The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

404 chapter 37would keep this crushingly learned and prolific jurist off the SupremeCourt. Posner is intelligent—though persistently and stubbornly misled.As he himself acknowledges, “That any sort of rape license [or slaverylicense or any-takings license] is even thinkable within the framework of thewealth-maximization theory that guides so much of the analysis in this bookwill strike many readers as a limitation on the usefulness of that theory.”It might.Holmes wrote similarly, with lips curled in disdain: “From societies forthe prevention of cruelty to animals up to socialism, we express . . . howhard it is to be wounded in the battle of life, how terrible, how unjust it isthat any one should fail.” 38 Rights, he wrote to Harold Laski in 1925, aremerely “what a given crowd ...will fight for.” 39The Athenians spoke likewise, enjoining the preachy Melians “to let‘right’ alone and talk only of interest.” As the Melians had predicted, though,the tough, willful, efficient, assertive, courageous, economistic, plutocratic,rights-ignoring, future-oriented, sociopathic Athenian guys soon found in413 at Syracuse and finally in 404, utterly defeated by their now very numerousenemies, that their tough words had for themselves, also, vacated “whatis our common protection, the privilege of being allowed in danger to evokewhat is fair and right.” King Lear protests to Regan and Goneril to “reasonnot the [forward-looking and utilitarian] need” but rather what is owed injustice to a king and father. But the evil sisters, like the Athenians, areunmoved by such ethical appeals. “One day,” writes Michael Ignatieff of thepassage in the play, “the look of entreaty will be met by the stare of force.” 40As a theory of ethics, this macho talk of Prudence Only, diamond-hardand unflinching, with the stare of force and the most recent scientific backing,has weaknesses.