The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

why not one virtue? 363986 Chastity: purity, decorum, propriety990 Temperance: moderation, forbearance, restraint, self-discipline, sobriety1026 Piety: Faith, reverenceNeither Faith nor Prudence have major headings of their own, a comment onthe intellectual world of 1852. In Aquinas’s of 1252 they most certainly did.The point is that any random virtue in this table can be related to theseven. But the seven cannot be derived from the other virtues. Take forinstance one virtue important to medievals especially, Chastity. In Aquinas,as the theologian Diana Fritz Cates observes, it is “the species of temperancethat concerns sexual relations.” 2 Or as Aquinas himself said more delicately,“A person is said to be chaste because he behaves in a certain way as regardsthe use of certain parts of the body.” 3 Aquinas rejects the notion thatchastity is a “general virtue” (as he argues temperance is), because in thatwider sense it is merely metaphorical, comparing the proper spiritual unionwith God with the proper physical union of people.Or take the virtue of liberality, put by Roget under hospitality andunselfishness. Aquinas argues that it might be considered a part of justice,quoting St. Ambrose (De Offic. i): “Justice has to do with the fellowship ofmankind. For the notion of fellowship is divided into two parts, justice andbeneficence, also called liberality or kind-heartedness.” Aquinas objects toAmbrose’s analysis, observing that justice is about what is due whereasliberality is precisely about what is not due. “The giving of liberality arisesfrom a person being affected in a certain way towards money, in that hedesires it not nor loves it: so that when it is fitting he gives it not only to hisfriends but also to those whom he knows not. Hence it belongs not to charity,but to justice, which is about external things.” 4Think of a tree of life, Ygdrasil, so to speak, from which branch out theindividual virtues. I am thinking of a tree viewed from above. From this viewpointthe most easily seen and lived level is the story of particular virtues, thetop canopy of leaves on the tree. See Roget’s list. The particular major virtues,the scores of virtues that Aquinas analyzes, for example, would be the leafbearingbranches just discernable. The seven abstracted Western virtues arethe main branches further down. The rational good life is the trunk.In saying that the seven are sensible places to begin I am not declaringthem universal or permanent from here to Proxima Centauri, merely widespreadand persistent from here to ancient and modern Jericho and Timbuktu.The union of three Christian and four pagan virtues is of course