The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

246 chapter 20The Danny Glover character in Lethal Weapon inquires of the Mel Gibsoncharacter, also a policeman, “You ever met anyone you didn’t kill?”A courageous institution or society or person lacking temperance and justiceand prudence will not last, or work.So at least we wish. We need a criterion for the virtue of virtues, an answer,not necessarily a simple one, to the question “Why is this a virtue?” It is notthe case, as opponents of virtue ethics sometimes believe, that an answer hasto reduce virtue ethics to duties or to utility. Edmund Pincoffs has suggestedthat we could decide which characteristics are virtues by asking whether wecould approach or flee the person having them. 13 The moral philosopherHursthouse identifies four ends, in two dimensions, survival/flourishing ofthe individual/group: the mere survival of the individual or of the group, orthe flourishing of the individual or of the group. 14Alasdair MacIntyre is one among the male philosophers, among themBernard Williams and John McDowell, who have contributed to virtueethics. His answer to the question is a “social teleology.” You test virtue X byasking how X contributes to the purpose, end, telos of the society, whatKnight called “the moral habitability of the world.” 15 The ancient theorists ofthe virtues applauded that balance and completion of virtues, worth havingof course in a little community. What sort of person suits best the telos ofdemocratic Athens or republican Rome? Well, of course a person having thefour virtues courage, temperance, justice, and prudence. Jean Bethke Elshtainputs Aristotle in the postheroic camp. She too uses the movie Shane asan example: in the end Shane himself must leave, she writes, because “he isas out of place in the placid, settled kingdom of a tamed town on the Americanfrontier as was Achilles’ gory glory in Aristotle’s list of civic virtues.” 16Unfortunately, as Elshtain well understands, the question about thevirtue of virtues can’t really be answered as it typically was before the gamewas spoiled by Machiavelli and Hobbes. The old question and the thenobviousanswer was in effect, “What does a society need to be virtuous?Well, that’s obvious: a throng of virtuous chaps.” The new social sciences ofthe eighteenth century came to realize, a century or two after the TerrifyingItalian and the Angry Englishman had first said it, that social virtue, andcertainly virtù sociale, does not require personal virtue in every one of asociety’s citizens, or perhaps in any of them. A self-interested mob of corporate-raiding,asset-stripping Gordon Gekkos might result, for example, ina rich economy, thank you very much.