The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

the monomania of immanuel kant 269intemperate lunacy lies at the heart of the modern and anti-Aristoteliantheory of ethics should give pause.Bernard Williams, another of the pioneering virtue ethicists since the1950s, concluded that “the resources of most modern moral philosophy arenot well adjusted to the modern world.” “Its prevailing fault, in all its styles,is to impose on ethical life some immensely simple model,” such as contractbehind a veil of ignorance, rationality as European bourgeois men mightdefine it, or utility, which seems so measurable. 21 An intellectual revolutionwas initiated 1690 through 1785, dethroning the thick, storied, pagan-Christian account of the virtues, plural, and erecting one or another universalmonism in their place. Reason was to become a new monotheism,demanding sacrifice and promising salvation in return, either here below orin the Good Society by and by.It was an admirable effort, courageous and prudent and hopeful, worththe attempt. Perhaps it had something to do with the rise of the bourgeoisie,uneasy in a system of the virtues which had classically talked of heroes andsaints. It certainly had to do with the contractarian idea so obvious to thebourgeois that, in the words of Richard Rumbold (the Presbyterian soldierI mentioned) before he faced the hangman in 1685, “the king having . . .power enough to make him great; the people also as much property as tomake them happy; they being, as it were, contracted to one another.” 22 Nosaddles and spurs. And the scientific revolution must have made ethicistsstrive for a similar rethinking.Yet on the whole, except as I say as a historically contingent rhetoricaltool of liberals against status, Locke’s and Kant’s and Bentham’s systemshave failed. They succeeded negatively as a political expedient, thank God.But afterward they failed positively as an ethical guide. They have not givenus guides to action and they have not matched how we live.