The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

324 chapter 28other good human behavior depends on virtues, on human character. Theidea is Aristotelian. As Ralph McInerny puts it, “In the Ethics, Aristotle treatsmoral virtues first and sees them as dispositive to and presupposed by theintellectual virtues.” 11 Thus we observe scientists with large ethical flaws,such as the great biologist James Watson or the great statistician Ronald A.Fisher or the great psychologist Cyril Burt or the great economist GeorgeStigler, and are inclined to suspect their science. Our suspicions are sometimesconfirmed. On the other hand we would be very surprised to findanything untoward in the work of great scientists we know to be good alsoin the ethical sense, whether or not we agree with them: in biology E. O.Wilson, for example, or in economics Thomas Schelling or BarbaraBergmann or Milton Friedman, or in history John Hope Franklin orWilliam McNeill.Since 1980 a small group of philosophers have been advocating in fact“virtue epistemology.” Justified belief, as much as good behavior, they argue,depends on such virtues as “intellectual carefulness, thoroughness, humility,courage, trust, autonomy, or fairness.” 12 Elizabeth Anscombe in 1958suggested that we give up the notion of “moral duty.” “It would be a greatimprovement if, instead of ‘morally wrong,’ one always named a genus suchas ‘untruthful,’ ‘unchaste,’ ‘unjust.’” 13Similarly in epistemology Richard Rorty suggested in 1987 that we giveup “Truth,” and substitute in a similar way the pragmatic reasons for believing.14 In a later essay, “Ethics without Principles,” he drew the analogyexplicitly: “The trouble with aiming at truth [that is, Truth, capital T] is thatyou do not know when you have reached it, even if you had in fact reachedit. But you can aim at ever more justification, the assuagement of ever moredoubt. Analogously, you cannot aim at ‘doing what is right,’ because you willnever know whether you have hit the mark. ...You cannot aim at being atthe end of inquiry, either in physics or in ethics.” 15 You can make more andmore persuasive arguments about physics or politics, and you can makeyourself more and more virtuous as a physicist or citizen. The virtue epistemologistsare combining the two projects of a pragmatic epistemology anda pragmatic virtue ethics.My quantitative, economist’s way of saying this is a little diagram. Imaginesmall-t, provisional truth in any field of inquiry measured on the verticalaxis and our years of patient inquiry measured along the horizontal. Atthe Second Coming I have no doubt that all will be revealed, namely, the