The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

33why not one virtue?The seven virtues of the Western tradition before Kant are ethical primarycolors, the red, blue, and yellow not derivable from others but themselvesable to form other colors. “The cardinal virtues,” Aquinas notes, “are calledmore principal, not because they are more perfect than all the other virtues,but because human life more principally turns on them and the othervirtues are based on them.” 1 Blue plus yellow yields green. Love plus faithyields loyalty. Courage plus prudence yields enterprise. Temperance plusjustice yields humility. Justice, courage, and faith yields honesty.Various moderns have tried to make up a new color wheel, with integrityand civility or indeed honesty as primary. Thus a New Yorker cartoon in 2002:a man who looks like he’s just returned from a grilling by a Senate committeeabout Enron and other accounting disasters says to his little son, “Honesty isa fine quality, Max, but it isn’t the whole story.” Making up new primaries islike depending on purple and green, or chartreuse and aquamarine—goodand important colors, among my favorites, but technically speaking, “secondary,”or even “tertiary,” the palette of Gauguin and Matisse against that of latevan Gogh and late Piet Mondrian. In this ethical case the made-up primariesare accompanied by no tradition of how to mix or array them.And they are, I repeat, all derivable from the older primaries. Thus honestyis courage, justice, and faith combined: the courage to speak out greatsouledly;the justice to give the due answer; the faith to adhere to one’s trueidentity. And so on, using St. Thomas or a modern virtue ethicist as a guide.Take down your Roget’s Thesaurus again. In the 1962 edition the categorieswere still those that would have occurred to an English physician,