The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

272 chapter 23Socrates—who I have to admit had had all these experiences of life—thatknowledge of the good is enough for the will to achieve it. I am not againstsweet, inexperienced, and unmarried men. After all, my hero Adam Smithwas one. One of my other heroes, Aquinas, was another. But, unlike Kant orBentham, Adam Smith managed somehow to restrain the impulse to theorizemuch beyond human life as actually lived. And Aquinas surpassed inintellectual flexibility and a sense of lived life many a neo-Thomist.My running, so to speak, changed my character to long, slow distance.I stopped thinking of my economic scholarship as a matter of the next articleand started to think of it as a marathon. “Running,” said Sir Roger Bannisterto the BBC cameras on the fiftieth anniversary of his first breaking thefour-minute mile, “is only a metaphor for life.” A certain kind of life, actually.And your life becomes a metaphor for running itself. I applied the narrativeof running to other parts of my life, such as slowly, slowly acquiringsmall Latin and less Greek, or learning to read a smattering of difficultbooks in the humanities. Reading The Grounding for the Metaphysics ofMorals, you see, is like a marathon, or at least like a run from Iowa City tothe Lake McBride Dam and back.Guides to ethical life, to repeat, are achieved mainly through story andexample. As Robert Hariman puts it:What to do? One typical [modern] response is to look for rules: what would anyrational person do in this situation? . ..There was another approach familiar tothe classical thinkers, however, which was to look to exemplars: how have otherindividuals managed situations such as this one? The attention given to the particularwise person—the phronimos—is not merely a heuristic device. ...Prudentialtheory [which is Hariman’s name for the Ciceronian program of virtueethics in action] requires a bifocal perspective that alternates between impersonalnorms and individual circumstances, a perspective that is similar to the readingstrategy for understanding a persuasive text. 5Hariman is here referring to the fruitful notion of the rhetorician RichardLanham that we should “toggle”—Lanham was using the computer term—between surface and depth, rhetoric and philosophy, practice and theory. 6The theoretical precepts are not useless. In baseball: “Keep your eye onthe ball.” In writing: “Don’t overload your sentences.” But they are like acoach offering commentary, not the achievement itself. There are no formulas,or else such activities would not be valuable arts. They would bemere skills, easily acquired by anyone, like typing or using econometrics. 7