The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

the system of the virtues 309He could have got to the conclusion by way of virtue ethics with less heavylifting. “What we care about, what is important to us, and what we love” givepoint to a life, says Frankfurt. But these, I note, are faith, hope, and charity. 10I expect that Frankfurt is well aware of all this, and is engaging in a crafty figureof argument necessary in a corner of the academic world dominated byKant. He shares with Wolf and many other modern philosophers the job ofclambering out of the rationalist hole that Kant dug so diligently.Frankfurt here seems to be marshaling a reductio ad absurdum, to showthat Kantianism or for that matter utilitarianism does not give a coherentaccount of an ethical life. The ethical life cannot in fact to be reduced, Frankfurtis saying, to formulas for deciding ethical dilemmas, formulas applicableto any rational creature as such. On the contrary, “it requires us ...to understandwhat it is we ourselves really care about.” 11 It depends on ethos, onagape and philia, on character, on moral sentiments, on a philosophicalanthropology and psychology, on being a particular woman in Chicago at aparticular time, with particular loves and faiths and hopes. As Philippa Footput it, Kant went wrong in not realizing that “the evaluation of human actiondepends ...on essential features of specifically human life.” 12In fact, as I have noted, the Kantian program is self-contradictory,which among Kantians is judged the worst sin. The character of ourselvesthat we care about, a caring denied in pure rationalism, is what makes aKantian moralist—or for that matter, if he reaches beyond ice-creamhedonism, what makes a utilitarian moralist. You have to want to be good.You have to care about what Frankfurt calls “ideals” and I and many othersin Western ethical tradition call “transcendentals.” Only then will youhave an interest in following, say, the categorical imperative or the truehappiness of all people in your dealings with others. The ethical-theorizing“constructed self” that the social psychologist Timothy Wilson speaksof wants to work with the ethical-behaving “adaptive unconscious.” Beinggood, in Frankfurt’s account and in mine, is a consequence of “what weregard as important to ourselves,” not itself derivable from Kantian orutilitarian maxims. 13Left and right in the diagram exhibit the gendered character of the virtues,masculine and feminine in the conventional tales. Women of course aresupposed conventionally to think of the world from the perspective of