The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

needing virtues 395any such thing as agathon aplox, that is to say, simply good.” 3 If virtues cannotbe connected to self-interest or genetics, to utility or power, they are, inthe early twentieth-century philosophical term of Vienna and Cambridge,simply “meaningless,” which is to say undiscussable.Most academics and other intellectuals by now adhere to this chocolateice-creamtheory of ethics, articulated philosophically out of the late logicalpositivism of the mid-1930s to the postpositivist present by A. J. Ayer, MoritzSchlick, Charles Stevenson, Richard Hare, John Mackie, Allan Gibbard, andSimon Blackburn, namely, that ethical arguments are mere preferences, likean uncriticizable preference for this or that flavor of ice cream. You preferchocolate to amaretto. I prefer on the other hand amaretto to chocolate. Nopoint in arguing.It is also called the “hurrah-boo” theory. Ethical and aesthetic preferences,Holmes wrote in 1902, are “more or less arbitrary. ...Do you likesugar in your coffee or don’t you?” 4 Hurrah. In the same year: “Our tastesare finalities.” 5 Boo. In the fourth year of the Great War he wrote toHarold Laski, “When men differ in taste as to the kind of world they wantthe only thing to do is to go to work killing.” 6 The problem is the word“taste,” with its invocation of considerations more or less arbitrary, sugarin your coffee, hurrah-boo. Perhaps Holmes was merely expressing thathe was appalled by the war and hopeless, as many were in that year. Buthere he is in 1920 writing to Pollock: “I think that the sacredness ofhuman life is a purely municipal ideal of no validity outside the jurisdiction.I believe that force, mitigated so far as may be by good manners, isthe ultima ratio, and between two groups that want to make inconsistentkinds of worlds I see no remedy except force. ...Every society rests onthe death of men.” 7 And here is he is again in 1918: “Deep-seated preferencescannot be argued about—you cannot argue a man into liking aglass of beer—and therefore, when differences are sufficiently far reaching,we try to kill the other man.” 8 To settle the matter of south Slavnationalism or German naval ambitions or the Eastern question we needto go to work killing.Jeffrey Masson describes the psychoanalytic branch of this modernistrejection of ethics. In becoming an analyst he was himself to be analyzed bya Dr. Irvine Schiffer of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute. Massondescribes Schiffer’s behavior (“Lie, cheat, steal, it’s all the same to me,” saidSchiffer), and offers its theory: