The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

414 chapter 381980 Posner was checkmated in two moves by another eminent legal scholar,Ronald Dworkin, who made the same observation as Knight had, thatwealth is a means, not itself an end. 21The observation is ancient. Aristotle said in the Nicomachean Ethics,“Clearly wealth is not the Good we are in search of, for it is only good asbeing useful, a means to something else.” 22 Ends of justice, themselves for thesake of love or faith or hope, can be served by greater social wealth, to besure. But they can be corrupted by greater social wealth, too. It’s an empiricalmatter whether the historical balance has been positive or negative, anempirical matter we are exploring in this book. And in any case an economistwould say, “If you want justice or faith to prosper, you should pursuethem directly, not indirectly and uncertainly through another, allegedly correlatedmeans, such as wealth.”The economist Robert Frank has been arguing this for years. His versionof P and S is to show in detail that “the most adaptive behaviors will notspring from the [direct, simple, short-run] quest for material advantage.” 23By this he means that people love or leave tips or build reputations out oftheir characters, and that what is “adaptive” about forming a character is notinstant profit but very long-term survival. This is also the vision of Fergusonand Hume and Smith: we build a successful commercial society out oflove and justice, too; trust spreads, as it in fact did in the eighteenth century.The contractarian philosopher David Gauthier is the modern master of thissort of sweet reasoning.Yet I doubt that Frank is right to cling to “survival” as the goal of humanlife, and therefore to cling to the just-so stories of evolutionary psychology.What about human flourishing, beyond bread alone? What about the spandrelsof San Marco and other accidental results of evolution that Gould andLewontin showed can undermine the retrospective claims of functionality?Love surely is not only a “commitment mechanism,” a way of keeping peoplefrom wasting time in looking for new mates when the ones they have arepretty good already. Frank’s argument here is cute, and parallels nicely, as hepoints out, the requirement of a lease in rental property. Swell. But hewouldn’t say, I think, and certainly never to his wife, that it’s a full accountof love. 24In any case, “the self-interest [P-Only] model,” Frank argues withnumerous tests and examples, “provides a woefully inadequate descriptionof the way people actually behave.” 25 Frank wants to offer a “friendly