In the new alternative to Platonism and its descendents Kantianism and Benthamism, Bernard Williams wrote, “morality is seen as something whose real existence must consist in personal experience and social institutions, not in sets of propositions.”[1] It is an alternative as new as Aristotle, Cicero, and Aquinas, with parallels in Chinese and Indian philosophy.
The classical virtue ethicists believed they had spotted the seams in the universe, the essence of Prudence or the substance of Justice. In re-using their words now, in an expanding universe, we do not have such ambitions. The ethical, we believe, is local, not universal, knowledge. It is contingent and fallible, not universal and necessary. “It is a contingent fact,” writes Hursthouse, “that we can, individually, flourish or achieve eudaimonia, contingent that we can do so in the same way as each other, and contingent that we can do so all together, not at each other’s expense.”[2]
Such a notion of the ethical, Kant would have said with a sneer, is only anthropological or psychological or historical, not pure and rational. Alasdair MacIntyre characterizes the monistic tradition of Hobbes, Bentham, and Kant as asserting without much evidence, or on the evidence, as MacIntyre notes, of a misunderstanding of how geometry proceeds, that “there is a way of founding adequately the first principle or principles of right action by appeal to considerations which they take to be equally available at the commencement of enquiry to every rational person as such.”[3] Any rational person just knows that we “must” imitate Euclid in method and “must” come to the Categorical Imperative in substance. There’s no grounding to the “must” in the Grundlegung.
And the method assumes its conclusion in another way, too: that we are discussing a person possessing practical wisdom already. No need to learn to cut cloth on the bias by watching one’s mother, to take batting practice, to run marathons. No need to grow in practical or ethical experience. The representation of Right lies deep in the soul of everyone, says Kant, even of the most delicate child, an axiom, an assumption. One is reminded of the joke about a physicist and an economist on a desert island finding a can of beans. They only lack a can opener. The physicist says, “Let’s build a fire and heat the can. By the laws of physics, it will explode, and that way we can get into the beans.” The economist says, “What a messy solution! I have a much neater one, which uses the laws of academic economics. First step: assume as an axiom that we have a can-opener. . . .”
The ethics of the virtues asks insistently of the universalizers, though always politely: “Do you have a reason for seeking The Universal? What guidance, when all is said, can such a priori generalities give to actual lives?” Talk of the local, contingent, non-universal virtues has the virtue at least of preserving how we actually talk, and therefore might help us talk—and behave. And there is a worry in the actual behavior of people who, as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, “identify what are in fact their partial and particular causes too easily and too completely with the cause of some universal principle.” “They usually behave,” he notes, “worse than they would otherwise do.”[4]
Factually speaking, as Alan Wolfe found in his surveys and interviews about American ethical views in the 1990s, “virtue,” singular, as a word means little to ordinary Americans, except to arouse annoyance at the conservative churches and their recent obsession with sex, sex, sex. But to Wolfe’s Americans the particular named virtues, plural, mean a great deal, provoking calm yet committed discussion. Americans admire especially, for example, loyalty, that blend of faith, love, justice, and temperance, and honesty—courage, justice, and faith; and in a broader sense a bourgeois blend of all the virtues.[5]
The way we actually talk does not depend on the Golden Rule or the categorical imperative or even the vaguer maxim of maximizing utility, at least not much. It depends on the particular virtues, straight from the Girl Scout Handbook, on the testaments old and new, and on the songs, poems, stories, family histories, and public dramatizations which give them life. Go and learn the commentary.
But the virtues do not work one-by-one. Murdoch observed that
as we deepen our notions of the virtues we introduce relationship and hierarchy. Courage, which seemed at first to be something on its own, a sort of specialized daring of the spirit, is now seen to be a particular operation of wisdom [including what I am calling Prudence] and love. We come to distinguish a self-assertive ferocity from the kind of courage which would enable a man coolly to choose the labor camp rather than the easy compromise with the tyrant. It would be impossible to have one virtue unless it were a very trivial one such as thrift.[6]
Or unless it were in fact a vice. Mary Midgley speaks of the treacherous Iago in the play: “Iago’s envy . . . . has taken him over. It swallows up every other motive. . . . All attempts at inward balance have ceased . . . . There are no more conflicts.”[7] Iago lacks temperance: “I do hate [Othello], as I do hell’s pains,” he says in the first scene, using a proverbial exaggeration, though also an ironic foreshadowing of his ultimate destination. As an economist would say, he is “specialized” in one or two virtues, showing courage in venturing and prudence in completing his somewhat haphazard plan against Othello but showing none of that inward balance in acknowledgement of the conflict between one virtue and another that would make room in a good person for Love or Justice or Hope: namely, Temperance.
You are moved to hate the boss who passed you over in favor of some insipid Cassio, and for all you know slept with your spouse. But you draw back from hatred, anger, envy, with a mild reflection that after all it would be unjust to indulge your feelings, or that after all the Lord has laid down that “Vengeance is mine,” not thine. Iago, however, courageously and unbalancedly does not draw back. His “motiveless malignity,” as Coleridge put it, arises from his character, not from the “motives” he offers, now one, now another, “the mere fictions of his own restless nature, distempered by a keen sense of his intellectual superiority, and haunted by the love of exerting power, on those especially who are his superiors in practical and moral excellence.” [8] Iago’s sin, like most sin, originates in the master sin of pride.
Likewise in Paradise Lost Satan declares courageously and single-virtuedly, “so farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, / Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost; / Evil be thou my good.” Of course it’s not so simple as he claims. In seeing with Stanley Fish how Milton works one should remember that theologically speaking Satan must be wrong about almost everything of importance.[9] C. S. Lewis writes: “What we see in Satan is the horrible co-existence of a subtle and incessant intellectual activity with an incapacity to understand anything.”[10] Satan is not just a liar, “with calumnious Art/ Of counterfeited truth.” He is an idiot savant of unbalanced virtù.
Satan is not some Other to God, a force of pure Evil as against pure Good. We must rid ourselves, wrote Lewis in the midst of the Second War, “of the absurd fancy that devils are engaged in the disinterested pursuit of something called Evil (the capital is essential).”[11] Devils have goals like our own—honor, affection, nourishment, dominion—and being like us creatures (that is, created by God) have the usual virtues and vices. Their chief lord is shown by Milton as gloriously courageous, accepting as great a share of hazard as of honor. I have noted that his courage has mislead romantics from William Blake to Jack London into imagining that Satan is admirable even in Milton’s secret heart. London took the proud words of Milton’s Satan as his personal motto: “To reign is worth ambition, though in hell: / Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.”[12]
Courage, in other words, is a virtue, but in a bad man or a fallen angel or a CEO gone off the ethical rails it is a virtue uncompleted by other virtues, such as Temperance or Justice or Love. Iago is courageous and, especially, prudent, but intemperate and, especially, unjust and unloving. The result is unchecked Envy and Hatred.
The classical and now revived analysis of virtues involves such balance and completion among the incommensurate virtues. The virtues cannot simply be added up into one sovereign Good, using that handy pocket-sized card. Aristotle or any typical recent Aristotelian, as Alan Ryan puts it, “approaches human nature more as a biologist than a mathematician, willing to recognize a variety of goods and ills [which suit different kinds of being] and a variety of ways of life which promote” the goods and ward off the ills.[13] That’s right: the long experiment in ethics of emulating Descartes and Newton, with their mathematical axioms and rigid proofs, has failed. We neo-Aristotelians want to try instead to emulate Darwin, Mayr, and Gould, with their biological classifications and their stories.
That is to say: Being good—lower-case g, no single Platonic ideal—always involves alloyed virtues, tin with copper, each a distinct element, to yield the more durable bronze. In fact Sin—Evil being Sin institutionalized—merely is some one or two virtues unalloyed with the rest. St. Gregory the Great classified the sins into the Seven Deadly ones. In matters of money an excess of virtuous Prudence unalloyed is sinful Greed, and its character is the miser. In matters of the body an excess of Love is Gluttony or Lust, and its character is the sybarite. Sin is a condition. Sins, plural, are acts. In Christian terms, sin is distance from God. Sins push one further away.
To think of sin or evil as a unified essence of its own, a contagion easily spotted in the very face of the person “infected” by it, is a Romantic and suburban Manichaeism according to which most of us believe ourselves to be—for all our admitted weaknesses, you see—on the good and light side of the Force. As Sartre once noted, “Manichaeism conceals a deep-seated attraction towards Evil. . . a curiosity fascinated. . . . In Berlin I knew a Protestant in whom sexual desire took the form of indignation. The sight of women in bathing suits aroused him to fury; he willingly encouraged that fury and passed his time at swimming pools.”[14]
On account of our after-knowledge of its evil fruit we are now rather more ravished, if we allow ourselves, by Triumph des Willen, Leni Riefenstahl’s film celebrating will-and-art politics in 1934 Germany. Listen to one Archibald Q. Stanton, a lay viewer of the film in 2002, about what he calls this “Feel Good Movie of the Century”: “Set aside your preconceptions, notions of political correctness, kick back with some nachos and enjoy the spectacle, pageantry, patriotism and just plain ole unmitigated evil of a bygone era.”[15] We cannot pretend to be much superior to Mr. Stanton, having ourselves felt the sexiness of evil, with or without nachos. We thrill to horror movies like Jaws or Friday the Thirteenth. It is therefore erotic as well as comforting to imagine Evil, though very interesting, as a rare case and therefore mainly irrelevant: Hitler or Darth Vader or Osama bin Laden.
Ethical questions are then corralled off as transfixing oddities. They are not how in the next minute or so you treat your husband or the clerk at the store or your fellow driver on the Kennedy Expressway. They are about how you decide, after consulting newspaper editorials and presidential commissions, the exceptional Bill-Moyers/ Charlie-Rose issues of abortion and cloning and bombing and other titanic wrongs and rights.
The problem for such a modern, secular, post-Holocaust, and Romantic view, in other words, is the banality of evil. As the philosopher John Doris puts it, in his book arguing that situations matter more than the character assumed in virtue ethics, “It takes a lot of people to kill . . . 6 million . . . human beings, and there just aren’t enough monsters to go around. Unfortunately, it does not take a monster to do monstrous things.”[16] Doris cites the famous experiment by Stanley Milgram in 1960-63, in which ordinary citizens of New Haven were persuade to (as they believed) torture other people to extreme pain and death.[17]
The ordinariness of the Germans—and let it be noted, the Austrians and Poles and Hungarians among others—who served as Hitler’s willing executioners, for example, disappears if we are looking for some Essence of Evil. Albert Speer, Hitler’s official architect and from 1942 minister of production, was a very saint of Prudence Only, an echt efficiency expert. But he was merely a more extreme version of ordinary Germans. He resembled ordinary Dutch and French people watching placidly out the window at Jews and Gypsies, homosexuals and socialists, being marched efficiently away. Compare ordinary Swedes trading peacefully with Hitler. Or ordinary Danes working with their usual efficiency in Hitler’s war machine. Or ordinary Swiss accommodating the banking needs of Nazi officials. Or, when it comes to that, ordinary Britons and Americans supporting their governments’ refusal to accept Jewish immigrants.
If we search always for the titanic we miss the banal evil, the unbalanced, uncompleted virtues, of our own, small, ordinary, local lives. In suburbia nowadays the very words “evil” and “sin” are taboo, except on Sunday mornings and then not in the sermon but only in the older hymns and rituals—and for special occasions in the rhetoric of conservative politicians. The Oxford English Dictionary notes dryly that evil as “the antithesis of good” is “now little used.” “Deliver us from evil,” you say in prayer—but you certainly do not mean your participation in the institutions of sin. You in such a pageant are (surely) a sweet old Dr. Jeckyl, and far away and far below is some terrifying, alien, evil, and above all rare Mr. Hyde.
In the view of virtue ethicists from Aristotle to Annette Baier, on the contrary, we are all capable of sin, and get into it daily. This is the secular meaning of the Abrahamic conviction that we are born in sin. It is the Greek and Christian sense of tragedy persisting in our culture—opposed recently by an Evangelical enthusiasm for a Rapture in which we, at least, will be saved. Sin in the Greek and orthodox Christian view is not radically foreign, something Satan made me do just this once, or something that only satanic people from the red or the blue states do, Anthony Hopkins playing Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Compare in this connection, by the way, Dr. Faustus, Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Roger Chillingworth the learned if evil physician, husband to Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter; or, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the “scientific” Dr. John X, the scorning and confining husband, and Dr. Y, the wife’s complicit brother—thus are the learned honored in Protestant Europe.
Anyway, sin is domestic. We actual, suburban humans are imperfect. We do not have for example perfect Temperance. We chicken out, overindulge, harden our hearts, can’t think it through, remain confusedly ignorant. And so a courageous gesture with our SUV at 70 miles per hour on the Kennedy Expressway, a banal, unremarkable aggression against a too-slow driver, a mini-heroic act, will once in while produce a looming, ramifying catastrophe.
The need for balance in the virtues, lest they be specialized into sin, is tragic. In Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) Jane Addams spoke autobiographically, as a woman would, about the conflict between the “family claim” which kept her from going to Smith College as she had planned and the “social claim” which later drove her life: “The collision of interests, each of which has a real moral basis and a right to its own place in life, is bound to be more or less tragic. It is the struggle between two claims, the destruction of either of which would bring ruin to ethical life.”[18]
“Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you, in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.” We are to confess our ordinary inability to balance our virtues in a world of scarcity, failing to exercise for example a properly Christian, cheek-turning love towards someone who has hurt us. Justice alone is not enough. Justice alone, unbalanced, will morph into the sin of Anger. One must have Love, and Courage and Temperance and the rest.
Bishop Butler in 1725 viewed Temperance as the crux, as one would naturally in an 18th century very conscious of its progress over the chaos of religious war. Self-interest was a matter of Prudence and Courage, benevolence of Love and Justice. But neither could flourish without Temperance restraining the passions.
Men daily, hourly sacrifice the greatest known interest to fancy, inquisitiveness, love or hatred, any vagrant inclination. The thing to be lamented is not that men have so great a regard to their own good or interest [even] in the present world, for they have not enough.[19]
“The greatest known interest” is eternal salvation. But in Butler’s way of arguing it could be any great secular end, too. The problem is to control passion, to balance virtues, as Temperance does.
“The existence of inborn tendencies to evil,” Midgley writes, “need not puzzle us too much. It only means that our good tendencies are not complete or infallible.”[20] Philippa Foot calls vice a “natural defect” in a living thing, as a tiger would be defective without teeth or an oak tree without leaves and a human without love or locomotion. For example, people who habitually free ride on the efforts of others “are just as defective as those who have defective hearing, sight, or powers of locomotion.”[21] But perfection is as rare in ethics as in body.
As St. Augustine and later Aquinas thought of it, sin is not a thing in itself but an absence, a hole in the fabric.[22] The holes are original and ordinary. Or as Milton thought of it, sin is not a thing in itself, since after all nothing but God exists. It is rather a mistaken love for and loyalty to the imagined holes—again ordinary, for God loves and respects us so much that He gave us the free will to make such a mistake, to make nonentities our gods. And after loss of Eden we do.[23]
* * * *
Justice, the giving of dues, said St. Augustine, is the social parallel to Temperance. Temperance speaks of inner, Justice of outer weather.
Temperance is the management of the self, Justice the management of society. The one is a balance of passions, the other a balance of citizens. “Just as a man is well-ordered in himself by virtue [namely, Temperance],” says Aquinas, “so too is he well-ordered to his neighbors [by Justice].”[24] As John Rawls noted, justice is the characteristic virtue of institutions, and of the people running them. Justice is the characteristically social virtue among strangers, because as Aristotle observed, “if men are friends, there is no need of justice between them,” which is to say that from someone who loves you as he loves himself you have no need to claim your due.[25]
What is due depends. Before the Protestant and egalitarian and bourgeois sentiments of the 18th century in Northwestern Europe flowered into a passion for equality a just balance meant what we and the reactionaries would now call “order.” The ordines, the classes, of Roman society were enforced by law and by the customs of the ancestors with bewildering precision, such as the details of seating at the games, the senatorial ordo in front, knights next, plebs in the back. And this was just. Justinian’s Institutes of 533 begins by defining justice as “the constant and perpetual will to acknowledge the right of each.”[26] But “right” [iūs] varied with social condition. And this was just.
Pliny the Younger declared that nothing is more unequal than equality itself. Shocking injustices as we now believe they are such as slavery or pedophilia could therefore survive millennia of ethical scrutiny, or rather a blithe lack of scrutiny. Thus too the inequality of women; or of children subject to a pater familias; or more recently the inequality of homosexuals abused by law and custom in Germanic countries; or of black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze; or of young black or Hispanic men imprisoned for selling coke to suburbanites slumming.
Humans have shown repeatedly that they can imagine almost any injustice—at any rate an injustice by the most elevated egalitarian standards of bourgeois Europe—as fit, decorous, natural, what we do, nothing-to-be-done-about-it-anyway; in a word, as “just.” Consider the Germans of the Third Reich, or the Germans rehearsing for the Third Reich in East Africa in 1904. Consider Hotel Rwanda. We have shown ourselves capable of imposing almost any indignity on Iraqis or Tutsis or barbaroi or any inferior.
Dignitas in Latin is from an Indo-European base *dek- meaning “receive, be fitting,” from which also decus (ornament) > decōrus (proper) > decorous. What is decorous depends in a hierarchical society of course on the dignity of rank. It is the free adult male Roman citizen, not a slave or woman or child, for whom it is dulce et decorum to die for the fatherland. Aristotle declares that “justice between master and slave and between father and child is not the same as absolute and political justice. . . . A chattel is . . . a part of oneself.”[27] Well, of course. An ancilla, a female household slave (from which we get the word “ancillary”), was recommended by ancient ethical writers as a sexual object useful for preventing real adultery. Never mind her admitted humanness. Galen the doctor warns an owner not to hit slaves with his fist, to avoid injury to his—the owner’s—fist. Wait until the passion subsides, he counsels, then apply the rod of justice. Never mind the slave’s humanness.
One waxes indignant about past slavery. But the point here is that its justice was until the late 18th century entirely unquestioned. Souls in such a view are of course equal before God, the “of course” applying for example to Greek and Roman stoicism, and to the Abrahamic religions of the Near East. It does not seem to apply to Hinduism, where a higher rank in the orders of the world must be earned in successive incarnations. Little wonder that over the millennia the castes of India have been sociologically hardy. The equality before God that distinguishes monotheism from rank-preserving polytheism is ancient.[28]
But as Samuel Fleischacker points out, {a} this-world egalitarianism was not imagined until Rousseau and especially Adam Smith. Equality of souls did not imply anything like equality of condition in this life.[29] On the contrary, fallen man must take up his burden as God’s test. The poor are to be relieved because charity is a Christian duty and a Jewish mitzvah, not because the poor servant is entitled to a comfortable life. Until the bourgeois ethicists of the late 18th century, whose new policy was carried out in the 19th century, every stoic, Jewish, Christian, and Moslem society placidly accepted slavery, on the principle for example of rendering unto Caesar in this life what is Caesar’s. And rendering unto quite a few other people, too: my lord, my master, my owner, my boss, my priest, my husband, my father, my older brother.
And until the bourgeois ethicists of the late 19th century, whose new policy was carried out in the 20th century, almost every society enforced the subordination of women, on the principle for example that a woman is an imperfect man. And until the bourgeois ethicists of the late 20th century, whose new policy is being carried out in the 21st century, Christian societies among others adopted the persecution of homosexuals, on the principle for example that anything that causes anxiety to young heterosexual men is to be assaulted. Whatever the conception of justice, an orderly ancient one or a Protestant modern one, Justice is the virtue of treating with respect whomever should be treated with respect. The rule of Justice is: no dissing. It is not a rule of Prudence or Love or any of the other virtues.
Bourgeois societies from ancient Jerusalem to modern Hong Kong have been notably, if never perfectly, free. This is because two people doing business must deal with each other, not overawe or submit to each other. So bourgeois society developed a historically unique notion of justice. Samuel Fleischacker in recent books has noted that Adam Smith, the theorists of bourgeois virtues, was a radical egalitarian, quite unimpressed with the claims of philosophers (say) to superiority over street porters.[30] An old notion has survived scrutiny: 18th-century liberal philosophers did abandon an appeal to status in favor of an appeal to contract, and the European society surrounding the philosophers was changing this way, too. So Henry Maine said in 1861, and Tocqueville, too, in The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution.
By contrast, everyone in Elizabethan England believed in a great chain of being from God through kings to lords to masters to apprentices to women to slaves. You can see it vividly in Shakespeare. David Cannadine argues that in Britain “the Elizabethan world picture did not die with the Elizabethans.”[31] By now in America only certain members of the Country Club believe it. Whether we like it or not we liberals, and even we radicals and conservatives in our less bloody-minded moods, are entangled in a bourgeois conception of justice.
The text above is an excerpt from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, the first volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.
[1] Williams, Moral Luck, 1981, p. x.
[2] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, p. 22.
[3] MacIntyre, Whose Justice, 1988, p. 175, italics supplied.
[4] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 1981, p. 206.
[5] Wolfe, Moral Freedom, 2001, pp. 21, 23ff.
[6] Murdoch, “Sovereignty of Good,” 1967, p. 95.
[7] Midgley, Wickedness, 1984, p. 147. Othello, I. i. line 154.
[8] Coleridge Omniana (1812), quoted at http:// www. clicknotes. com/othello/ motiveless.html.
[9] Fish, How Milton Works, throughout, for example pp. 47, 57. 92.
[10] Lewis, “Satan,” 1942, p. 200
[11] Lewis, Screwtape Letters, 1943, p. xi.
[12] Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667, Book IV, lines 108-110; Book I, lines 262-263. London’s use of Milton: James Dickey, “Introduction” to his edition of The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories (1961), quoted in Gary Kinder, ed., Jack London, The Sea Wolf, Modern Library 2000, p. 293.
[13] Ryan, “Human Nature,” 1987, p. 218.
[14] Sartre, Anti-Semite, 1944, p. 46f.
[15] http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0025913/
[16] Doris, Lack of Character, 2002, p. 54.
[17] Doris, Lack of Character, 2002, pp. 39-51 and throughout.
[18] Quoted in Elshtain, “Adams, Jane,” 1995, p. 14.
[19] Butler, Fifteen Sermons, 1725, Preface, p. 352.
[20] Midgeley, Wickedness, 1984, p. 14.
[21] Foot, Natural Goodness, 2001, pp. 16, 116.
[22] Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, c. 1259-1264, III: 7.
[23] Midgley, Wickedness, 1984, p. 14.
[24] Aquinas, Disputed Questions, 1269-72, “The Cardinal Virtues,” Art. 1, p. 106.
[25] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, c. 330 BC, VIII, 1, 4 (1155b).
[26] Justinian, Institutes, 533 AD, p. 1, “Iustitia est constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum cuique tribunes.”
[27] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, c. 330 BC, V, vi, 8 (1134b).
[28] Sacks, 2002, Dignity of Difference, p. 92.
[29] Fleischhacker, Short History, 2004b, p. 2 and throughout.
[30] Fleischacker, Short History, 2004b, and “Economics and the Ordinary,” 2004c.
[31] Cannadine, Class in Britain, 1998, p. 167.