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Since the publication of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue in 1981, tensions inherent to the relationship between morally educative practices and the institutions that house them have been widely noted. We propose a taxonomy of the ways in which the pursuit of external goods by institutions undermines the pursuit of the internal goods of practices. These comprise substitution, where the institution replaces the pursuit of one type of good by another; frustration, where opportunities for practitioners to discover goods or develop new standards of excellence are frustrated by institutional priorities and resource allocation; and injustice, which undermines the integrity of relationships within the organization and/or with partners. These threats, though analytically distinct, are often mutually reinforcing. This conceptual contribution is illustrated both by the extant literature and by a novel context, the three-ring circus.

Ethics and the Conflicts of Modernity’ begins with a consideration of how lives might go wrong through a series of failures in relation to desire. In probing the relationship between an agent’s desires and her beliefs, MacIntyre introduces a woman who has not considered “that she might run away and join the circus”, and as we learn a few lines later, this possibility evades her because she wrongly believes that she could not become a trapeze artist. Incautious readers may regard this as a flippant illustration; but that would be an error. Trapeze is an example of the type of practice in which, on MacIntyre’s account, participation both requires and develops virtues, and the circus provides a context for the type of virtuous local political community to which MacIntyre gives his allegiance.

This paper uses the example of circus to illustrate the relationship between self-understanding and social order that underscores MacIntyre’s diagnoses of developments in mainstream moral and self-understanding. ‘Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity’ provides a largely sociological account as to why the distinctive and incoherent Morality of modernity persists, and moreover must persist, if the illusions of the conventional social order are to be maintained. MacIntyre’s allusions to such contexts as the circus manifest the same intimate relationship between self-understanding and social order, but in contrast to modernity, provide a context for coherence. [editor summary]

In a series of papers I have sought to present empirical evidence from the travellingcircus to exemplify MacIntyre’s ‘goods-virtues-practices-institutions’ framework (Beadle 2003, Beadle and Könyöt 2006, Beadle 2009), a project to which MacIntyrehas recently given support (MacIntyre 2008a, 6). The parallels between the travellingcircus, fishing communities and other forms of work-based community commendedby MacIntyre include their requirements of apprenticeship, their maintenance of shared standards of excellence (along with the practical rationality these involve),their immanent integration between the domains of work and non-work and their recognition of tradition. My work has sought to illustrate the relationships betweenthese features of their shared lives and the development of the virtues of their inhabitants. Part of the animation for this project has been to illustrate the starkcontrast between the lives of travelling circus people and the compartmentalisedliving of the contemporary order.[extract]