The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

evil as imbalance, inner and outer 281But the virtues do not work one-by-one. Murdoch observed thatas we deepen our notions of the virtues we introduce relationship and hierarchy.Courage, which seemed at first to be something on its own, a sort of specializeddaring of the spirit, is now seen to be a particular operation of wisdom [includingwhat I am calling prudence] and love. We come to distinguish a self-assertiveferocity from the kind of courage which would enable a man coolly to choose thelabor camp rather than the easy compromise with the tyrant. It would be impossibleto have one virtue unless it were a very trivial one such as thrift. 6Or unless it were in fact a vice. Mary Midgley speaks of the treacherousIago in the play Othello: “Iago’s envy . . . has taken him over. It swallows upevery other motive....All attempts at inward balance have ceased....Thereare no more conflicts.” 7 Iago lacks temperance: “I do hate [Othello], as I dohell’s pains,” he says in the first scene, using a proverbial exaggeration,though also an ironic foreshadowing of his ultimate destination. As aneconomist would say, he is “specialized” in one or two virtues, showingcourage in venturing and prudence in completing his somewhat haphazardplan against Othello, but showing none of that inward balance in acknowledgmentof the conflict between one virtue and another that would makeroom in a good person for love or justice or hope: namely, temperance.You are moved to hate the boss who passed you over in favor of someinsipid Cassio, and for all you know slept with your spouse. But you drawback from hatred, anger, envy, with a mild reflection that after all it wouldbe unjust to indulge your feelings, or that after all the Lord has laid downthat “vengeance is mine,” not thine. But Iago courageously and unbalancedlydoes not draw back. His “motiveless malignity,” as Coleridge put it,arises from his character, not from the “motives” he offers, now one, nowanother, “the mere fictions of his own restless nature, distempered by a keensense of his intellectual superiority, and haunted by the love of exertingpower, on those especially who are his superiors in practical and moralexcellence.” 8 Iago’s sin, like most sin, originates in the master sin of pride.Likewise in Paradise Lost Satan declares courageously and singlevirtuedly,“So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, / Farewell remorse:all good to me is lost; / Evil be thou my good.” Of course it’s not so simple ashe claims. In seeing with Stanley Fish how Milton works, one shouldremember that theologically speaking Satan must be wrong about almosteverything of importance. 9 C. S. Lewis writes, “What we see in Satan is thehorrible co-existence of a subtle and incessant intellectual activity with an