The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

evil as imbalance, inner and outer 287pedophilia could therefore survive millennia of ethical scrutiny, or rather ablithe lack of scrutiny. Thus too the inequality of women; or of childrensubject to a pater familias; or more recently the inequality of homosexualsabused by law and custom in Germanic countries; or of black bodies swingingin the Southern breeze; or of young black or Hispanic men imprisonedfor selling coke to suburbanites slumming.Humans have shown repeatedly that they can imagine almost anyinjustice—at any rate an injustice by the most elevated egalitarian standardsof bourgeois Europe—as fit, decorous, natural, what we do, nothingto-be-done-about-it-anyway;in a word, as “just.” Consider the Germans ofthe Third Reich, or the Germans rehearsing for the Third Reich in EastAfrica in 1904. Consider Hotel Rwanda. We have shown ourselves capableof imposing almost any indignity on Iraqis or Tutsis or barbaroi or anyinferior.Dignitas in Latin is from an Indo-European base *dek- meaning “receive,be fitting,” from which also decus (ornament) > decōrus (proper) > decorous.What is decorous depends in a hierarchical society of course on thedignity of rank. It is the free adult male Roman citizen, not a slave orwoman or child, for whom it is dulce et decorum to die for the fatherland.Aristotle declares that “justice between master and slave and betweenfather and child is not the same as absolute and political justice....A chattelis ...a part ofoneself.” 27 Well, of course. An ancilla, a female householdslave (from which we get the word “ancillary”), was recommended byancient ethical writers as a sexual object useful for preventing real adultery.Never mind her admitted humanness. Galen the doctor warns an ownernot to hit slaves with his fist, to avoid injury to his—the owner’s—fist. Waituntil the passion subsides, he counsels, then apply the rod of justice. Nevermind the slave’s humanness.One waxes indignant about past slavery. But the point here is that its justicewas until the late eighteenth century entirely unquestioned. Souls insuch a view are of course equal before God, the “of course” applying, forexample, to Greek and Roman Stoicism, and to the Abrahamic religions ofthe Near East. It does not seem to apply to Hinduism, where a higher rankin the orders of the world must be earned in successive incarnations. Littlewonder that over the millennia the castes of India have been sociologicallyhardy. The equality before God that distinguishes monotheism from rankpreservingpolytheism is ancient. 28But as Samuel Fleischacker points out, a this-world egalitarianism was