The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

64 chapter 1which is to say the patterns of character in a good person. True, the wordshave become entangled in the red vs. blue states and their culture wars. Theleft once embraced situational ethics and the right favored a moral majority.Now the Christian and progressive left wonders at the ethics of capital punishmentand the Christian and neocon right wonders at moral decline. Butat the outset let us have peace.“Ethics” is the system of the virtues. A “virtue” is a habit of the heart, astable disposition, a settled state of character, a durable, educated characteristicof someone to exercise her will to be good. The definition would becircular if “good” just meant the same thing as “virtuous.” But it’s morecomplicated than that. Alasdair MacIntyre’s famous definition is: “A virtueis an acquired human quality the possession of which tends to enable us toachieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of whicheffectively prevents us from achieving such goods.” 3A virtue is at the linguistic level something about which you can coherentlysay “you should practice X”—courage, love, prudence, temperance,justice, faith, hope, for example. Beauty is therefore not a virtue in this senseof “exercising one’s will.” One cannot say, “You should be beautiful” andmake much sense, short of the extreme makeover. Neat, clean, well turnedout—yes. But not “beautiful.”At the simplest level people have two conventional and opposed remarksthey make nowadays when the word “ethics”comes up. One is the fatherly assertionthat ethics can be reduced to a list of rules, such as the Ten Commandments.Let us post the Sacred List, they say, in our courthouses and high schools,and watch its good effects. In a more sophisticated form the fatherly approachis a natural-law theory by which, say, homosexuality is bad, because unnatural. 4In contrast, the other remark that people make reflects the motherlyassertion that ethics is after all particular to this family or that person. Let’sget along with each other and not be too strict. Bring out the jello and thelemonade. In its sophisticated form the motherly approach is a cultural relativisttheory that, say, female circumcision and the forced marriage ofeleven-year-old girls are all right—because they are custom. 5The “virtue-ethic” parallel to such college-freshman commandments orcollege-sophomore relativism is the vocabulary of the hero and of the saint.In its senior high-school version the two split by gender, at least conventionally,and at least nowadays. A man wants to be Odysseus, a woman HolyMary, the one physically courageous, the other deeply loving.