The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

other lists 385epistemology, and cites (this in a 2003 book) none of Hilary Putnam’s recentwork. 7 About a quarter of the citations are to works by one or another of thethirteen authors of the essays written for the book—though admittedly selfcitationis after all characteristic of any small and beleaguered academicmovement.But Comte-Sponville goes a step further: he writes on virtue ethics withoutreading any books or articles about it. Pas un seul. The deafness inComte-Sponville to recent English and older Christian talk of the virtueswould be as though a French jazz musician made no musical reference toCharlie Parker or Thelonious Monk, and refused even to listen to Armstrongor King Oliver. There is no citation to virtue ethics after Aristotle andAquinas, I say, in a treatise on the ethics of the virtues. This is jazz relyingon Jelly Roll Morton.It could make one indignant, if one were inclined that way. The sevencitations in Comte-Sponville’s index to English-language humorists outnumberhis citations to all English-language moralists of any descriptionbefore the twentieth century except Hume (Hobbes 3, Bentham 1, Locke 1,Mandeville 1; no Sidgwick, Mill, Smith, Hutcheson, Butler, Shaftesbury). Ofthe thirty-one page citations to English-language writers a fifth are toWoody Allen and Groucho Marx. One is disappointed not to see moreengagement with the ethical thought of Jerry Lewis.