The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

92 chapter 4Noddings, Mary Midgley, Martha Nussbaum, Sissela Bok, Amélie Rorty,Susan Wolf, Nancy Chodorow, Joan Tronto, Virginia Held, Annette Baier,and Rosalind Hursthouse, have since about 1958 turned a woman’s eye onethical philosophy. They have noted that love is not self-love. (Ethical theoryhad been for a long time, oddly, a guy thing. I suppose that’s an entailmentof “theory” in general having been for a long time a guy thing. Womenfrom Sappho to Virginia Woolf did their ethical thinking in poems and stories,not in philosophy.)This program of Aristotle in modern dress, I say, has been strikingly feminine.Its leaders have been women, though, as Kathryn Morgan observed,none of them is a “star” in the style of John Rawls or Robert Nozick. “Thecommunity of feminist theoreticians is calling into question the very modelof the individual autonomous self presupposed by a star-centered maledominatedtradition. ...We experience it as common labor,a commontask.” 6 Let’s get this kitchen cleaned up. No quarterbacks. Speak of thee, notme: “tuistically,” from Latin tua, thy.The theology and ethics and science of love is not that of bodice-rippingromance novels. It is hard nowadays to get beyond the Romantic idea oflove, according to which one “falls” into it with no ethical restraint.Stendhal, for example, wrote a long treatise on the subject in 1822, Del’amour, in which love other than an adolescent version of eros is neglected.Alice Munro calls eros “a tingling contentment in the presence of the otherperson”; Nick Hornby, “the mad hunger for someone you don’t know verywell.” 7Such “love” is, as C. S. Lewis put it, one of God’s little jokes, “that a passionso soaring, apparently transcendent, as Eros, should thus be linked inincongruous symbiosis with a bodily appetite....[W]e are composite creatures,rational animals, akin on one side to the angels, on the other to tomcats.”8 To give free rein to the tomcat in us would hardly be a virtue. It wouldbe the vice of lust, a “love” unbalanced by other virtues, a yielding to passion.Yet eros is not an ethical zero. As Lewis noted, it can touch the transcendent.The Song of Songs is erotic yet religious, loving yet Loving. The versionof eros that Jane Austen’s novels study, for example, is hardly animalistic. Itis ethical, that is, it is concerned with the education of the will to the end ofgood character, and indeed is precisely about coming to know someone’scharacter.