The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

antimonism again 355want to generalize, but “lying to prevent a murder,” which we would indeedwish to make a universal ethical law? If a lie could have spared someone fromthe gas chambers, as in fact it sometimes did—“He’s only thirteen years old,Herr Commandant”—wouldn’t you, my dear Immanuel, recommend it?Alasdair MacIntyre puts the point this way: “Lutheran pietists broughtup their children to believe that one ought to tell the truth to everybody atall times whatever the consequences, and Kant was one of those children.Traditional Bantu parents brought up their children not to tell the truth tounknown strangers, since they believed that this would render the familyvulnerable to witchcraft. In our culture many of us have been brought upnot to tell the truth to elderly great-aunts who invite us to admire their newhats.” 9 “But each of these codes,” he continues, “embodies an acknowledgmentof the virtue of truthfulness.” It’s just that the exercise of truthfulnessvaries in detail with the internal goods achievable in being a German Pietistor a traditional Bantu or a Scottish bourgeois.Ethical choices I say come up a hundred times a day, in the dilemmabetween doing X and doing Y, both goods. Go visit the friend in the hospitalor finish grading the papers for tomorrow’s class? Call Deb to go eat atHackney’s or finish another paragraph of writing? And then, too, one mustmake a choice about those portentous issues that the editorial page regardsas the very meaning of ethical: protect the mother’s choice or the embryo’slife? Pull the feeding tube? Intervene in a mass slaughter?Any monism denies the dilemmas. Thus economics of the Max U varietysays: Come now, no dilemma; just do what maximizes utility. Or an evolutionarypsychology of the we-brain-scientists-have-it-all-worked-outvariety says: Face up to it, there’s no dilemma; just do what your genes aretelling you to do. Or a revealed theology of the we-already-know-God’s-willvariety says: Bless you, no dilemma; just do what God so evidently wishes.Or a natural theology of the early Enlightenment variety: Be calm, nodilemma; just be assured that all is for the best in the best of all possibleworlds. Or the reason-loving-side-of-the-late-Enlightenment-project variety:Seriously, no dilemma; just follow the rule of reason, such as the categoricalimperative.The opposite side of the Enlightenment’s love of reason, as I’ve said, islove of freedom. That side does not think dilemmas are so easily resolved.Aristotle treats the moment of choice as the result of a painful deliberation,personally and historically contingent, about “matters which, though