The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

500 chapter 48Aristotelian, or a socialist to be a Christian. Hursthouse quotes Daniel Statmanas asserting that communitarianism “might turn out to be the politicalaspect of virtue ethics.” 5 I hope you are persuaded by now that this aspect isnot the only one that can be discerned. Bourgeois virtue is as plausible apolitical entailment of virtue ethics as is the Green Party.Nor to be a libertarian does one have to be a egoist. The right wing, I havesaid, has too often embraced the analysis of its enemies that capitalismworks only through a sociopathic egoism, à la Hobbes, with left and righttherefore agreeing on the amoral character of markets. Quentin Skinnerworried that “contemporary liberalism, especially in its so-called libertarianform, is in danger of sweeping the public bare of any concepts save those ofself-interest and individual rights.” I admit there is such a danger, in theform of a vulgar version of neoliberalism advocated at the country club andin some classrooms and in some Cabinet rooms.But as Skinner in turn admits, there is a path between MacIntyre’s communitarianismand Ayn Rand’s individualism. I would characterize the wayas a positive duty to be a good bourgeois—many exemplars of which youand I know personally. As Skinner puts it,“Unless we place our duties beforeour rights, we must expect to find our rights themselves undermined.” 6Placing duties ahead of rights comes naturally to a burgher of Delft or to acitizen of Rapid City.A bourgeois version of the virtues deriving ultimately from Aristotle +Augustine = Aquinas is also called liberalism. The bourgeois moment isSmith, whom I have claimed as something like a secular Aquinian—thoughnote that Aquinas and his generation were busy in the mid-thirteenth centuryproving that “an honest, modest, charitable merchant was indeed ableto lead a good, Christian life.” 7 I have noted that Robert Nelson argued indetail in his first book on “economic theology” that “American economicsfollows ...closely in the Roman tradition, associated with ideas of naturallaw as revealed through exercise of faculties of human reason, given a leadingtheological exposition by Thomas Aquinas.” 8 The darker “Protestant”tradition in economics, “seeing a sinful . ..world ...where the powers ofhuman reasoning have been fatally weakened by the . . . corruptionof human nature,” he detects in the line of Plato, Augustine, Luther, andMarx.Some liberal theorists would deny their heritage in virtue ethics, claimingthat liberalism, for example, is at heart simply radical democratic