Virtue of the Species-being

Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of internal goods in After Virtue parallels Karl Marx’s idea of species-being, though they do operate at a different level of analysis. For MacIntyre, internal goods are those realized only through participation in a practice and according to its standards of excellence; they are constitutive of the activity itself rather than externally attached rewards. As he writes, “what the artist discovers within the pursuit of excellence…is the good of a certain kind of life…it is the painter’s living out of a greater or a lesser part of his or her life as a painter that is the second kind of good internal to painting” (190)—internal goods are not merely outcomes but forms of life: to achieve them is to become a certain kind of person through sustained engagement in a practice. Accordingly, “a virtue is an acquired human quality…the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices” (191), which means that virtues are not external moral constraints but conditions for participating meaningfully in practices at all.

Marx’s account of species-being can be read as a more general claim about this same structure of fulfillment. Marx argues that human beings realize their nature through free, conscious, and creative activity, such that labor becomes an expression of one’s powers rather than a means to survival. The key point is that fulfillment arises when activity is internally related to the self—when what one does is not merely instrumental, but expressive. In this sense, internal goods can be understood as the concrete, socially organized forms through which species-being is realized as it specifies what it looks like, in particular practices, for activity to be intrinsically meaningful.

However, practices are not simply for fulfillment; they are embedded within institutions that distribute external goods such as money, status, and power. As MacIntyre emphasizes, “a practice…is never just a set of technical skills…what is distinctive…is…that regard for its own internal goods which are partially definitive of each particular practice” (193). This distinction allows us to see that the problem is not external goods as such, but their dominance over practices. Under modern capitalist conditions, institutions tend to prioritize external goods, thereby subordinating the standards of excellence that are internal to practices. However, MacIntyre argues that institutions are necessary conditions of the survival and continuation of these practices (chess requires chess clubs, medicine requires hospitals, science requires universities). Therefore, any institutionally sustained practice faces the risk that the external goods required to keep it alive will come to dominate its internal goods. What appears, from a Marxian perspective, as alienation—labor experienced as external and coerced—can thus be reinterpreted in MacIntyrean terms as the corruption of practices by institutions. The agent no longer orients their activity toward excellence internal to the practice, but toward externally imposed metrics of success.

Furthermore, if institutions were only corrupted from external factors, alienation would be a problem that could be fixed by changing or getting rid of the harmful structures. But because practices need institutions, the tension can't be resolved; it can only be managed. Alienation is thus a persistent possibility within any structured existence. Capitalism destroys the space for excellence by filling institutions with market demands to the point where it becomes harder and harder to stay focused on internal goods. This explains why modern work often feels empty even when it is technically skilled or socially valued—it fails to sustain the conditions under which one’s activity can be experienced as one’s own. Thus, MacIntyre and Marx demonstrate that alienation is not merely a psychological condition or an economic relation, but a normative failure in the structure of practices themselves.