The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

398 chapter 37Emotivism, observe again, taken as a doctrine one should believe, is ofcourse self-contradictory, since preaching against preaching is preaching.But logic is not the strong point of logical positivism or of those who havefallen away from religious faith.Undergraduates and many of their professors become uneasy and startgiggling when an ethical question arises. They regard such questions as havingmainly to do with sex—thank you, fundamentalists of the late twentiethcentury—or with unargued authority, such as the Baltimore Catechism andthe nuns to enforce it. The agreement to disagree that ended the wars of religionin Europe can be traced in their unease and in their stock remarksexpressing it: “That’s just a matter of opinion”; “Religion should not bementioned in polite conversation”; “If we disagree about ends it is a case ofthy blood against mine”; “The only methods for reconciling different normativevalue judgments are political elections or shooting it out at the barricades.”According to the chocolate-ice-cream theory, to be caught makingstatements about shameful behavior is to be caught in meaningless burbling.Shame on you.Aristocratic or peasant virtues elevated to universals have not given anethical home for the bourgeoisie. A theory of virtue transcending our actualbehavior and a theory of knowledge transcending our actual rhetoric ofinquiry have put ethics and science beyond argument. The itch for a transcendentobjectivity has had the result of turning the answers to importantquestions into unargued pronouncements. Thou shalt not commit adultery.Light is a particle. The bishops support the war because the Church ofEngland owns the stock and bonds of munitions manufacturers.In 416 BC, rejecting all appeals by the hitherto neutral island of Melosto justice, temperance, hope, and faith, the Athenian envoys in Thucydides’account applied relentlessly the logic of prudence (with courage)alone:We shall not trouble you with specious pretenses. ...In return we hope thatyou ...will aim at what is feasible . . . since you know as well as we do that right,as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strongdo what they can and the weak suffer what they must. . . . If any [other cities]maintain their independence [from the Athenian Empire] it is because theyare strong, and . ..ifwe do not molest them it is because we are afraid. ...We know . . . that by a necessary law of their nature [men] rule wherever theycan....You will show ...great blindness of judgment unless . ..you can find