The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

against reduction 339So the modern mathematical and econometric economist. But it doesn’twork. The economist has merely renamed as tastes, preferences, empathythe thing to be explained. As Robert Frank notes, “When a man dies shortlyafter drinking the used crankcase oil from his car, we do not really explainanything by asserting that he must have had a powerful taste for crankcaseoil.” 3 Amartya Sen puts it so: “If a person does exactly the opposite of whatwould help achieving what he or she would want to achieve, and does thiswith flawless consistency, ...the person can scarcely be seen as rational.” 4Making “empathy” or “a powerful taste” or “consistency = rationality” intoan all-purpose motive that explains everything else is unhelpful. We’verenamed Love “empathy.” And for what scientific gain? Alors?But further: Love is not love, I have noted, not the best sort of love foranother human and certainly not Aristotle’s or Jesus’ or C. S. Lewis’s highestsort, if it is utilitarian. Brigid O’Shaughnessy has almost run out of argumentsto persuade Sam Spade to let her go:She put her hands up to his cheeks and drew his face down again. “Look at me,”she said, “and tell me the truth. Would you have done this to me if the falcon hadbeen real and you had been paid your money?” . . .He moved his shoulders a little and said, “Well, a lot of money would havebeen at least one more item on the other side of the scales.”She put her face up to his face. Her mouth was slightly open with lips a littlethrust out. She whispered: “If you loved me you’d need nothing more on thatside.” 5That’s right. Orderings and trade-offs of material things are irrelevant toTrue Love. It’s not for sale.But Spade will not be persuaded: “Dreading the role of the chump,” saysRobert Frank in making such a point in the general case, “we are often loathto heed our nobler instincts.” 6 Or more exactly, we let one nobility trumpanother. Loyalty to his profession as a detective, faith in his identity as anonchump, Spade says, wins against putative love. True Love—or True Patriotismor True Courage or True Faith or True Anything—is not an input intosomething else, or else it is not True.“It is in the nature of loving,” Harry Frankfurt observes, “that we considerits objects to be valuable in themselves and to be important to use fortheir own sakes” (compare Aristotle’s notion of friendship). 7 So says theology,literature, Patsy Cline, and all characterizations of humans that are notbased on an analogy with accounting—one more item on that side of the