The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

294 chapter 25are after all merely human, good for business, good for life: the courageto venture, the prudence to venture aright, the temperance and justice tokeep balance in doing so. The mother of a handicapped child, the managerof a company facing bankruptcy, the ordinary person rising daily to workin an ordinary job for her son or his daughter, need to be courageous,temperate, just, and prudent, “the better fortitude / Of patience and heroicmartyrdom / Unsung.” St. Thomas’s teacher, St. Albert the Great, summarizedCicero’s claim that every virtuous act has all four: “For the knowledgerequired argues for prudence; the strength to act resolutely argues forcourage; moderation argues for temperance; and correctness argues forjustice.” 11In On Duties (44 BC) Cicero had declared that the four pagan virtuesconstitute a man’s honestas, there meaning simply “rectitude, moral worthiness.”12 But in Latin honestas also meant “honor” in the aristocratic sense,that is, reputation, as does exclusively its reconstructed root *honos withoutsuffix and the usual honōs (genitive honōris) or simply honor. The Romansused rather the original of our “sincere,” originally meaning “pure,” for whatwe now call “honest.” Sinceritas was not highly esteemed in a shame cultureof aristocrats, and in fact this particular form is not attested before Augustus.At Rome and in its offshoots ethical goodness was what was worthy ofesteem in a man of honor. “To live honorably” is the modern English translationof the advice in Justinian’s treatise on Roman law in AD 533, honestevivere, not our modern “live honestly.” 13 Truth telling was distinctly secondaryto this notion of honestas. Think of the haughty virtues, the dignitas,ofan English lord or of a Mafia don.Othello’s characterization of “honest Iago” (1.3.298, 2.3.160) and “myfriend, your husband, honest, honest Iago” at 5.2.162 just before he discoversIago’s lies are therefore not quite so crude cases of dramatic irony as theyappear to us now. In Othello as most usually in Shakespeare the word meanschiefly “honorable,” as men still speak in jest of the purity of an “honest”woman. This sense with reference to women is also very common in Shakespeare—eighttimes, for example, in Othello about Desdemona (“I do notthink but Desdemona’s honest,” 3.3.230).Thus 5.1.32, “O brave Iago, honest and just / That hast such a noble senseof thy friend’s wrong.” Iago is here characterized as a warrior, brave andnoble as a warrior should be, though, as it will turn out, having neitherintegrity nor justice. In Othello the word is used twenty-five times about dis-