A practice involves standards of excellence and obedience to rules as well as the achievement of goods. To enter into a practice is to accept the authority of those standards and the inadequacy of my own performance as judged by them. It is to subject my own attitudes, choices, preferences and tastes to the standards which currently and partially define the practice. Practices of course, as I have just noticed, have a history: games, sciences and arts all have histories. Thus the standards are not themselves immune from criticism, but nonetheless we cannot be initiated into a practice without accepting the authority of the best standards realized so far.

-Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

In discussing a given practice, Alasdair MacIntyre distinguishes between goods external to that practice, and goods internal to it. External goods include monetary compensation and being publicly praised or given an award. Internal goods are excellences defined by the standards of the practice itself; in carpentry this might be a smooth, unblemished table that is also sturdy and reliable, and perhaps even in keeping with present aesthetic standards. In the working world we often encounter such goods in the form of professional standards. Yet the relationship of professional standards and internal goods in general on the one hand and the preferences of clients, customers, and consumers on the other seems to me to be rather ambiguous. MacIntyre uses this ambiguity as a means to criticize commercial culture, but it’s not clear to me that that is a valid conclusion to come to from the framework he lays out.

Let’s start with a short conversation between Martin Gurri and Virginia Postrel that touches on this subject in the context of the news business:

Consumer sovereignty is one of those things that economists present as though it is a “positive” (that is, descriptive) concept rather than a “normative” (that is, value-based) one, but in practice the two aspects are difficult to disentangle. And certainly you will find many people presently who will assert that consumer sovereignty should be catered to, or should be subsumed to some standard considered to be more ethical.

Nowhere today does this seem more acute than in the debate about the future of journalism and the news business. On the one hand, there is a set of professional standards for the practice of journalism. On the other, there are consumer preferences. Most people stop here, but I would add a third — there is also a desperately aspirational characterization of journalism, or what journalism could or should be in a democracy, that has very little to do with how it has ever been practiced.

The professional standards are MacIntyre’s internal goods. They have a history in precisely the sense that he describes, and they are what the young, entry level journalist must resentfully subordinate themselves to. Only once they have experience and have achieved a degree of mastery by those standards can they meaningfully enter into the conversation in which those standards are critically evaluated by fellow practitioners.

The idealism that is more or less divorced from journalism’s reality on the ground is in fact what draws many aspiring journalists in the first place. It is the story that journalists tell about themselves to the world and to themselves. It is the reason that so many young people are going to J-School at precisely the moment that the industry’s material prospects have been imploding. There is also of course the external good of the high social status of famous journalists, and in this journalism entrants have a similar status-seeking aspect as people going into acting or the arts in general. But only fools go into either in search of material prosperity.

Consumer sovereignty obviously has the last word in the end, because news outlets that cannot fund themselves simply disappear. But this does not mean that it is the only word. The idealism of journalism is often employed as a vehicle for attempting to persuade consumers about what they ought to be reading. Its effectiveness as a vehicle seems to be diminishing over time, but there are still plenty of readers who seem to think there is something immoral about their fellow citizens who do not read The New York Times. Steve Jobs famously pursued what people did not realize they wanted rather than attempting to cater to known preferences; the tension in the news business today can be seen as being between those who want to hold such a philosophy and those who are comfortable catering to consumer preferences in a straightforward way.

Professional standards emerge in the compromise between prudence, aspiration, and the sense of justice embedded in the particular professional community. That is, the sense of what is “due”; to the client, to fellow practitioners, and to oneself and one’s firm. It is this sense of justice that calls for the use of fact-checkers or copy-editors when readers may simply be seeking a story that gives them a cheap thrill and aren’t so discerning about the details. It is also this sense of justice that calls for journalists to give credit to whomever broke a story when reporting it in to their own readers. Among bloggers, this latter sense of owing attribution is embodied in the hat tip.

All practices in all of human history strike a compromise between prudence, aspiration, and this situated justice. This is precisely why I am skeptical of MacIntyre’s condemnation of modern commercial culture in particular and commercial culture in general. The fact that prudence weighs heavily on people’s career decisions and particular employment decision does not seem to me to be a special feature of modernity. Just because a medieval blacksmith stuck to one trade for life and probably came from a family who did the same does not mean that putting bread and meat on the table wasn’t a primary concern — especially given the relative poverty of such people compared to ourselves. Their dedication to the goods internal to forging metal objects was no more legitimate than the dedication of a modern PR professional to the standards of their field.

Moreover, MacIntyre elsewhere concurs that practices cannot exist without institutions, which sustain practices primarily by allocating external goods. In MacIntyre’s framework, these external goods are what entice the newcomer to stick with a practice while they are still too inexperienced to appreciate its internal goods. So for instance we start by looking at what is honored and seeking that sort of praise, but with time and experience we may become truly honorable. But of course, we never actually become entirely above being honored, or appreciating external goods. There’s a tension there but a necessary one. For instance, to be truly honorable is also to think about how being honored may reflect on your family and those who associate with you. Being paid well for a job well done means that you can put your kid through college, or take care of a loved one when they fall on hard times.

It’s a necessary tension but it is a tension. Part of what MacIntyre gets right is that your work life cannot be compartmentalized apart from your life as a whole. If the professional standards of the industry you are in require you to act in bad faith, unjustly cause harm, or outright defraud your clients, then it is unethical to remain a part of that industry. And if the vices are company specific, then you ought to walk away from that company. Because the situated justice of the community of work must be subordinate to the justice and virtues of your community as a whole, and your life as a whole. The person you are in the workplace is the same person that goes home in the evening, the same person who your loved ones associate with.

Which brings me back to journalism. It’s no secret that I am deeply skeptical of the ethics of journalism as it is practiced, as well as what consumers ask of journalism. I also think that the stories journalists tell about themselves, their ideals, are often self-defeatingly telescopic. From my position as a relative outsider, journalism is an industry in which I would personally like to see ethical change of a more radical sort than seems likely at present. In the long tail of journalism, I have seen examples of internal goods that seem to me to be more aligned with the good of a community; for instance when journalists in a given beat embrace the ideal of community storyteller over the ideal of savior of democracy and revealer of hard truths. But that is a discussion for another time.