In a recent interview with the Big Think, chess-player Maurice Ashley,
celebrated as the first African-American grandmaster, briefly narrates
his development in the game of chess, from novice to master. His
recollections and reflections are interesting from a Virtue Ethics
perspective for several reasons.
The game of Chess is in fact one the very practices examined by contemporary virtue ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre in his seminal book After Virtue. He didn’t pick chess by chance or whim — chess does in certain ways exemplify the sort of practices that bear important and educative analogies to traditions of moral inquiry, like those of Virtue Ethics. A practice, in the way MacIntyre famously reconfigures the term, denotes:
The game of Chess is in fact one the very practices examined by contemporary virtue ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre in his seminal book After Virtue. He didn’t pick chess by chance or whim — chess does in certain ways exemplify the sort of practices that bear important and educative analogies to traditions of moral inquiry, like those of Virtue Ethics. A practice, in the way MacIntyre famously reconfigures the term, denotes:
