The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

364 chapter 33historically contingent. A. Th. van Deursen writes, “European culture of theseventeenth century rested on two pillars: Christianity and the classics ofGraeco-Roman antiquity. They were inseparable, not because they cannotbe separated, but because European history had bound them together.” 5Kant and Bentham tried to separate them. The result has been, youmight say, existential angst and ethical chaos. Maybe those old Europeantheorists of the virtues were onto something. I do not speak of their practiceof virtues, of course, considering the long history of European religiousfanatics and royal murderers. I speak merely of their theory.The argument I am making is philosophical, but supplementedby some anthropological and historical and literary arguments: anyway,un-Kantian. There’s no essence, I suppose, of “courage” in God’s eyes—though, by the way, if anyone has found it, I would lay odds on Aquinas. 6The ethics here have their origin in Aristotle, but we have the advantageover the Philosopher and his follower the Divine Doctor that we knowmore—though the “more” we know is, as T. S. Eliot once remarked . . .Aristotle and Aquinas. “Courage” does not mean just the same thing to aRoman knight as to a Christian knight, or to a samurai as to a cowboy, orto a free man in the Athens of 431 BC as to an adult woman in the Paris ofAD 1968.Ideas change even under the same rubric, the intellectual historianobserves. Words are emptied out of content and refilled. Witness “justice,”as I have noted, in a society of routine slavery as against a successor societyhorrified at the very idea; or a little boy’s idea of playground fairness asagainst his adult self’s belief in the justice of markets. You are in moleculesdifferent from the child you once were. For certain purposes of, say, microbiologicalinvestigation of the accumulation of heavy metals, that is thesalient fact. But for many other purposes the child is the parent of the adult.So too the history of temperance or justice can matter to their presentmeanings.One might ask what lies “behind” the virtues—it is the question thatPlato and Kant asked so very persistently. It is the question of what makesthe virtues virtuous. By now many philosophers and even more undergraduatesbelieve that ethics is “just a matter of opinion,” “a flag used by thequesting will,” as Iris Murdoch described the modern view, “a term whichcould with greater clarity be replaced by ‘I’m for this.’ ” 7 Murdoch and I donot approve of such “emotivism,” as it is called. On the contrary, “excellence