The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

ourgeois economists against love 125If you could repeat your life you might do so, especially if this time you had achance to get it right. In stories in books and TV you temporarily enter intoimagined lives, perhaps not temporarily enough for your own good.But scarcity in your own life seems essential for a real human life. Imagineyou were an Olympian god. Being immortal, you would have no needfor the virtues of hope, faith, courage, temperance, or prudence. These makeno sense if you, like the Devil, cannot die. Othello stabs Iago, who replies indefiance, referring to the Devil’s immortality, “I am cut but do not die.”Though then he does. Most virtues are useless to someone who really cannotdie. Even on Olympus, admittedly, the virtues of love and justice mighthave political rewards. But what gives human love its special poignancy, andgives human justice its special dignity, is the limit to life. You love a man whowill die. You help a woman who is a mere mortal. Not being either a cat oran Olympian god you want a real life with real hazards and rewards, not anexperience machine. You wish to retain an identity, a Faith and Hope, as youmight put it, named You.You might as well give in and call it a soul. 31The late eighteenth-century impulse and especially the utilitarian impulsewas to force ethics into a behaviorist and naively scientistic mode, reducingit to some “immensely simple” formula, as one of the virtue ethicists put it.For example, many utilitarians and some Kantians do not want to acknowledgethe force of words and free will and inner light. I myself acknowledgedthese unbehaviorist motivations late, finally realizing that the meaning ofa human action, not merely its external appearance, is important for its scientificdescription.Virginia Held argues that in ethics “we should pay far more attention . . .to relationships among people, relationships that we cannot see but can beexperienced nonetheless.” 32 We would not call a mother “virtuous” who felt noemotion in carrying out her duties toward her children. Nor would we call agood Samaritan “good” who saved the drowning victim in order to achievefame. 33 Or call a business person “ethical” who followed the law out of fear ofjail time. Virtue is not merely a matter of observable action. It is dispositional—feeling, for example, love and regret and anguish and joy for our acts of will.That is, it is a matter of character, ethos, exercising one’s will to do good,to be good. It is a matter of one’s soul.