The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

30against reductionThe life of reason or utility or even contract or some versions of natural lawwould apply equally, I’ve noted, to six-headed creatures from a planet inanother galaxy as they would to human beings. Contrary to the Cartesianismof eighteenth-century and some later thought, the alleged universalismof modern ethical thought from Kant to Rawls and Nozick is bad, not good.We do not need literally universal theories of ethics, any more than we needuniversal theories of cuisine, covering also food for silicon-based creatures,or of psychology, covering also the behavior of angels. We need—declare thefeminist ethicists, for example—not a theory of rationally prudent agents,but a theory of French people and of Europeans and of moderns, who areprudent within other virtues and vices.The trick is to find a useful middle ground—a golden mean, you mightsay—between on the one hand an ethical theory like “Act on the maximwhich can at the same time be made a universal law,” which, Kant assertedproudly, would apply to any rational creature whatever, and on the otherhand an ethical theory like “When a calf, a lamb, or a kid is born, it must notbe taken from its mother for seven days,” which would apply only to followersof Moses after the thirteenth century BC. You can of course choose tocarry on with every one of the 613 commandments of Moses, or some Conservativeor Reform selection. But presumably you follow these only becauseyou follow a higher and more general, yet still specifically Jewish and humanand nonuniversal, law: for example, “I am the Lord thy God,” the God whotells about himself in the Hebrew Bible, the God of Moses and the prophets,the one we Jews have been discussing now for three millennia, that one.