The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

118 chapter 7Prudence Only calculations of productivity to calculate that there was noresidual to be accounted for by causes other than Prudence. When in the1970s I wanted to show that medieval English open fields were insurance in anage of terrifying uncertainty I used Prudence Only calculations of portfoliobalance to show that Prudence sufficed to explain the scattering of a peasant’splots of land. When in the 1980s I wanted to show how to teach economicsthrough applied examples rather than useless theorem-proving—whichunfortunately has since then triumphed in advanced and some elementaryeconomic education—I used Prudence Only arguments throughout, thoughI was beginning in that decade to worry that they might not suffice.Adam Smith asserted in 1776 that “what is prudence in the conduct ofevery private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.” 4 A splendidlyuseful principle. Hardheaded. No talk of love, or of any other virtuethan prudence. Smith, however, understood well what later economists havegradually come to forget. After all, said Smith as early as 1759, we want peopleto have a balanced set of virtues, including even love, not merely prudence,and this for all purposes, sacred, profane, business, pleasure, the good,the useful, the wide world, and the home, too. All. Annette Baier argues in“What Do Women Want in a Moral Theory?” that love and obligation, whichare both necessary for a society to survive, arise from “appropriate trust.” 5The economist and historian Alexander Field has based a similar argumenton biology. He notes that on meeting a stranger in the desert withbread and water that you want, you do not simply kill him. Why not? Sheerself-interest implies you would, and if you would, he would, too, in anticipation,and the game’s afoot. Once you and he have chatted a while andbuilt up trust, naturally, you will refrain. But how does trust get a chance?How did it originate?Field argues that it originates from “modules inhibiting intraspecific violence,”that is, from a very long evolution of a taboo on hurting one’s ownkind. 6 The “failure to harm” nonkin is hardwired into animals. It evolvedfrom selection at the level of the group, Field argues, not the individual. It’sbetter for you as a behavioral egoist to kill the man you meet in the desert.But of course you are inhibited in doing so, because you are not in fact suchan egoist: that’s best for the human species.I remember driving once in Amherst past a woman walking towardme on the verge, and the strange thought entering, “Suppose I run herdown?” I didn’t, I’m very glad to report. But there it was, the potential for