The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

the system of the virtues 311MacIntyre (dependent rational animals, and practices), and then she studiesHume from the feminine, connective perspective in detail. Hume is, sheargues, “uncannily womanly” in emphasizing the role of sympathy asagainst higher law, having others to share experiences with, and the love ofchildren as the exemplum for ethical theory. She finds in Hume a stress on“the inescapable mutual vulnerability and mutual enrichment . ..[of] thehuman conditions ...[which] make autonomy not even an ideal.” 17A socialist like Paul Tillich would have viewed the right side of love, justice,and faith as commendably anticapitalist, as against the left-side enterprise ofcourage and hope. Capitalism is, after all, the system supporting the virtue ofenterprise, and that is the left-side virtues—though I have emphasized that infact even capitalism depends of the loving right side, too. Tillich among otherswould have quarreled with placing courage only on the left, masculine side. 18The pioneering feminist economist/philosopher Julie Nelson wouldargue that any ordering has the danger of privileging one over the other. I’vesaid why I think all the virtues work in any serious ethical life. So by placingthem high up I am not saying that hope and faith are superior to prudenceand temperance, or that love trumps courage every time. Nelsonwould use positive and negative versions of each virtue, deconstructing thegeometry of a “top” thought superior to a bottom, or a “left” sinister. 19 Solove of others can be negative as love of others only, without sufficient selflove:self-abnegation, the womanly sin. 20 Or one could use Aristotle’s notionof a mean splitting the difference between excess and deficiency.And indeed the placement of the virtues in the diagram is that of mythicalconvention, not God’s truth, or even science’s. Thus upper-and-rightpertains to the past, lower-and-left to the future: well ...perhaps. The fourvirtues in bold are the signature virtues of the mythically ancient socialclasses: warrior (courage, daring), peasant (love, loyalty), merchant (prudence,know-how), and priest/brahmin (temperance, wisdom). More mythicalconvention. But that is how we talk.There is no reason why the number of sins should equal the number ofvirtues, though of course in Western tradition, thanks to Pope Gregory,there are also seven, and deadly. In modern English they are lust, gluttony,avarice, anger, envy, sloth—that is, acedia, from Greek, spiritual sloth,a lack of hope, replacing “sadness” in the seventeenth century—and pride