The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

388 chapter 36contemporary with Plato and Aristotle, and was, so to speak, the St. Paulto Confucius, analyzing what the master had left in storied form. He identifiedthe four “sprouts” of good ethical character, the inborn characters ofhumanity from which a good person can grow: benevolence, righteousness,propriety, and right-and-wrong. We are in another ethical world, itseems. But Mencius’s botanical metaphor is simply a psychology, thehuman plant for a flowering of virtue. The flowers themselves springingfrom the sprouts look a good deal like Western virtues. Courage, forexample, is of course prominently mentioned. The “flood-like energy”(hoaran zhi qi) of ethical courage, the prudence and temperance shown inheart-and-head (xin, pronounced in this Latinization as “shin”), the mentalcourage and temperance of “focus” (si) do not sound all that far fromhabits of the heart and of the ethical mind admired in the West. “Rightand-wrong”is in fact merely prudence, common sense.There is a price to pay in the motherly, developmental sprouts of Confucianethics. Remember François Jullien’s exposition of the devaluation ofcourage by the “upstream” strategy in Chinese thought, and its cost in freedom.The case is similar here. The emphasis on development implies a hierarchyof full adults supervising presumed children—for example, theConfucian bureaucrat supervising the “small men” of mere commerce.There’s a similar tension in Western thought on the left. James Boyd Whitecriticizes the market-loving school of law and economics, which posits afully competent adult, mysteriously produced. “Our lives [in fact entail] . . .the development of wisdom, judgment, taste, and character.” 5 I agree. Theautonomous man may be a myth. Yet isn’t it sometimes a politically goodmyth? And doesn’t participation in markets in which you are treated asthough you were an adult—admitting that very few of us actually are—helpyou to fuller competence? I think so; Jim White is doubtful.In any event, the virtues of grownups admired in the Confucian traditionare, unsurprisingly, pretty much those admired by Greek pagans—andby French Christians, too, and doubtless by the Bushmen of the Kalahari.The three leading virtues according to Confucius himself are prudence(wisdom, chih: here it would seem a mix of sophia and phronēsis),love (benevolence), and courage: “Wisdom, benevolence, and courage, thesethree are virtues universally acknowledged in the Empire,” and anywhereelse you might mention. 6 For example, they were acknowledged in TheWonderful Wizard of Oz (1900): the Scarecrow lacked prudent brains, theTin Man a loving heart, and the Cowardly Lion imperial courage.