An Excerpt From Our Book: Internal and External Goods

A quick look at what we've been working on

Since October, we’ve been working on a book on the philosophy of vocation (though it’s the culmination of writing and research stretching as far back as 2022), considering both practical and philosophical elements of meaningful work. After much re-writing and editing, we’re nearing completion. (A secondary motivation for posting this excerpt is that I have not had a moment to write anything new this week with the editing process taking up every unoccupied hour—a final manuscript is in the final stages.) This is an except from chapter 3, discussing Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of internal and external goods and applying it to both work and life.

What makes anything worth doing for its own sake? Let’s use a young student as an example. What motivates her to study? Well, at first, she might read because her parents force her to. “You can’t go outside until you do your homework,” they might say. Perhaps they’ll try to motivate her with a certain gift at the end. Maybe if she earns a good enough grade, her parents will take her to a movie or bring her out for ice cream.

For her, the value of studying is this benefit that comes at the end. We don’t expect children to want to do math homework or memorize vocabulary because they think it’s fun. Instead, we have to offer them a sort of external motivation, a reward at the end.

But a student growing older might recognize that there’s something more valuable than just the reward at the end. This young student might learn to love reading. Likely, she’ll still think about the benefits of studying: eventually, instead of time-out or ice cream, she’ll think about her GPA or her college application. But there may come a point where she stops caring about the grade and starts loving her studies for their own sake.

Perhaps she has to read The Great Gatsby for class just to finish an essay. She’s focused on finding quotes, identifying themes, and working out a solid paper at the end. But soon, she’ll recognize that there’s something more valuable to this book than just the grade she’ll get at the end. She could become attached to the characters, appreciate the writing, and come to love this book just because it’s beautiful. Now, she doesn’t need those benefits to motivate her reading. Independent of any grades or rewards, she sees a value to reading for its own sake.

This story is common to all sorts of hobbies and passions: we start off motivated by some external benefit only to find ourselves drawn in by an appreciation for the good things inherent to the practice. A young kid forced to play baseball might come to love the game. A teenager might find a summer job landscaping and learn to appreciate just how much skill and effort it takes. Although we start doing these things for an external reason, we still find something worth appreciating for its own sake within.

The philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre argued that this is the difference between internal and external goods. Look at the rewards and punishments above: we could think of children being punished or rewarded to motivate them to do well in school or play a sport. We don’t have to limit this to children, of course. A professional baseball player who’s just in it for the money is motivated just the same as one of these children: he’s doing it for some reward at the end, not out of an appreciation for the game itself.

These rewards aren’t requirements for the activity. There’s no reason why you need a reward or a punishment to play baseball. They’re unnecessary things added on to motivate someone to join. You don’t need to understand anything about the activity to “appreciate” these things. Whether you’re a baseball expert or you’ve never picked up a bat in your life, $10,000,000 means the same thing.

But we’re recognizing something different when we appreciate the things required for the activity. When we appreciate the skill it takes to hit a fastball or the talent a writer needs to make a beautiful poem, we’re seeing something unique to each activity. These are necessary parts of baseball or writing or whatever it is we’re looking at. The only way to appreciate them is through experience and skill in the activity. These are the internal goods of an activity. This is the inherent value of these things.

MacIntyre argued that these internal goods are virtues. Virtues, as MacIntyre defines them, represent excellence in a particular capacity. When we admire good writing, we’re looking for the virtues of a good book: good prose, carefully planned plots, or compelling descriptions. When we admire good baseball, we admire another unique set of virtues: the quickness of a center fielder, the patience of a great batter, or the strong arm of a hard-throwing pitcher.

It should be clear that this same model can be applied to any practice we might have. Take management for example: we might think of skills like motivation, organization, delegation, and so on. All of these are virtues necessary for good management. A good manager could appreciate these for their own sake.

We can apply this same model to any kind of work: there are virtues to accounting, landscaping, stenography, and stocking grocery shelves. If you see someone doing menial work that you did at some point in your life, you’re likely to appreciate the unseen skill required for it. Once you’ve had a job in a restaurant, you’ll never look at the waitstaff the same way again. No matter how others perceive this work, there’s still something beautiful within it.

When we stick with the same sort of work for a long enough time, we should come to recognize this good within it. Even something simple can become beautiful in its own way: Think of how a janitor comes to appreciate the skill required to make a hallway spotless. That might not seem very beautiful to anyone without experience mopping and drying. But it’s not meant to be. It’s a beauty unique to each kind of work, a beauty that you can only understand through a long life of learning.

While internal goods are particular to each activity, external goods are generally common between all sorts of different things. Money is an obvious example of an external good: we work for pay without really thinking about the value of these skills or virtues. You don’t need any appreciation of the virtues to appreciate this value.

However, this is not an either-or. We should appreciate the internal and external goods of work. The living that we earn from work and the virtues that we can appreciate within work aren’t opposed to each other, nor is work automatically better without these external goods. Working for a living doesn’t make your work less valuable than someone who does that same job as a hobby. This beauty and this usefulness should go hand in hand.

We’ve seen how work can be valuable for its own sake. We can take pride in all work even without its good consequences. But we also emphasized that work and life should be unified in their values. If we’re looking for the inherent value of work, we should look for what values it shares with life as a whole instead of looking at it as a separate thing.

Recall the definition of virtue we used before: it’s excellence in a particular capacity.

It’s easy to apply this model of virtue to everything that we do. There are virtues of skateboarding and virtues of accounting, all of which must be gained through practice and all of which we learn to appreciate through experience.

However, we might be more familiar with using virtue in a moral sense. When we talk about the virtues, we’re likely referring to things like patience, kindness, or wisdom. We’re not thinking of some particular practice or activity but rather about life in general. Put simply, we’re thinking about what is required to be a good human being.

When we put it this way, the analogy should be clear: in the same way that the virtues of work represent excellence in those practices, the moral virtues represent excellence in the skills that are natural to human life. Put simply, their activity is human life. These are the skills necessary to excel in everything natural to being human. These lead us to be better as friends, as parents, as siblings, or as members of a community.