The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

4the first virtue: love profaneand sacredLove can be thought of as a commitment of the will to the true good ofanother. 1 Love is identified conventionally with the “feminine,” whichwould not have recommended it to Nietzsche or to Aristotle. Of the sevenvirtues—courage, temperance, justice, prudence, faith, hope, and love—courage is, I repeat, stereotypically male, love stereotypically female. “Loveis the general name of the quality of attachment,” said Iris Murdoch, somethingwhich sounds to a man suspiciously cloying. 2 “The disdain for . . .words like ‘love’ and ‘giving,’ ” the literary critic Jane Tompkins notes, “ispart of the police action that [male] academic intellectuals wage ceaselesslyagainst feeling, against women, against what is personal.” 3The gendering of the virtues makes even Christian males a little nervous.It has troubled Christian ethics since the beginning. As Basil Willey oncewrote, “There has always, perhaps, been a latent contradiction between ourofficial lip service to the Christian standard in all its rigor, and the paganideal of ‘the gentleman’ which is what we [men] have really admired andsought to practice.” 4 The French Jansenist Pierre Nicole wrote in 1671,“There are an infinity of small things which are extremely necessary for usto live, and can be given for free; and which cannot be traded so that theycan be purchased only by love.” He sounds like a modern male economist,thinking of love as an exchange. And said so: “Human civility . . . is only asort of commerce of self-love, in which one endeavors to arouse the love ofothers by displaying some affection towards them.” 5 No, dear.A large group of philosophically savvy women, such as ElizabethAnscombe, Philippa Foot, Judith Shklar, Iris Murdoch, Carol Gilligan, Nel