The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

ourgeois economists against love 123my mink, and if screwing other people gets me such toys, fine. What do Icare about my so-called soul?” To which Zeno the Stoic replied, as GilbertMurray put it, “Would you yourself really like to be rich and corrupted? Tohave abundance of pleasure and be a worse man? Apparently, when Zeno’seyes were upon you, it was difficult to say you would.” 19 Zeno’s Roman-Greek follower Epictetus said, “No man would change [honorable poverty]for disreputable wealth.” 20It seems so, by the Deathbed Test: what would you wish to remember onyour deathbed, more diamond rings consumed or more good deeds done inthe world? Drek or mitzvoth? Aristotle wrote that things good by nature arethose that “can belong to a person when dead more than alive.” 21 “Althoughtherefore riches be a thing which every man wisheth,” wrote Hooker in1593, “yet no man of judgment can esteem it better to be rich, than wise, virtuous,and religious.” 22 Unto death.Leave off if you wish the religious part or the death talk. “The virtuousperson’s reward is . . . an entire life of satisfying actions,” writes DarylKoehn, “while the vicious person’s punishment is a life of actions thatproduce both unexpected and unintended consequences for himself andothers.” 23 Even in consequentialist terms, in other words, an instrumentaland materialist view of love is a scientific mistake. A loveless economywould not work. And it would be hell. The secular meaning of the Christianword “hell” is personal corruption, which in truth makes ruling insuch a figurative place worse, not better, than serving in heaven. “Wemust picture Hell,” writes C.S. Lewis, “as a state in which everyone is perpetuallyconcerned about his own dignity and advancement, ...whereeveryone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, andresentment.” 24David Schmidtz sees again into the core here. He notes a mental experimentimagined by another philosopher that we could “pull a lever” todecide whether or not to have scruples. “Many of us would pull a lever thatwould strengthen our disposition to be honest.” But as we actually are afterEden, we are weak. If you profess an Abrahamic religion you can call theweakness “original sin.” Or you can argue as Schmidtz does that naturalselection has made people, alas, “built to worry about things that can drawblood, not about the decay of their characters.” 25In The Invisible Heart (2001), a finely crafted “economic romance” (sic),Russell Roberts makes a similar point about the limits of instrumentalism.