Abstract

Practices are the coherent and complex social activities we spend much of our lives engaging in. This category encompasses everything from figure skating to wine-tasting to friend relationships. We gain immense value from participating in practices, and philosophers have articulated a number of accounts for where the value emerges from and how we can best experience it. Many of these theories are ‘externalist’, because they posit that value is incidental to practices and emerges from outside of them. In contrast, this thesis will argue that the value in practices is internal to each practice. The value comes from each practice’s internal goods. This account of the internal goods of practices largely comes from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. I incorporate arguments from Agnes Callard’s Aspiration and Ronald Dworkin’s Law’s Empire to argue first that excellence in a practice is dependent on its internal goods, and second that externalist accounts of practices fail.