Diacritica 25-2_Filosofia.indb - cehum - Universidade do Minho

ELITISM AND THE ETHICS OF VIRTUE
4. The second proposal
It may be supposed that being practically wise is close to being, say, wine
expert. For both living in a community that follows the teachings of VE
and tasting wines can be conceived as kinds of ‘practice’ – a category of
human activity, which Alasdair McIntyre defi nes as follows:
By practice, I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially
established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that
form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards
of excellence, which are appropriate to, and partially defi nitive to, that form of
activity with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human
conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.
(McIntyre, 1984: 187)
Without going into the details of McIntyre’s defi nition, it is clear enough
that both communal life and wine tasting meet the conditions he sets for
practice. For both are coherent and complex socially established human
activities that have certain standards of excellence etc. Both communal life
and wine tasting constantly both extend their practitioners’ conceptions of
the demands and aims of their respective practices and gradually improve
their prospects of becoming experts in them. In the former, the standard of
excellence is practical wisdom, whereas in the latter that standard consists
of the wine evaluations and advice characteristic to the wine experts.
In spite of being close, these two practices would, however, not be analogous
according to McIntyre’s defi nition, because “virtue” – such as practical
wisdom – unlike wine expertise “is not a skill that makes for success in
one particular type of situation”. [15] Th e diff erence between being practically
wise and being wine expert is that the former conforms the standards of
excellence in a wider range and type of contexts: it suffi ces for one to systematically
excel only in a context of wine tasting so as to be a wine expert,
but in order to be practically wise, she would have to manifest excellence in
almost any ethical context she may face within her community.
However, apart from this considerable diff erence in the areas of relevance,
elitism is common to both wine tasting and communal life. In fact,
it is a defi ning element of any practice qua practice, since one’s success in
a practice (i.e. whether that practice extends her “powers to achieve excel-
15 McIntyre 1984, p. 205
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