The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

372 chapter 34one cruelty what another justice; one prodigality what another magnanimity;and one gravity what another stupidity, etc. And therefore such namescan never be true grounds of any ratiocination.” 5Hobbes and Machiavelli nowhere take the virtues seriously as a system.They were early in that strange belief that a serious political philosopherhad no need to be serious about ethics. Ancient rhetoric is scornfullydropped by the same people at the same time. After the seventeenth centuryin the West a serious ethical or epistemological philosopher had no need tobe serious about persuasion. With Richard Lanham and Robert Hariman,I suspect a connection, and note that virtue ethics and rhetoric revive inacademic circles at about the same time, the 1960s. 6Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin have suggested a connectionbetween the two histories. The “moral geometry” that people like Pascal andSpinoza demanded in the seventeenth century revived a Platonic project. 7And along with it went an antirhetorical frame of mind. Plato was of coursecontemptuous of the lawyers of sophistry, as he was of all democratic institutions.Aristotle was less persuaded that we could do without persuasion,and wrote sympathetically about the art of honest rhetoric. I have notedthat Aquinas, who wrote just after the Nicomachean Ethics had been rediscoveredin the West, has a highly dialogic and rhetorical method. This iscontrary to the anachronistic modern view of Aquinas as a handbook of settledjudgments. Jonsen and Toulmin argue that in the late sixteenth andearly seventeenth century Roman Catholics and Anglicans needed guides tojudgments recently unsettled by political and religious turmoil, and foundit in casuistry—“case ethics,” to use the less dishonored term. “No rule,”observe Jonsen and Toulmin,” can be entirely self-interpreting.” 8 How tointerpret? Persuade. It was a revival of thirteenth-century scholasticism,which had replaced a rural and monastic focus on fixed rules with a rhetoric“based on disputation,” as Lester K. Little notes. 9 “Classical rhetoric,”write Jonsen and Toulmin, “provided the elements out of which later casuistrydeveloped.” 10 How to persuade? Be a vir bonus dicendi peritus, a goodman skilled at speaking, as Quintilian had put it in the late first century AD.How to be good? Be, as Aristotle and Aquinas suggested, a student of theseparate virtues in their system. Pascal killed casuistry, and Descartes andBacon and Hobbes killed rhetoric, along with other scholastic traditions.Little wonder that an ethics of the virtues, brought to a climax in Aquinas,began to die then, too.