The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

256 chapter 21if you didn’t mean to burn the place down, even if your intentions werepure, even if it was your own room to dispose of. The school of Platodefined prudence (that is, phronēsis) as “the ability which by itself is productiveof human happiness; the knowledge of what is good and bad; theknowledge that produces happiness; the disposition by which we judgewhat is to be done and what is not to be done.” 9Aquinas declares that “any virtue which causes good in reason’s considerationis called prudence,” and observes that prudence “belongs to reasonessentially whereas the other three virtues [viz., courage, temperance, andjustice] ...apply reason to passions.” 10 And elsewhere he says, “One needsto deal rightly with those things that are for the sake of the end [finis], andthis can only come about through reason rightly deliberating, judging, andcommanding, which is the function of prudence....Hence there can be nomoral virtue without prudence.” 11 Or still elsewhere, the job of such practicalreason is “to ponder things which must be done ...but it is through prudencethat reason is able to command well.” 12It is the executive function. Executive, not technical. In his book urgingan Aquinian ethic on economics, Andrew Yuengert points out that theadjusting of means to ultimate ends that is “prudence” is not merelythe adjusting of means to intermediate ends of “technique.” 13 In RosalindHursthouse’s textbook of virtue ethics the word “prudence” is rare. But theequivalent phrase, “practical wisdom,” occurs repeatedly, because reasonmust rightly deliberate about any virtue if the intended act of justice or temperanceor faith is to do the job.Prudence is so to speak the grammar of the virtues. Robert Harimanwrites that it “fulfills an executive function in respect to human flourishing.”14 A faithful Roman Catholic who believes imprudently—that is,unwisely in practical terms—that going to mass regularly suffices for resurrectionat the Last Judgment is making a dreadful mistake. A federal judgewho believes himself a just man fails in his project if he is ignorant of thelaw, or if he entertains a theory of it that no one else regards as just.Amélie Oksenberg Rorty neatly encapsulates the Aristotle behindAquinas as requiring that “the virtuous person perform the right action inthe right way at the right time on the right objects.” 15 Clearly, such a personmust be a phrónimos, a person of practical reasoning, “really knowing whatone is doing, being aware of the circumstances and consequences of one’sactions, with the right conception of the sort of action one is performing.” 16