The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

8love and the bourgeoisieAt the risk of sounding a bit uncool, I say to the graduating class that your success in life, andthe success of our country, is going to depend on the integrity and other qualities of characterthat you and your contemporaries will continue to develop and demonstrate over theyears ahead....I could urge you all to work hard,save,and prosper. And I do. But transcendingall else is being principled in how to go about doing those things....And beyondthe personal sense of satisfaction, having a reputation for fair dealing is a profoundly practicalvirtue. We call it “good will” in business and add it to our balance sheets. Trust is at theroot of any economic system based on mutually beneficial exchange....Our system worksfundamentally on individual fair dealing.—Alan Greenspan, 1999Love figures in any human group, even a capitalist group, understanding“love” in an expanded sense to include more than Aristotle’s lower friendshipsfor pleasure and profit. We do not have to be Hobbesians or utilitariansand reduce “love” to self-interest. We can be Stoic or Christian, orfollowers of Grotius or Adam Smith, and suppose that people care. In factI’d claim we had better, if we want to be scientific about it.Disinterested solidarity is necessary for any human activity—even, totake what would seem to be the hardest case, for the playing of a game. Ithas been discovered mathematically that games such as those contemplatedby John Nash, that beautiful mind, cannot be played to mutual profit withPrudence Only rules. For one thing, if the game is finite—even as long as tenmoves—it unravels into selfishness. For another, if it is not finite, it has aninfinite number of solutions. The second point is known as the Folk Theorem,because no one knows who first devised it—and perhaps because it isso destructive of game theory that no game theorist now will claim it.