The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

338 chapter 30You can opt for the categorical imperative instead. But at such a high levelof abstraction the justification flies off into interstellar space. It’s too general.The laws of gravity were of course the inspiration for the law-seeking of Kantand Bentham and of practically everyone else in the West in the eighteenthcentury. The laws of gravity apply to Earthbound things but also to interstellarspace. Amazing. So you can expect to get something from an ethicaltheory that claims to apply universally, as one can get something from thinkingof the flight of a cannonball using F = ma. But in the ethical case, notmuch. And for actual artillery on a battlefield having on the very day airresistance at a pressure of 1025 millibars and 85 percent humidity and an 11kilometers breeze from the north-northwest and a southern-hemisphereCoriolis effect, you are going to have to modify the ideal parabola derivedfrom F = ma in a vacuum quite a lot, too, if you wish to economize on cannonballsand avoid collateral damage. That has been the trouble with ethicaltheorizing in a vacuum since Kant (or Plato). A bit like epistemologicalthinking since Kant (or Plato). Or political thinking. Or metaphysical.Benthamism is particularly hardy. Whole classes of professors find it impossibleto think of the Good except as something reducible to an index thataggregates emotions (so-called love, courage, etc.) into one Utility. Mill said ofBentham that “no one who ...ever attempted to give a rule to all human conduct,set out with a more limited conception either of the agencies by whichhuman conduct is, or of those by which it should be, influenced.” 1 Benthamand his modern professorial followers can’t see why one would need, say, sevenvirtues, unless they are summed into one, and the one is then used to makechoices. Pick the bundle of “virtues” that maximizes utility. Simple.The more sophisticated among the mathematically inclined economistswill speak of “Debreu’s representation theorem,” after the Nobel-winningeconomist who perfected the argument. We are back, they will say, to the completeness,transitivity, and continuity required of an ordering of baskets toallow the maximization. If we include empathy in the utility function of anotherwise self-interested actor, the economists put it, we are back in a worldin which cost and benefit are easily calculated—easily at least in conception.Cooperation in a repeated prisoner’s dilemma, Brutus dooming his sons, achild caring for dying puppies, or even suicide bombers in some higher cause,can all be explained simply with empathetic motives. Empathy is the omittedvariable with which one could eventually mop up the omitted variable biaswhen acquiring the econometric dataset of one’s dreams. 2