The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

the storied character of virtue 271Kantian or utilitarian ethical reasonings, though neither was entirely irrelevant,I suppose. The Kantian duty to step out the door on a cold morningor the utilitarian reasoning that after all it was good for me did help, a little.Kant’s maxim would not acknowledge any pleasure in the run, and Bentham’scalculation would not acknowledge any identity in it. Virtue ethicscombines the two. The unity of ethical thinking was torn apart by the analystsof the eighteenth century. It is somewhat harder to see a contractarianmotive in a lone daily run. The fact casts light on a fault of contractarianismsuch as Nozick’s, namely, that it reduces ethics to the improvement of otherpeople, ignoring self-improvement, and ignoring also the transcendent—unless we think, as monotheists in fact do, of making covenants with God,or with ourselves.To actually keep putting one foot in front of another I told myself, as wedo, little character stories, of Pheidippides running from Athens to Sparta,say, or of the game of making it to the next bridge, or of my identity imaginedand actual. I was in a sense fooling myself, though aware. I learned fromrunning how to make a change from a very overweight smoker to a somewhatoverweight nonsmoker. In my fifth decade, that is, I learned that thecombination of temperance plus courage we call persistence can achievewith small steps quite a lot. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, choose notto drink one day, or one hour, at a time. Beginnen is ondernemen, the Dutchsay. Literally, “to begin is to undertake”—a journey of a thousand miles.I had of course “known” such an obvious truth long before in the intellectualsense sufficient for Kantian or Benthamite reasoning. But to littlegood for weight control. That’s what’s wrong with Kantian or Benthamitereasoning. It is reasoning, not a cause for action. “Moral knowledge, unlikemathematical knowledge,” Hursthouse notes, “cannot be acquired merelyby attending lectures and is [therefore] not characteristically to be found inpeople too young to have much experience of life. A normative ethicsshould not aim to provide a decision procedure which any reasonably cleveradolescent could apply,” like the chain rule for derivatives. 3 But an adolescent’shead is of course filled with stories and characters to imitate, for goodor evil.Both Kant and Bentham were sweet but notably inexperienced men. AsMill said of Bentham, “He was a boy to the last.” 4 Kant and Bentham hadseen little of life. Neither of them had been married or had run a businessor had carried a spear in the phalanx. Both of them supposed, with