The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

p & s and the capitalist life 413premise for moral conduct, since the very nature of morality seems to dictatethat desires must be limited by the need to coexist with others.” 17 Runninga business, though, would teach anyone that gain is limited. Dealing ina market would teach that desires must be limited by the need to coexist withothers. The tuition in scarcity, other-regarding, and liberal values of a marketsociety works as an ethical school. Pagan or Christian preachments,absent capitalism, did not.Even so fine an anthropological historian as Alan Macfarlane believes theMarxist/Weberian lore: “The ethic of endless accumulation,” he writes, “asan end and not a means, is the central peculiarity of capitalism.” 18 If it were,the miser would be a strictly modern figure, and not proverbial in every literaturein the world. “In this consists the difference between the characterof a miser,” wrote Adam Smith in 1759, “and that of a person of exact economyand assiduity. The one is anxious about small matters for their ownsake; the other attends to them only in consequence of the scheme of lifewhich he has laid down for himself.” 19 “Scheme” of life, an S-variable.At the level of the society as a whole there is “unlimited” accumulation.Corporations, with supposedly infinite lives—though in truth 10 percentdie every year—are indeed machines of accumulation. The individual economicmolecules who make up the river of capitalism may not always wantmore, but the river as a whole, it is said, keeps rolling along. True, and to ourgood. The machines and improved acreage and splendid buildings and soforth inherited from an accumulating past are good for us now.But there is no case for accumulation being peculiar to capitalism. Infinitelylived institutions like “families” or “churches” or “royal lineages”existed before modern capitalism, and were sites of accumulation. Thusimproved acreage spreading up the hillsides under the pressure of populationbefore the Black Death. Thus the splendid building of the medievalcathedral, a project of centuries. Accumulation is not the heart of moderncapitalism, as economists have understood at least since the calculationsby Abramowitz and Solow in the 1950s, and before them the calculations byG. T. Jones in 1933. 20 Its heart is innovation.Richard Posner has long advocated “wealth maximization” as the standardfor good law. If judges arrange the laws of liability so that the economicpie is made as large as possible, then our wealth—“our” meaning the society’sas a whole—is maximized. Good. You can see the merit of the argument,a utilitarian one. It goes along with “unlimited” accumulation. But in