The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

24evil as imbalance, inner and outer:temperance and justiceIn the new alternative to Platonism and its descendents Kantianism andBenthamism, Bernard Williams wrote, “Morality is seen as somethingwhose real existence must consist in personal experience and social institutions,not in sets of propositions.” 1 It is an alternative as new as Aristotle,Cicero, and Aquinas, with parallels in Chinese and Indian philosophy.The classical virtue ethicists believed they had spotted the seams in theuniverse, the essence of prudence or the substance of justice. In reusing theirwords now, in an expanding universe, we do not have such ambitions. Theethical, we believe, is local, not universal, knowledge. It is contingent andfallible, not universal and necessary. “It is a contingent fact,” writes Hursthouse,“that we can, individually, flourish or achieve eudaimonia, contingentthat we can do so in the same way as each other, and contingent thatwe can do so all together, not at each other’s expense.” 2Such a notion of the ethical, Kant would have said with a sneer, is onlyanthropological or psychological or historical, not pure and rational. AlasdairMacIntyre characterizes the monistic tradition of Hobbes, Bentham,and Kant as asserting without much evidence—or on the evidence, asMacIntyre notes, of a misunderstanding of how geometry proceeds—that“there is a way of founding adequately the first principle or principles ofright action by appeal to considerations which they take to be equally availableat the commencement of enquiry to every rational person as such.” 3 Anyrational person just knows that we “must” imitate Euclid in method and“must” come to the categorical imperative in substance. There’s no groundingto the “must” in The Grounding.