The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

the anxieties of bourgeois virtues 499Mr. Moneybags and “endless accumulation” for its own sake, whatever thatmight mean. The hard left’s heaven, likewise, a communist society withoutprivate property, depends on Jesus rather than Satan being a member of thePolitburo. In actually existing socialism Satan has had a more successfulpolitical career than Jesus.The philosopher Edward Feser has usefully outlined three grounds forwhat he calls “principled libertarianism.” The three Enlightenment philosophiesshow up once again. The libertarianism of Smith’s “simple and obvioussystem of natural liberty” can be justified on utilitarian grounds, asmaximizing national income. Or it can be justified, as Feser himself andRobert Nozick do, on natural rights and Kantian grounds: “the only systemcompatible with respect for individuals’ natural rights to life, liberty, andproperty is a libertarian one.” 2 Or it can be justified on contractariangrounds, as John Rawls does, being what one would choose at the Creation.By Feser’s definitions I am not in fact a “principled” libertarian—whichis not to say that I am unprincipled in the nonphilosophical way of talking,but that I am pragmatic in the philosophical way of talking. That’s fine withme. Such libertarians, Feser puts it, “tend to appeal to empirical considerations,eschewing philosophical analysis in favor of economic arguments andhistorical and sociological studies comparing the results of free-marketpolicies with those of government intervention.” 3 That’s right, as I have triedto do here. As a mere economist and historian I am incapable of the fantasiesthat the people of principle are so gifted at. I keep being brought upshort by the world as it is, at least as I can discern it through a glass darkly.But if I had to be principled I would reach back before the FrenchEnlightenment, or back into the Scottish Enlightenment, and offer a fourthjustification for the free society, namely, that it leads to and depends onflourishing human lives of virtue. My so-called principle shares some featureswith the “postmodernist bourgeois liberalism” of Richard Rorty, or the“agonistic liberalism” of Isaiah Berlin, or the “dystopic liberalism” of JudithShklar, or the rhetorical pluralism of Stuart Hampshire, or the “biblical realism”of Reinhold Niebuhr and Michael Novak, or the “cooperation tomutual benefit” plus “light” of Robert Nozick, or the feminist virtue ethicsof Annette Baier or Carol Gilligan. 4Such impure mixes have not been popular in the West after Kant andBentham and Locke. But they are not therefore merely confused. One doesnot, for example, have to be an antimarket communitarian to be an