The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

356 chapter 32subject to rules that generally hold good, are uncertain in their issue; orwhere the issue is indeterminate; and where . . . we take others into ourdeliberations, distrusting our own capacity to decide.” 10 The Talmudic traditionfrom Hillel and Akiva down to Marx and Freud celebrates the indeterminatenessof dialogue. The school of Hillel says such and such, to whichthe school of Shammai replies so and so. The Jewish tradition of interpretationhas some of its origins in the Greek sophistic tradition, against whichPlato the monist railed.The Christians, too, like Plato, have preferred rather to settle things onceand for all, and then have demanded that the government enforce with fireand sword what God so evidently wishes, in the Nicene Creed or the AugsburgConfession. But Aquinas himself, in the very method of dialogic argumentin his quaestiones, exhibits the deliberative spirit, as does the greatJewish influence on Aquinas, Moses Maimonides.In other words, “choice” in the system of the Western virtues since c. 330BC, brought to some sort of perfection AD 1267‒1273, active in Westernthought up to the time of Adam Smith, and still underlying our culture, ismade not by applying a formula, but by rhetorical and narrative reflection.The philosopher John McDowell wrote that “one knows what to do, if onedoes, not by applying universal principles but by being a certain kind of person:one who sees situations in a certain distinctive way.” 11 And one comesto see situations that way by rhetorical and narrative reflection. Thephilosopher Jerry Fodor complained about the most recent of the monisticformulas which keep popping up, “The direct evidence for psychologicalDarwinism is very slim indeed. In particular, it’s arguably much worse thanthe indirect evidence for our intuitive, pluralistic theory of human nature.It is, after all, our intuitive pluralism that we use to get along with oneanother. And I have the impression that, by and large, it works pretty well.” 12Amos Oz said once that when he is sure of some ethical position hewrites a nonfiction article. But when he faces a dilemma, as between Jew andPalestinian for example, he writes a story. Stories—the stories of those sevennonfungible virtues in our culture—give us reasons to be good, and tounderstand that we cannot be perfectly, monistically so. Some of whatmakes us human is precisely our stories and our languages. Some storiessuit Chinese culture better than European or Indian. That’s no scandal. AsIsaiah Berlin wrote, “Forms of life differ. Ends, moral principles, are many.But not infinitely many: they must be within the human horizon.” 13