The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

evil as imbalance, inner and outer 285the scorning and confining husband, and Dr. Y, the wife’s complicitbrother—thus are the learned honored in Protestant Europe.Anyway, sin is domestic. We actual, suburban humans are imperfect.We do not have, for example, perfect temperance. We chicken out,overindulge, harden our hearts, can’t think it through, remain confusedlyignorant. And so a courageous gesture with our SUV at 70 miles per houron the Kennedy Expressway, a banal, unremarkable aggression against atoo-slow driver, a mini-heroic act, will once in while produce a looming,ramifying catastrophe.The need for balance in the virtues, lest they be specialized into sin, istragic. In Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) Jane Addams spoke autobiographically,as a woman would, about the conflict between the “familyclaim” which kept her from going to Smith College as she had planned andthe “social claim” which later drove her life: “The collision of interests, eachof which has a real moral basis and a right to its own place in life, is boundto be more or less tragic. It is the struggle between two claims, the destructionof either of which would bring ruin to ethical life.” 18“Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you, inthought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have leftundone.” We are to confess our ordinary inability to balance our virtues ina world of scarcity, failing to exercise, for example, a properly Christian,cheek-turning love toward someone who has hurt us. Justice alone is notenough. Justice alone, unbalanced, will morph into the sin of anger. Onemust have love, and courage and temperance and the rest.Bishop Butler in 1725 viewed temperance as the crux, as one would naturallyin an eighteenth century very conscious of its progress over the chaosof religious war. Self-interest was a matter of prudence and courage, benevolenceof love and justice. But neither could flourish without temperancerestraining the passions. “Men daily, hourly sacrifice the greatest knowninterest to fancy, inquisitiveness, love or hatred, any vagrant inclination. Thething to be lamented is not that men have so great a regard to their owngood or interest [even] in the present world, for they have not enough.” 19“The greatest known interest” is eternal salvation. But in Butler’s way ofarguing it could be any great secular end, too. The problem is to controlpassion, to balance virtues, as temperance does.“The existence of inborn tendencies to evil,” Midgley writes, “neednot puzzle us too much. It only means that our good tendencies are not