Virtue at Work: Ethics for Individuals, Managers, and Organizations

by Geoff Moore

But there are a few new ideas in this definition as well. First, and most notably, practices are ‘coherent and complex forms of socially established cooperative human activity’. Up to now, we have considered virtue ethics from the individual perspective and linked this to the community level and its pursuit of the common good. But now we have an intermediate level between the individual and the community. Practices are, under MacIntyre’s definition, social activities, so they are things which we do together in groups or teams; sometimes, practices are referred to as social practices in order to remind us of this. Practices, therefore, involve collaboration with others, and this collaboration is in the common pursuit of the internal goods which are the key outcome of practices. But in addition to this, practices are not just any old activity which we might collaborate in together. They have to be sufficiently ‘coherent and complex’ if they are to justify being designated as practices.