The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

498 chapter 48unless virtues come down from the stage scenery miraculously. The life ofman is solitary and poor unless miraculously the Max U’s cooperate—as infact experimental subjects do cooperate, because they have been childrenand have loved someone and are not monsters of P Only. They cooperate,that is, for reasons inconsistent with the assumption of P Only.The P-Only science of economics has no place for what Smith called “thefaculty of speech.” Yet it is well known in experimental economics that“simply allowing individuals to talk with one another [love, faith, justice] isa sufficient change in the decision environment to make a substantial differencein behavior....Individuals who start as strangers with no normativerelationship to one another [in the style of P Only] may soon begin todiscuss a problem . . . and eventually acquire a sense of community [love,faith] and moral responsibility [justice].” 1But in truth that last, saving, ethical row is necessary for any of the threecolumns to work. Even my beloved second column, which is the waycapitalism actually operates, pretty much, can be undermined by Max Uideologies. I stress that such ideologies are seen not only on the right, politicallyspeaking. The hard left, too, with Marx, sees capitalism as a field for