The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

the system of the virtues 305Among the beasts no mate for thee was found.” Animals were “dumb” inboth senses.By the grace of Darwin, however, we now see the calculative virtues inthe least human of beings, in ants justly sacrificing themselves for the queen,or dandelions prudently working the cracks in the sidewalk. The terminologyis figurative, note the scientists, a human attribution, not Nature’s ownway of putting it. But that is what we are discussing: human figures ofspeech. Natural history has taught us in the past three centuries to realizethat the lion is not actually “courageous,” ever, but merely prudent in avoidingelephants and just in acknowledging the pride’s hierarchy. Courage andtemperance are emotion-controlling and will-disciplining, and therefore,we now realize, human. Faith, hope, and love, above all, provide ends fora human life. The rest are means, and prudence is not the highest, Godgivenrationality but the lowest evolved strategies of these.The triad of temperance-justice-prudence near the bottom and middleis cool and classical, and therefore recommended itself to theorists of thebourgeoisie such as David Hume and Adam Smith. The others at the topand edges are warm and Romantic, and came into their own in the nineteenthcentury. Hume called temperance-justice-prudence the “artificial”virtues, necessary for the artful making of any community whatever. Theywere of particular interest to men who had seen or vividly imagined communitiescollapsing in the tumult of religious war and dynastic ambition, ofJesuit and Presbyter, of Hapsburg and Bourbon and Stuart. Hume andSmith both, for example, had witnessed the Jacobite rising of 1745, and withnothing like sympathy—they were not wild Highlanders, and certainly notCatholics, but lowland Scots of a deist or atheistic bent who had made theirpeace with Englishry.“Enthusiasm” was in the eighteenth century a term of abuse. Let us confineour discussion, most of the philosophes of France and Scotland agreed,to the cool, dignified, essential, and “artificial” virtues. Hume was using thecategories and argument of Pufendorf, defending natural law against theintellectual and political chaos of the early seventeenth century. The categoriesbecame part of European classicism in the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies, reacting to the rhetorical charms of the Renaissance andthe rhetorical excesses of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.The other, “natural” virtues of courage, love, hope, and faith impartwarmth and meaning to an artfully made community. Sometimes too much