The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

280 chapter 24And the method assumes its conclusion in another way, too: that we arediscussing a person possessing practical wisdom already. No need to learnto cut cloth on the bias by watching one’s mother, to take batting practice,to run marathons. No need to grow in practical or ethical experience. Therepresentation of right lies deep in the soul of everyone, says Kant, even ofthe most delicate child, an axiom, an assumption. One is reminded of thejoke about a physicist and an economist on a desert island finding a can ofbeans. They only lack a can opener. The physicist says, “Let’s build a fire andheat the can. By the laws of physics, it will explode, and that way we can getinto the beans.” The economist says, “What a messy solution! I have a muchneater one, which uses the laws of academic economics. First step: assumeas an axiom that we have a can opener....”The ethics of the virtues asks insistently of the universalizers, thoughalways politely, “Do you have a reason for seeking the universal? What guidance,when all is said, can such a priori generalities give to actual lives?” Talkof the local, contingent, nonuniversal virtues has the virtue at least of preservinghow we actually talk, and therefore might help us talk—and behave.And there is a worry in the actual behavior of people who, as AlasdairMacIntyre puts it, “identify what are in fact their partial and particularcauses too easily and too completely with the cause of some universalprinciple.” “They usually behave,” he notes, “worse than they would otherwisedo.” 4Factually speaking, as Alan Wolfe found in his surveys and interviewsabout American ethical views in the 1990s, “virtue,” singular, as a wordmeans little to ordinary Americans, except to arouse annoyance at the conservativechurches and their recent obsession with sex, sex, sex. But toWolfe’s Americans the particular named virtues, plural, mean a great deal,provoking calm yet committed discussion. Americans admire especially, forexample, loyalty, that blend of faith, love, justice, and temperance, andhonesty—courage, justice, and faith; and in a broader sense a bourgeoisblend of all the virtues. 5The way we actually talk does not depend on the Golden Rule or the categoricalimperative or even the vaguer maxim of maximizing utility, at leastnot much. It depends on the particular virtues, straight from the Girl ScoutHandbook, on the testaments old and new, and on the songs, poems, stories,family histories, and public dramatizations which give them life. Go andlearn the commentary.