The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

the very word “virtue” 65The sharpness of the gender split appears to be only a couple of centuriesold. By 1895 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., could declare that “the idealsof the past for men have been drawn from war, as those for women havebeen drawn from motherhood.” 6 “War is for men,” said Mussolini somedecades later, “what birth is for women.” 7 Now at the beginning of thetwenty-first century we still speak in our goodness talk mainly of courageand of love, the fatherly rhetoric of conservatives and the motherly rhetoricof liberals. 8The models are popular heroes and saints—Sergeant York was wonderfullycourageous” or “Mother Teresa loved the poor”—and by analogy wepraise the ordinary little virtues. We witness “Some village Hampden, thatwith dauntless breast / The little tyrant of his fields withstood,” and weapplaud. A local boy endures a football injury, courageously. Brave boy. Ayoung almost-bride mourning for her soldier walks up and down, up anddown, in her stiff brocaded gown, and we weep. A local girl volunteers at theretirement community, lovingly. Sweet girl.Such talk is on its way to the virtues. But it’s still high-school stuff. Wecan do better, getting all the way to graduate school, by being a little morephilosophical. In particular we can enfold the street talk of manly courageand womanly love, fatherhood and motherhood, into the seven virtues ofthe classical and Christian world. This is my main theme. To the naturallawand cultural-relativist theorists we can reply that virtues underlie theirtheories, too, and that the virtues are both less and more universal thanthey think. That’s what I propose to do, and then show you that a bourgeois,capitalist, commercial society can be “ethical” in the sense of evincingthe seven.The virtues came to be gathered by the Greeks, the Romans, the Stoics,the church, Adam Smith, and recent “virtue ethicists” into a coherent ethicalframework. Until the framework somewhat mysteriously fell out of favoramong theorists in the late eighteenth century, most Westerners did notthink in Platonic terms of the One Good—to be summarized, say, as maximumutility, or as the categorical imperative, or as the Idea of the Good.They thought in Aristotelian terms of many virtues, plural.“We shall better understand the nature of the ethical character [toethos],” said Aristotle, “if we examine its qualities one by one.” 9 That stillseems a sensible plan, and was followed by almost all writers on ethics in theWest, and quite independently of Aristotle in the East, until the cumulative