The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

35other listsYet “few have resisted the temptation,” says chapter 2 in Peterson and Seligman’sCharacter Strengths and Virtues, “to articulate a definitive list of thevirtues that constitute the well-lived life.” 1 So true. It’s a Great Booksimpulse. (See The Great Ideas: A Syntopticon of Great Books of the WesternWorld [1952], pp. 925–1009.) Peterson and Seligman’s chapter 3, which thetwo editors wrote by themselves, examines among the less serious listsWilliam Bennett’s, the Boy Scouts’, Benjamin Franklin’s, Charlemagne’s, andthe wizard Merlin’s, taken from a Web site. And then it reviews morerespectfully the scientific literature in psychology on the matter in Erikson’sstages (1963), Maslow’s hierarchy (1970), Norman’s Big Five (1963), Greenbergeret al.’s psychosocial maturity (1975), Marie Jahoda’s concepts of positivemental health (1958), Ryff et al.’s dimensions of well-being (1989),Piaget’s (1932) and Kohlberg’s (1981) moral reasoning of the child, Schwartzet al.’s universal values, Buss et al.’s desirable characteristics in a mate (1990),Kumpfer’s resilience factors (1999), Vaillant’s defense mechanisms (1971),Gardner’s multiple intelligences (1983), Leffert et al.’s internal developmentassets, and the vocabulary lists of virtues by Allport, Oddbert, Cawley,Martin, and Johnson. 2But even this admirable project overlooks most of ethical philosophy,and most of what ethics says about such lists. Hursthouse’s textbook onvirtue ethics has 126 items in its bibliography, Peterson and Seligman over2,300. The forty-odd psychologists contributed on average about 60 citationseach. They are polite toward ethical philosophy. Yet their and Hursthouse’sbibliographies overlap in a mere five items: two from Aristotle;