The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

against reduction 345a reasonable if not particularly golden mean between 613 and 1. It is richenough to capture actual humanity, shining a light on a particular Germanor Chinese definition of courage as against temperance. It is neither so generalas to be useless or so specific as to pertain only to a local tribe.Each of the seven has that library of philosophy and fiction associatedwith it, the truth of reason and the truth of narrative. Each of them—prudence, justice, faith, and the rest—is an essentially contested concept.That’s a merit, not a fault. It tells us that we are at the frontier where ethicsmatters. In the contestation is the work. If “courage” is taken to mean fortitudein battle and other manly exercise, it has one set of stories associatedwith it. If it means fortitude in childbirth and other womanly labor, quiteanother. Most of us are never tested for martial courage, and most of usenact justice in some less glorious way than from the bench of the AmericanSupreme Court—before which, by the way, Biff’s studious friendBernard was privileged at last to plead. Yet we still have a character-buildinguse for stories drawn from places high and low.We need the words. It’s useless, or very nearly so, to stay at the level of theGood, or the categorical imperative, or preference orderings.A woman needs to know how to behave in detail when facing a big presentationtomorrow at the office. All the bosses will be present, and the mainclient. She is fearful. She says to herself, “Come on, girl: be courageous,” andthe very word evokes the stories of courage in our culture, giving her ethicaltools for the job. “When Florence Nightingale faced the Purveyors of themilitary hospital during the Crimean War or the Army Medical Board inLondon,” the woman recalls to herself, “she didn’t snivel and whine. Shecourageously spoke out. I must be like Nightingale”:It was not by gentle sweetness and womanly self-abnegation that she had broughtorder out of chaos in the Scutari Hospitals, that, from her own resources, she hadclothed the British Army, that she had spread her dominion over the serried andreluctant powers of the official world; it was by strict method, by stern discipline,by rigid attention to detail, by ceaseless labor, by the fixed determination of anindomitable will. 20Stories like Nightingale’s are, as we say these therapeutic days, “resources”for good behavior.