The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

482 chapter 46and our wealth is built on. The envious or poor man, Nozick says, “must puttogether, with the cooperation of others, a feasible package.” 6 He must deal,not steal.In The Invisible Heart (2001) Russell Roberts imagines a high-schoolteacher of economics, Sam Gordon, trying to convert a high-school teacherof English, Laura Silver, over coffee at the local Starbucks. It is significant,by the way, that in the same year that Roberts published a book called TheInvisible Heart, viewed from the libertarian right, Nancy Folbre published abook with the same title, viewed from the marxisant left, in mutualunawareness. They were making related points, Folbre that the societyshould have a heart, Roberts that the market does. As Roberts’s Sam Gordonput it, “I’m not saying that the gentle and caring people of the world arefound at the top of the modern corporation. But the scum of the earth can’tmake it to the top either,” which is surely true, and truer of the businessworld than of many others.Politicians, police, soldiers, bureaucrats, even ministers of religion andprofessors of political science can be scum of the earth and get away with itfor decades. J. Edgar Hoover comes to mind, or Pinochet and his friends, orthe pedophile priests protected by the Roman hierarchy. You can provideyour own examples. Laura replies to Sam with a superior smile, expressingthe conventional calumny, “I doubt goodness counts for much of anythingin the boardroom or in the marketplace.” “But it does” Sam urges—Sam isso earnest. Says he: “Meaning what you say, keeping your word, and servingothers without resentment are probably more valuable in the businessworld than elsewhere.”To suppose that the world of profit always kills caring is the mistake thatNancy Folbre makes in her own book. She criticizes Adam Smith—whomshe admires on the whole as much as I do—for ignoring “the possibility thatthe expansion of an economy based on self-interest might weaken moralsentiments.” 7 Oh, I dunno. A lawyer friend of mine says that the worst liarsand cheats he has encountered are not property developers or city planners,the capitalists or the haughty clerisy, but . ..church people, the literal clerics,officially devoted to humble, caring behavior toward us all. He says thatthey regard themselves as exempt from merely commercial promisekeeping.After all, they are on God’s mission, not Mammon’s. So nonprofitorganizations are commonly filled with Dilbert-like bad actors. It is notprofit that makes people bad; often enough it is the lack of it.