The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

eastern and other ways 387The Chinese sages understood this well, beginning a century beforeAristotle noticed it. The Confucian virtues are not obviously identical to theWestern seven.“Confucius” (551?-479? BC) is the Latinized name from the Chinesefor “Kung the great teacher.” Kung reflected on moral charisma or moralpower and its connection to the proper rites, but his method of teaching, gatheredin The Analects, is not systematic. It proceeds by parable and by oftenobscure proverb and by quotation from a preexisting body of poetry, somewhatin the manner of the Nazarene five centuries later offering strange littlefables to his followers and quoting Hebrew scripture back at the Pharisees. Thestories and proverbs of The Analects and other writings that contained the sayingsattributed to Confucius were referred to again and again in the twenty-fivecenturies of Confucian philosophy, as the writings about the Nazarene and thewritings of the Philosopher have been in the West. Like Christianity and Aristotelianism,too, Confucianism is no mere static body of thought.Philip Ivanhoe, from whom I have mainly learned the little I grasp of allthis, notes that Chinese ethical philosophy concerns itself much more witheducation and cultivation of character than with Platonic explorations ofthe Good. And so, like virtue ethics (and like the schools of Greco-Romanethics after Plato, and like existentialism c. 1950, too), it is more likely tofocus on what Kant called “anthropology” or “philosophical psychology.” 2The lack of interest in ethical development, as against the ethical actionof already formed adults, is a fault in the footnotes to Plato that constituteWestern ethical philosophy. Hursthouse commends Aristotle for never forgettingthat we were all once children, noting that “to read almost everyother famous moral philosopher is to receive the impression that we, theintelligent adult readers, sprang fully formed from our father’s brow.” 3 FromZeus’s brow, note, not Hera’s. Hursthouse does not make the feminist point,and also, by the way, seems unacquainted with the famous moral philosophersof the East, who as I say focus on development. 4 Western moralphilosophy is peculiarly masculinist and, so to speak, adultist, taking anautonomous, finished adult, preferably a middle-aged and childless bachelor,as the site of philosophizing. Feminists such as Carol Gilligan and hermany followers and critics do not forget that we were all once children, andfeminists such as Nel Noddings and Annette Baier do not forget that we allcame from families.Neither I say do the Chinese. “Mencius” (391–308 BC) was Meng Tzu,and thus his epithet was “Mengzi,” Meng the teacher. This Meng was