The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

22the monomania of immanuel kantThe ancients Plato and Augustine and the moderns Immanuel Kant andJeremy Bentham, on the contrary, wanted to find some elemental, singleGood that could be poured into useful shapes whole, unalloyed. Kantcalled it “pure reason” (reinen Vernunft), Bentham “utility.” Their intellectualprogram, attempted over the next two centuries by hundreds of ethicalphilosophers down to John Rawls and Robert Nozick, and still goingstrong, was to reduce the virtues to a virtue. Here is all of virtue, the Platonicidea of the Good, the virtue of virtues, here on my convenientpocket-sized card, with no stories or traditions behind it, no culture,merely universal Reason.Thus Kant, with a pocket-sized, three-by-five-inch card inscribed “Imaginethe action you propose to take would be elevated to a general rule for allsociety.” Or Rawls: “Imagine you are a risk-averse person making rulesfor society behind a veil of ignorance about your own location in the society.”Such metarules are as applicable to creatures on a planet circling ProximaCentauri as to us humans.From its beginnings in Plato’s writings such ethical monism did notwork very well. As Aristotle said—he apologized for thus refuting histeacher—“it is not easy to see how knowing the same Ideal Good will helpa weaver,...or how anybody will be a better physician or general for havingcontemplated the absolute Ideal.” 1 The neo-Aristotelian and anti-Kantianturn in recent ethical philosophy can be put this way: it’s no good talkinglike Plato or Kant of the ultimate when most of the ethical issues we face arematters of practice as a weaver or a physician or a mother. Or to put it more