The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

23the storied character of virtue“When I was young,” said Clovis, “my mother taught me the difference between good andevil—only I’ve forgotten it.”“You’ve forgotten the difference between good and evil?” gasped the princess.“Well, she taught me three ways of cooking lobster. You can’t remember everything.”—Saki (Hector Hugh Monro)An ethic of the virtues gives a guide. It does not solve every ethical problemslam-bang, which as Rosalind Hursthouse notes is no special problem—because after all neither does any other serious ethical theory. 1 Even asstraightforward an ethical theory as “follow the 613 commandments of theTorah,” Hillel’s count, has not proven to be slam-bang, not even close.Deciding whether a certain act “would be the object of choice of allrational beings” (as Hursthouse summarizes Kant) or “maximizes happiness”(as one might summarize Hume and Bentham) or “would be chosenat the social contract” (Ockham, Suarez, Hobbes, Locke, Rawls, Nozick) isno less difficult than deciding whether the act entails cowardice or hatred orinjustice. Ethics “after virtue” was commonly more difficult to apply, notless. The stories of our culture give us models for acting courageously orlovingly or justly. The virtue-words with stories attached appear anyway tobe how humans reason ethically. “A [Greek] tragedy,” Martha Nussbaumdeclared, “does not display the dilemmas of its characters as prearticulated;it shows them as searching for the morally salient; and it forces us, as interpreters,to be similarly active.” 2The point applies to less elevated stories than Orestes and Antigone.In mythirties and forties I used to jog long distances. I did not then tell myself