Reviving Internal Goods

We go to the gym to be healthier or look more attractive. We play games of chess with the intent to win. We commute to work to make money and to school with the long-term goal of making more money.

This makes sense. We need our health to keep walking, our money to keep buying things, and those small hits of dopamine at the end of a chess win to keep living. But at what point does virtue get pushed to the wayside? It seems most practitioners are chiefly concerned with achieving external goods first. E.g. the star chess player who spends hours studying computer lines or the champion debater who spreads the longest without breathing. People might be so obsessed with might be winning the most tournaments, that they lose sight of the tradeoff: they are masters at a system of winning, but novices to the excellence needed to acquire internal goods.

It seems as though, a reorientation to these internal goods is needed. Less "how do I win my Super Smash Brothers Ultimate tournament?" and more "how do I become an analytical thinker?"

However, advocating for this radical shift in seems privileged. A supermajority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. They are less concerned with internal goods, because they cannot afford them. To tell a salesman to earn less commission so she can refine the rhetorical crafts of pathos, ethos, and logos would be absurd. But once again, this kind of thinking seems privileged, subject to Aristotelian biases. It would be equally ridiculous to conclude that only the ruling class is eligible for internal goods.

Perhaps the greater problem is the idea internal goods can only be achieved through certain practices. Almost everybody can go on a walk, without ear pods, and contemplate. Almost everybody can listen to a piece of music while stationary. The ruling class might have a greater number of options to acquire the internal goods of contemplative depth, of the Phronesis that walking and active music listening gives, but they are not the only ones who are eligible like Aristotle says. Something as simple as meditation affords internal goods. While some people need cash diapers or sculpted abs for relationships, they can sit down and breathe every now and then. If anything, they'll gain the mental energy needed for more diapers and romantic interests.

Comments

  1. GeorgiaApril 2, 2026 at 11:16 AM

    I think your point reflects the consistent tension between external and internal goods, especially how they manifest as institutions and practices. Yet, McIntyre reflects on this tension as a critque made against Aristotle by many, and he states virtue and vice can exist together in practices, and this is a danger between internal and external goods. I want to push on your claim, I think it fits in McIntyre's account of society as the basis for the creation of the internal and external virtue, in America, do we not live in a society that blantantly prioritizes external goods? "If in a particular society, the pursuit of external goods were to become dominant, the concept of the virtues might suffer first attrition and then perhaps something near total effacement" (196). Further, to your point of the type of practices that develop virtue, I think this is a broad and mutable concept that can be understood by the space and time you exist in, that can define where you achieve courage, justice, and truthfullness in your character and work.

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