In his defence his concept of a
practice is set out against a sociology whereby the purpose of a practice is to enable
human good. Thus any activity that has evil ends cannot, in MacIntyre’s terms, be a
practice. In addition, while there may be internal satisfactions to be had for some
individuals engaged in ‘activities of evil’ the fact that those satisfactions can be neither
equated with virtue nor transferred with any consistency to other practices that go to
make up the good life debars them from being practices as such.
It has been pointed out that the ability of people to recognise chess as a practice in the
sense that MacIntyre uses the term suggests that the concept is one that is a recognisable
part of human experience (Sellman 2000). However, his choice of chess as a paradigm
case has provided some ammunition for his critics. Miller, for example, takes MacIntyre
to task for failing to distinguish between what Miller terms ‘self-contained’ practices on
the one hand and ‘purposive’ practices on the other. In the former category he places
chess because its “.. .raison detre consists entirely in the internal goods achieved by the
participants...” (Miller 1994 p. 250) (original emphasis) and he contrasts this with those
practices “.. .which exist to serve social ends beyond themselves” (ibid). He insists that
MacIntyre’s failure to distinguish between these two specific and fundamentally
different types of practices is a fatal flaw because the vision that MacIntyre develops
from his premise of a practice comes from the self-contained rather than the purposive
practice. All that is claimed from the example of chess fails to recognise the additional
complexity that purposive practices reveal. In the real world of purposive practices the
internal goods are observable and measurable by those external to the practice itself.
Miller considers purposive practices as having socially constructed ends and nursing
can clearly be placed in such a category. However Miller goes on to say that it is the
ends of the practice that can be judged in terms of excellence by those not actively
engaged in the practice itself. He provides an example from medicine and he appears to
say that a practice is likely to be deformed by those engaged in it if there is no external
accountability. He suggests by way of illustration that:
.. .the medical community [may] come to attach special weight to the capacity to
perform certain spectacular operations whose long term efficacy is doubtful -
the practice has fallen victim to professional deformation. A good practice here
is one whose standards of excellence are related directly to its wider purpose
(Miller 1994 p. 250-251)
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