The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

love and the bourgeoisie 135prudently judged, balanced in style between male and female. A company ora market runs partly on Love.Of course a company and a market work also on Prudence. But the modernacademic theory of market capitalism, that Samuelsonian economics Istudied so passionately in the 1960s and 1970s, goes astray in imagining thatthe only character we need in understanding capitalism is Mr. MaximumUtility, the monster of Prudence who has no place in his character forLove—or any passion beyond Prudence Only. Recall Steven Pinker’s analysisof love as Max U—or Max G[enes]. Max U does not work scientifically,the only terms the Samuelsonian economists profess to care about, forwhich see the economists Frank and Frey and George Akerlof and manyothers. 19 And in terms that the rest of us can appreciate, he is a menace. IrisMurdoch describes Max U as “the agent, thin as a needle, [who] appears inthe quick flash of the choosing will.” 20Such a fellow would view friendship, philia, as an exchange, and wouldnever achieve what Aristotle saw as the highest stage of friendship, love forthe friend’s own sake. 21 Another’s “own sake” is meaningless in a Max Uview of the social world. Things in such a world are valued for their capacityto yield utility, with the result, as Michael Stocker has noted, that peopledisappear. 22 The so-called “man” Max U does not value even himself as aperson, and leaps at the chance to hitch himself up to an ExperienceMachine. Impulsive, manipulative, shallow. How many sociopaths can therebe? Max U is a chimera conjured by the clerisy, left and right. They portraya world impossible for most actual human beings.This is the point of a famous paper by Amartya Sen in 1977, just as Sen wasworking his way out of a Max U intellectual world,“Rational Fools: A Critiqueof the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory.” The founder of modernMax U reasoning, Francis Y. Edgeworth, had acknowledged in 1881 that sucha fellow as Max U depended on “unsympathetic isolation abstractly assumedin Economics.” 23 But as you can see, economists think that “sympathy”—literally in Greek (which Edgeworth knew well) “fellow feeling”—is all thereis to relations among humans. I am sad because you are sad. “Behavior basedon sympathy,” Sen writes, nice though it is, “is in an important sense egoistic,for one is pleased at others’ pleasure and pained at others’ pain, and the pursuitof one’s own utility may thus be helped by sympathetic action.” 24 Invirtue-ethical terms, sympathy is a matter of prudence and lower-level (thatis, not transcendent) love. Or maybe it is a matter of mere prudence, since this