The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

360 chapter 32Ethical life is like bridge engineering, not like mathematics. There isnothing desirable in axiomatizing ethics in order to make sure that it is consistent.Consistency, after all, is a minor virtue. Pace Plato, Hobbes, Spinoza,Kant. If you deduce from your axiom that you should inform a murderer ofthe location of his intended victim, well, we should not call this “ethics,” thatis all.As the Midwesterner Jane Addams said, family and social claims struggle,tragically, but necessarily, and “the destruction of either ...would bringruin to ethical life.” It sounds obvious to say that Americans are engaged in“contradictions” when they claim to value both liberal autonomy andrepublican connection. But that’s how people of good will are.Virtues are not to be subsumed under a monism free from “contradictions,”that is, from the tensions and balances of any ethical life. 22 Stock herselfgives a catalogue of the “impulses” in her Dakotans. A better word forthem would be “virtues”: “loyalties [faith] to individualism [courage] andcommunity [justice, temperance], to profit [prudence] and cooperation[love, justice, faith], to progress [hope] and tradition [faith again].” 23 Andbourgeois.