The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

against reduction 341But I said Nozick was sensible. And it is hard to imagine a more intellectuallyhonest person. So occasionally he breaks into praise for the alternativeethical objects, as though realizing uneasily that his reduction toprudent deals has not sufficed. He distinguishes four “levels or layers ofethics,” referring to a treatment in his semipopular book, The Examined Life(1989). 12 The first, or lowest, is the mutual benefit on which Nozick spendsmost of his analytic effort in Invariances (2001), Pareto optimality, the ethicof respect. The next highest is an ethic of responsibility, discussed also inhis 1981 book, Philosophical Explanations. 13 The next is an ethic of caring,Nozick’s version of love. And the highest is an ethic of Light, “truth,goodness, beauty, holiness,” or in other words the ethics of faith, hope, andtranscendent love. 14Nozick admits that he has no account of how the levels relate, or why heshould always refer to the ethics of respect as basic—except on the not unreasonablepolitical grounds that it is the least controversial. He has no acquaintancewith the virtue ethicists. They are never referred to by this most ethicallyobsessed of the analytic philosophers—the two references to BernardWilliams in Invariances are on matters of metaphysics, not ethics. Aristotle isdiscussed only briefly as an ethical theorist; Aquinas is not mentioned in anywork of Nozick, nor are any other virtue ethicists. 15 He appears not to haveread with any care Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Invariances speaksof Smith’s favorite book on one occasion, as holding a theory of the “idealobserver,” a misquotation placed in quotation marks—the phrase is the“impartial spectator,” not the “ideal observer.” And the passage construes thenotion in Smith as being about “moral” matters having to do with other people,not the self-shaping temperance that is the chief theme of The Theory. 16Nozick, like Frankfurt and other mainline English-speaking analyticphilosophers, finds himself trapped at the bottom of a Kantian well, unableto clamber up to the virtue-ethical fields of flowers lying round it.Modern students of the economics of religion note that religious affiliationis like a social club. 17 Caught again attending to utility, eh, Mr. Churchgoer?Some part of behavior is explained this way, by accounting for cost andbenefit. My grandmother religiously attended and generously contributedto the Congregational Church in St. Joseph, Michigan, for seven decadeswith, she claimed, no high motive of faith or hope in mind. She said, “I go