But such passages are misleading. This blind spot renders her unable to tell the difference between erotic union and ordinary friendship. This view will hardly be sustaining to mortal spouses, who often fall in and out of love with each other several times during a lifelong marriage. What we don t learn much about from these remarks is fidelity. And that brings us back to our starting point.
Practices are social activities like tournament chess or concert flute.
To begin with, a practice is cooperative, complex, and internally coherent. Moreover, certain standards of excellence are part of its very definition this is why we say that careless flutists haven t a clue what musical performance is about. In turn, the effort to achieve these standards has three results. First, the participants cultivate their powers of achieving excellence. For tournament chess, the external goods include prestige, money, and status, but the internal goods include analytical skill, strategic imagination, and competitive intensity.