The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

love and the transcendent 107It is not . . . that feeble spark of benevolence....It is reason,principle, conscience,the inhabitant of the breast. ...The natural misrepresentations ofself-love can be corrected only by the eye of this impartial spectator.” 26 It isthe bundled virtues in a soul which ascend. I say “ascend” to my fellowbelievers in a loving and living God.But to you others I have at least a practical suggestion, that love withoutother virtues is sin and simulacrum. An absorbing love of a child withoutthe virtue of justice, for example, makes the child into a mere source ofsatisfaction for its mother. You know mothers like this. She “loves” her child,doubtless. But she loves him rather in the way that Screwtape—theimagined middle-management devil giving advice to a junior devil inC. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters—describes the “love” his fellow devilshave for human souls: “To us a human is primarily food; our aim is theabsorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood atits expense.” 27 Such increasing of the area of selfhood—in a word, pride—changes love into domination.“A love relationship,” Murdoch observed, “can occasion extreme selfishnessand possessive violence, the attempt to dominate the other . . . so thatit is no longer separate; or it can prompt a process of unselfing wherein thelover learns to see, and cherish and respect, what is not himself.” 28 The politicaltheorist Joan Tronto warns likewise about unbalanced and absorbing“love.” She criticizes the communitarians like Nel Noddings and ElizabethFox-Genovese for imagining that love conquers all. “Without strong conceptionsof right, care-givers are apt to see the world only from their ownperspective and to stifle diversity and otherness.” 29 Mother knows best. Yeton the other hand, “justice without a notion of care is incomplete.” 30