The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

384 chapter 35you will note, when she very learnedly cites Montaigne, Nicole, Molière,Bayle, Thomassin, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Frederick’s French, Rousseau,Bonaparte, Constant, Tocqueville, Baudelaire, Renan, Rimbaud, van Gogh’sFrench correspondence, Albert Aurier, Proust, Gide, Weil, Sartre, de Beauvoir,Aron, Bourdieu, Todorov, Jacques Le Goff, Nathalie Heinich, François Jullien,and indeed Vladimir Jankélévitch and Comte-Sponville themselves,uses English translations. I am not quite being as Anne Elliot put it to herselfin Persuasion “like many other great moralists and preachers . ..eloquenton a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination.”I am criticizing rather Comte-Sponville’s, and Weil’s and Fogel’s andBennett’s, lack of scientific care in collecting the data. The slapdash scholarship,I’ve noted, is typical of how ethical inquiry has been handled in theWest since the rise of emotivism c. 1900, or since the receding sea of faith c.1848, or even in some circles since Machiavelli and Bacon and Hobbesrecommended that we toss away two millennia of study of the virtues.Among about 150 citations to authors in the index of The Small Treatisea bare 15 write in English, the German-born Arendt and the AustrianbornPopper among them. Rawls, Arendt, and Popper—that is, one bornAmerican, a naturalized American, and a naturalized Briton—are the onlytwentieth-century English-writing philosophers cited. None of the virtueethicists, therefore, get into Comte-Sponville’s lecture hall, not one, notFoot or MacIntyre or Nussbaum or Williams or Anscombe or McDowell,though Comte-Sponville is without doubt of their company and his treatmentwould have been improved by listening to them.I have already noted how Comte-Sponville’s anticlericalism denies himspecifically Christian systems of the virtues, though to his credit he doesmake occasional raids into Aquinas. And it must be admitted that theEnglish-speaking virtue ethicists themselves, with exceptions such as MacIntyre,do virtue ethics with even less engagement with Christian ethicalthinking.More generally, the various fields of ethical scholarship don’t much talkto each other. On ethical and scientific grounds, I think, something shouldbe done. The recent book I mentioned on “virtue epistemology,” for example,is courageous. But it is narrow in its intellectual conversation. That doesnot seem a good plan for a group advocating ethical intellectuality. Its listof references is ungenerous on virtue ethics itself, and does not containFeyerabend or Lakatos or much of anything from the social criticism of