Alasdair MacIntyre, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Virtues are defined first in relation to practices — coherent forms of socially established cooperative human activity whose standards of excellence are partially constitutive of the activity itself.1 A practice generates internal goods, goods only achievable through the practice as such, distinguishable from external goods (wealth, status, power) that can be gained by other means and tend, in modernity, to corrupt the practices and the institutions that house them.23
The chess-playing child who learns to play for the sake of excellence has crossed from external to internal goods; virtues are the qualities of character that enable us to achieve goods internal to practices.4 But the definition is incomplete. The virtues also sustain the narrative unity of a whole human life: a life is intelligible as the unity of a story-being-told.
And the virtues sustain the tradition — historically extended, socially embodied argument — within which the narrative is told and the practices are pursued. The three tiers compose; later levels presuppose the earlier; virtue defined at any single level is incomplete.5
I hasten to add two caveats however. The first is to point out that my argument will not in any way imply that virtues are only exercised in the course of what I am calling practices. The second is to warn that I shall be using the word 'practice' in a specially defined way which does not completely agree with current ordinary usage, including my own previous use of that word. What am I going to mean by it?After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory, pp. 202–203
Moreover characteristically they are such that the more someone has of them, the less there is for other people. This is sometimes necessarily the case, as with power and fame, and sometimes the case by reason of contingent circumstance as with money. External goods are therefore characteristically objects of competition in which there must be losers as well as winners.After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory, pp. 205–206
Scheffler is quite correct in the views that he ascribes to me, but only of course if by 'internal goods' he means what I mean. Yet if one does mean what I mean, then the answer to Scheffler is clear. Imagine an immensely skilled chess player who cares only about winning and cares for that very much. His skills are such that he ranks with the grandmasters. Thus he is a great chess player.After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory, pp. 289–290
Thus motivated the child plays and plays to win. Notice however that, so long as it is the candy alone which provides the child with a good reason for playing chess, the child has no reason not to cheat and every reason to cheat, provided he or she can do so successfully.After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory, pp. 203–204
What is it in the account which I am about to give which provides in a similar way the necessary background against which the concept of a virtue has to be made intelligible? It is in answering this question that the complex, historical, multilayered character of the core concept of virtue becomes clear.After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory, pp. 201–202
The constructive backbone of After Virtue's second half. Two errors I have publicly retracted: the rejection of the Thomistic doctrine of the unity of the virtues (AV chapter 13, p. 179) was a mistake — Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988, preface) and 'Moral Dilemmas' (1990) implicitly correct it. And the allowance that there might be evil practices (AV p. 200) — I am now convinced there cannot be, since a practice in the proper sense requires goods internal to its activity. Dependent Rational Animals (1999) implicitly corrects both. The framework stands; the corrections are internal.