For tournament chess, the external goods include prestige, money, and status, but the internal goods include analytical skill, strategic imagination, and competitive intensity. Finally, by striving for excellence in the practice the participants not only achieve these goods, but also achieve greater and greater understanding of them. Although Wallace is trying to follow MacIntyre, her terminology is a little inconsistent, so I will use MacIntyre s terminology instead. With this little help, her argument can be put in a nutshell. The discipline of fidelity is one of the standards of excellence that define it.
Intimacy is one of the goods internal to it.
So far as it goes, I think all this is precisely correct. In one way, the argument even goes further than necessary. The author does not need to roll out MacIntyre just to tell us, as she does, that fidelity is to marriage as yeast is to cinnamon buns. The analogy could be true and helpful even if MacIntyre were wrong. More serious is that in four other ways, the argument does not go far enough.