The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

310 chapter 26right-side love, or its corresponding vices, such as envy and jealousy. Menare supposed to think of the world from the perspective of left-side courage,or cowardice, vainglory, self-absorption, and so forth.Another name for the right side in the diagram is “connection”; and forthe left, “autonomy.” Knight believed that even ordinary desires could bereduced “in astonishingly large measure to the desire to be like other people,and the desire to be different.” 14 Tillich called them “participation” and“individualization,” and noted that there is a “courage to be as a part,” thatis, to participate. Michael Ignatieff called the one side “connection and rootedness”and the other side “freedom”: “a potential contradiction . ..arisesbetween our need for social solidarity and our need for freedom.” We haverights, which is good, allowing us to achieve our left-side projects of hopeand courage regulated by justice. But we need “love, respect, honor, dignity,solidarity with others,” Ignatieff notes, on the other, upper-right-hand side,and these cannot be compelled by law. 15 Hence Hume’s vocabulary of “natural”as against “artificial,” law-enforced virtues.Whether or not men in general do actually fall on the left, autonomousside, the male non-Scottish, non-virtue-ethics ethical philosophers of theeighteenth century certainly did. The Kantian and Benthamite men, forexample, are just that, men deciding ethical issues without regard to connection,men fiercely autonomous, adults always in their primes, rationalbeings never dependent. So they believed. They are, as the feminists put itwith irritation and amusement, “separative selves.”The third fresh option in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ethicalphilosophy, contractarianism, is likewise gendered as masculine. A Hobbesian/Lockean/Rousseauian“contract” is not the usual metaphor with whichwomen describe their lives. Rather: love, caring, obligations of affection,“a view of the self as relational.” 16 Women in fact find themselves with childrenand parents and friends and husbands and lovers to take care of. Menseem to think of such connections as optional, wholly contractual, evenrelationships of exchange. Thus Marcel Mauss, a leading male anthropologistof the early twentieth century, encouraged people to think of the gift,too, as a sort of exchange.The feminists such as Carol Gilligan and Virginia Held resist. AnnetteBaier, following them, observes that not all male ethical philosophers takethe side of autonomy. She gives passing grades on the matter to Aristotle(connection in the polis), Marx (class), Mill (progressive sympathy), and