The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

sweet love vs. interest 113word “love,” and then reduce it to gain. The most extreme of the evolutionarypsychologists claim that love itself is an evolutionary result of PrudenceOnly, this time of the very genes themselves. Consider Steven Pinker in 1997on the rationality of friendship: “Now that you value the person, theyshould value you even more ...because of your stake in rescuing him or herfrom hard times....This runaway process is what we call friendship.” 18No, Steven, it is what we call self-absorption. The cognitive philosopherJerry Fodor remarks of Pinker’s one-factor theory: “A concern to propagateone’s genes would rationalize one’s acting to promote one’s children’s welfare;but so too would an interest in one’s children’s welfare. Not all of one’smotives could be instrumental, after all; there must be some things that onecares for just for their own sakes. Why, indeed, mightn’t there be quite a fewsuch things? Why shouldn’t one’s children be among them?” 19 He quotesPinker on the evolutionary explanation for why we humans like stories,namely, that they provide useful tips for life, as, for example, to someone inHamlet’s fix: “What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killedmy father, took his position, and married my mother? Good question.” Startlingly,Pinker does not appear to be joking here. It’s unintentionally funny,this “scientific” attempt to get along without sheer love, or sheer courage, orto get along without the aesthetic pleasure of stories reflecting faith andhope.Even the admirable Robert Nozick falls prey to the reductionism ofsocio- and psycho- and evolutionary- and brain-science-biology. But characteristicallyhe has wise doubts. “Someone could agree that ethics originatesin the function of coordinating activity to mutual benefit, yet holdthat ethics now is valuable because of additional functions that it hasacquired.” 20 She certainly could.In the analysis of the philosopher Harry Frankfurt this sheer love has“four main conceptually necessary features.” 21 It must be “a disinterestedconcern for the well-being or flourishing of the person who is loved.” That’sthe main point, and the way the utility-driven mother imagined by economistsis less than perfectly loving. Her utility function reflects precisely, andonly, self-interest.Frankfurt, by the way, equivocates between “love” as love of persons and“love” also of nonpersons such as the Revolution or Art or God. Thus headds that love is “ineluctably personal,” which I believe would be betterexpressed as “ineluctably particular.” Anyway, the person (or transcendent