The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

why not one virtue? 365has a kind of unity and there are facts about our condition from which linesconverge in a definite direction.” 8 Murdoch, a persuaded Platonist, arguedthat Good is “that in the light of which the explanation [of any particularexcellence] must proceed,” and she retold for these purposes Plato’s allegoryof the sunlight beyond the fire in Plato’s cave. The Sun of Good illuminatesour path.Murdoch was an atheist, too, and would have resisted respelling “the Sunof Good” as the “Son of God,” which a persuaded Christian would prefer.Yet Murdoch, like all Platonists, seemed to flirt with theism, and writes in1969 a characteristically brilliant essay “On ‘God’ and ‘Good.’ ” “If we saythat Good is Reason, we have to talk about good judgment,” she writes, andso we end standing in the light cast by the Good anyway. “If we say thatGood is Love, we have to explain that there are different kinds of love,” badand okay and good. 9 You see what I mean by her flirtations with theism,even Christianity. If you are a determined Platonist, then the root ofYgdrasil is the Good, period; or, again, with one letter left off—I earnestlyinvite you to do so—God, period.Another and Platonic image for the unity of the virtues (for example,Phaedo 100c) is to think of it as the locus or asymptote or envelop or limit,to use again mathematical imagery that Plato would have liked, of allsequences of bad-okay-good-better-best. All these, declares the Platonist,“I better in one general Best.”