The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

ethical striving 327such as Aquinas, “could not envision a notion of truth that is not salutary, . . .for if something is harmful to us, it must be false and certainly cannot be thetruth of God.” 18 Charry recommends “the pre-seventeenth-century theologians,who wrote before the modern disjoining of truth, beauty, and goodnesstook hold.” 19 So do I, and T. S. Eliot.If you want a good career, of course, you can follow the script of JamesWatson in The Double Helix. “A generation of graduate students,” wroteAnne Sayre about Watson’s teaching, “learned a lesson: the old morality isdead, and they had ...been told about its demise by . . . an up-to-date herowho clearly know more about how science was acceptably ‘done’ than theold-fashioned types who prattled about ‘ethics.’” 20 To the contrary, saidRonald Coase, a Nobel prize winner in economics (b. 1910): “My mothertaught me to be honest and truthful.” 21 In the same volume James Buchanan(b. 1919), speaks of a teacher in graduate school who “instilled in me themoral standards of the research process....[S]omething that seems so oftenabsent in the training of economists of the post-war decades.” 22 That’sabout all the method we can handle.Beyond the academic analysis, for whatever the analysis is worth, each virtuehas behind it a library of human stories. Robert Hariman notes that inanswering the question What is to Be Done, one can answer with Aristotleand the philosophers up to Kant, “Look for rules.” Or one can answer withSophocles, Thucydides, and the sophists up to Jane Austen and Iris Murdoch,“Look for exemplars,” that is, human models of prudence or justice or love. 23Plutarch, for example, most of whose surviving work is ethical theorizing,was in his Lives steadily ethical, inspiring medieval saints’ lives and modernmythologies of national heroes, William Tell to the Blessed JFK.We are still writing them, filming them, singing them, retelling the storiesin the women’s gossip or the men’s instant replays. It is not merely theabstract, Aquinian analysis of, say, courage that forms an ethical tradition ofresistance to fear, of course. It is the stories of particular courages, in our particularfaiths, Western or Eastern or Northern or Southern: anyway particular.The old children’s encyclopedia The Book of Knowledge (1911) had sectionsin each of its twenty big volumes called “The Book of Golden Deeds”focused on the faithful courage of, say, Father Damien, a Belgian missionaryto the South Sea lepers, or the just courage of Sir Samuel Baker, “an intrepid