The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

31character(s)The Dutch economist Arjo Klamer puts it to me this way. A person needs tohave this or that virtue on this or that occasion. Sunday mornings in church,for example, she exercises the virtue of spiritual love; Saturday nights on thedance floor (say) the virtue of self-asserting courage; Mondays through Fridaysthe virtue of careful prudence.That’s not to say that “everything’s relative” or some other version ofhigh-school nihilism. Acting like a prudent bourgeois on the dance floor,where risky courage is in order, or like a courageous aristocrat in church,where pious temperance is in order, would be contrary to the proprieties.The classical theory of the virtues depended heavily on “decorum,” what issweet and proper on the particular occasion. Adam Smith bases the systemof the virtues on a balance of “propriety” among the contending virtues,which can be tested “nowhere but in the sympathetic feelings of the impartialand well-informed spectator”— “reason, principle, conscience, theinhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of ourconduct.” 1 We are each the exerciser of virtues and vices, and each of us isdoubled by the judgment of “the man within.”We are all composed of differing characters, and have use at differenttimes for different stories of good behavior, putting them in conversation,as Klamer says. I have used, maybe overused, the figure of “balance” amongthe virtues. Robert Hariman makes the same point against it as Klamerdoes: “The idea that the prudential person is balanced becomes an oversimplification,an easy metonymy for a much more dynamic process of alternatingcontradictory impulses within oneself.” 2 He adds that one must