ABSTRACT
Building on Alasdair MacIntyre seminal work After Virtue (1981), this chapter develops what is called ‘the Corruption Argument’. It presents the view that the introduction or intensification of institutionalised competition tends to corrupt the practices that are embedded in that institution. Put differently, it is part of competition’s logic that it incentivises practitioners to (solely) focus on obtaining external goods like money, status and power at the costs of those things we deem indispensable to a practice: its internal goods, i.e. genuine, cooperative care for standards and excellence. Examples of practices that run through the chapter are philosophy, chess, portrait painting, politics and health care. To add to the plausibility of the Corruption Argument, this chapter also considers empirical research on the ways in which competition can crowd out intrinsic motivation and creativity and diminish performances, which seems to have an important gendered dimension. The upshot of this chapter is that not only the direct practitioners lose out on what matters once their practice is corrupted, others – students, audiences, art lovers, citizens and patients – lose out as well, calling into question the assumption that competition (always) leads to excellence and social benefits.
