The principal ends of human acts are God, self, and others, since we do whatever we do for the sake of one of these.
Aquinas, Summa Theologia, Ia IIae, q. 73,
art. 9, objection 3, “I answer that.”.
[O]ur life consists in this achieving of a pure relationship between ourselves and the living universe about us. This is how I `save my soul.’ . . . [If you view] love as the supreme, the only emotion worth living for, then you will write an immoral novel. Because . . . . all emotions go to the achieving of a living relationship.
D. H. Lawrence, pp. 128-29.
The “moral universe within” has been described for 2500 years in the West, then, in terms of the Seven Virtues, containing hundreds of particular virtue, among which are the virtues for a bourgeois life:
The Seven Virtues
In ethical space the bottom is the realm of the Profane, where Prudence and Temperance rule, the top the realm of the Sacred—of spiritual Love, and Faith and Hope. Moving from bottom to top is moving from self-disciplining virtues whose main object is the Self through altruistic virtues whose main object is Others (Love of humans; Justice) to the transcendent virtues whose main object is God or Physics or the Nation. That is, bottom to top is the axis of wider and wider ethical objects.[1]
The essentially transcendent virtues of Faith and Hope, I have noted, are essentially verbal. The others can be silently yet fully expressed. Prudence and Justice are calculative and intellectual. They have been thought since Plato and the writers of footnotes to Plato to be the most characteristically human of virtues. Prudence or Justice could be seen in a god-haunted society as gifts or laws from the Creator to Man: “for which cause /Among the beasts no mate for thee was found.” Animals were “dumb” in both senses.
By the grace of Darwin, however, we now see the calculative virtues in the least human of beings, in ants justly sacrificing themselves for the queen, or dandelions prudently working the cracks in the sidewalk. The terminology is figurative, note the scientists, a human attribution, not Nature’s own way of putting it. But that is what we are discussing: human figures of speech. Natural history has taught us in the past three centuries to realize that the lion is not actually “courageous,” ever, but merely prudent in avoiding elephants and just in acknowledging the pride’s hierarchy. Courage and Temperance are emotion-controlling and will-disciplining, and therefore, we now realize, human. Faith, Hope, and Love, above all, provide ends for a human life. The rest are means, and prudence is not the highest, God-given Rationality but the lowest evolved strategies of these.
The triad of Temperance-Justice-Prudence near the bottom and middle is cool and classical, and therefore recommended itself to theorists of the bourgeoisie such as David Hume and Adam Smith. The others at the top and edges are warm and Romantic, and came into their own in the 19th century. Hume called Temperance-Justice-Prudence the “artificial” virtues, necessary for the artful making of any community whatever. They were of particular interest to men who had seen or vividly imagined communities collapsing in the tumult of religious war and dynastic ambition, of Jesuit and Presbyter, of Habsburg and Bourbon and Stuart. Hume and Smith both, for example, had witnessed the Jacobite rising of 1745, and with nothing like sympathy—they were not wild Highlanders, and certainly not Catholics, but lowland Scots of a deist or atheistic bent who had made their peace with Englishry.
“Enthusiasm” was in the 18th century a term of abuse. Let us confine our discussion, most of the philosophes of France and Scotland agreed, to the cool, dignified, essential, and “artificial” virtues. Hume was using the categories and argument of Pufendorf, defending natural law against the intellectual and political chaos of the early 17th century. The categories became part of European classicism in the 17th and 18th centuries, reacting to the rhetorical charms of the Renaissance and the rhetorical excesses of the Reformation and Counter-reformation.
The other, “natural” virtues of Courage, Love, Hope, and Faith impart warmth and meaning to an artfully made community. Sometimes too much warmth and meaning. The Scottish followers of Hutcheson admitted Love, as benevolence, and admitted Courage, as enterprise, but rather off to the side of their main concerns. They certainly had no patience with Hope and Faith, and Hume was fierce against their religious forms, “celibacy, fasting, and the other monkish virtues.” Imparting warmth and meaning was decidedly not what the Scots of the Enlightenment had in mind. That is a Romantic project, and these are not Romantics.
That Adam Smith was a virtue ethicist for a commercial age is pretty plain. He escaped, as Hume did not entirely, from the “prison,” as Hayek puts it, of the Greek categories physei (natural) and thesei (artificial). He emphasized a third category, the social interaction neither rock-like nor painting-like, the invisible hand.[2] Hayek observes that the 18th-century learned the third category from the appalling Dr. Mandeville. But Smith used it to support rather than attack conventional ethics.
Smith made his virtue-ethic purposes clearest at the end of his life, in a Part VI added to The Theory of Moral Sentiments 31 years after its first publication. Section I of the new Part is an encomium on The Prudent Man. Section II is an analysis of love in an expanding circle outward from self to country. It concludes with a criticism of going still higher, to the faith and hope in transcendence that had been so troublesome to the Scotland of his grandfathers:
The administration of the great system of the universe, however, the care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and the narrowness of his comprehension: the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country. That he is occupied in contemplating the sublime can never be an excuse for neglecting the more humble department. . . . The most sublime speculation of the contemplative philosopher can scarce compensate the neglect of the smallest active duty.[3]
One can hear him including the theologian or other advocate for the Transcendent in that phrase “contemplative philosopher.” Compare Hume’s “ divinity or school metaphysics.”
And then Smith embarks on a concluding, climactic Section III, “Of Self-Command,” the master virtue in his book. “The man who acts according to the rules of perfect prudence, of strict justice, and of proper benevolence [love, that is] may be said to be perfectly virtuous.” That accounts for three of the seven virtues: Prudence, Justice, and Love. But suppose he knows he should so act, but can’t bring himself to it? “The most perfect knowledge, if it is not supported by the most perfect self-command, will not always enable him to do his duty.” “Extravagant fear and furious anger,” to take one sort of passion, “[are] often difficult to restrain even for a single moment.” The “command” of fear and anger was called by the ancients “fortitude, manhood, and strength of mind,” which is to say Courage. “The love of ease, of pleasure, of applause, and other selfish gratifications . . . often mislead us.” The command of these the ancients called “temperance, decency, modesty, and moderation,” that is to say, Temperance.[4]
So: in Smith there are the five virtues, of Prudence, Justice, Love, Courage, Temperance. There is no room for Faith and Hope.
But this will not do. Alasdair MacIntyre—his name and Glasgow birthplace are not irrelevant, nor is his youthful Communism or his mature Catholicism—argues that the artificial and all the natural virtues including Faith and Hope are to be taken together:
The virtues that we need, if we are to develop from our initial animal condition into that of independent rational agents [viz., prudence, temperance, and justice], and the virtues that we need, if we are to confront and respond to vulnerability and disability both in ourselves [courage, hope] and in others [love, faith], belong to one and the same set of [seven] virtues, the distinctive virtues of dependent rational animals.[5]
All three regions of the diagram are drawn on for a full life. The Romantics after the 18th century understood this. The Christians before the 18th century did, too.
In particular, Prudence Only will not be a life worth living. As Ellen Charry observes, “the gratification of being a part of a larger reality [Tillich’s ‘the courage to be a part of’] that gives each experience a purpose beyond its momentary accomplishment buffers the soul against life’s disappointments.”[6] For “ye have your closes,/And all must die.”
It is an obvious secular truth, too. Enjoy the White Sox game, by all means, in the present—the ballgame, the show, the peanuts, the crackerjack, in the lower region of Prudence, sheer Utility. Live as Nature’s son, not her bastard. But enjoy also your own little son’s delight in being there with his father, at the middle region of Love. And at the higher regions take joy in “being part of a larger reality,” Baseball or American Fatherhood or the Democratic Tradition.
* * * *
The seven virtues illuminate other ethical systems. William Schweiker, for example, quotes with approval Tzvetan Todorov’s characterization of humanists, believing that “freedom exists and that it is precious, but at the same time . . . [appreciating] the benefit of shared values [such as Hope and Faith], life with others [such as Love and Justice], and a self that is held responsible for its actions” [showing Temperance, Prudence, and moral Courage].
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt starts with the usual definition of “virtue” as “altruism,” confined to the middle region of the diagram. The ethical object at the bottom is a self, I have noted, and at the top is a transcendent; in the middle the object of ethics is other people. Like Susan Wolf writing about her obnoxious moral saints, Frankfurt uses terms like “morality,” “moral principles,” and “moral philosophy” as though they did not include either the self or the transcendent as objects of ethical action.
Such a definition appears to be a convention in mainstream, Kant-derived ethical philosophy. “Morality is most particularly concerned with how our attitudes and our actions,” Frankfurt writes, “should take into account . . . other people.”[7] Well, not in the view of Aristotle or the other virtue ethicists. Morality among them is about the good life for a human, which requires a character of prudence and temperance towards oneself, and faith, hope, and higher love towards the transcendent. And it requires justice and courage and lower love on behalf of other people—the Scots called it “benevolence.” Thus ethos, character. Robinson Crusoe on his island can be said to have had a good or bad ethical life, even before Friday. So virtue ethics.
But Frankfurt comes to the same view in the end, concluding that love must have a transcendent object for a human life to have a point. “A person may legitimately be devoted to ideals—for instance, aesthetic, cultural, or religious ideals—whose authority for him is independent of the desiderata with which moral principles are distinctively concerned; and he may pursue these nonmoral ideals without having his personal interests in mind at all.”[8] The ideal of the transcendent, such as God or Baseball, are independent of altruism. The transcendent is defined as “nonmoral,” namely, having in mind the self-interest of Prudence and Temperance. Frankfurt is saying that the transcendent, and in particular a notion of Love which includes what Christians would call agape, is necessary for a fully human life. In this way the ethics of the Enlightenment is sacralized.
He could have got to the conclusion by way of virtue ethics with less heavy lifting. “What we care about, what is important to us, and what we love” give point to a life, says Frankfurt. But these, I note, are Faith, Hope, and Charity.[9] I expect that Frankfurt is well aware of all this, and is engaging in a crafty figure of argument necessary in a corner of the academic world dominated by Kant. He shares with Wolf and many other modern philosophers the job of clambering out of the rationalist hole that Kant dug so diligently.
Frankfurt here seems to be marshaling a reductio ad absurdum, to show that Kantianism or for that matter utilitarianism do not give a coherent account of an ethical life. The ethical life cannot in fact to be reduced, Frankfurt is saying, to formulas for deciding ethical dilemmas, formulas applicable to any rational creature as such. On the contrary, “it requires us . . . to understand what it is we ourselves really care about.”[10] It depends on ethos, on agape and philia, on character, on moral sentiments, on a philosophical anthropology and psychology, on being a particular woman in Chicago at a particular time, with particular loves and faiths and hopes. As Philippa Foot put it, Kant went wrong in not realizing that “the evaluation of human action depends . . . on essential features of specifically human life.”[11]
In fact, as I have noted, the Kantian program is self-contradictory, which among Kantians is judged the deadly sin. The character of ourselves that we care about, a caring denied in pure rationalism, is what makes a Kantian moralist—or for that matter, if he reaches beyond ice-cream hedonism, what makes a utilitarian moralist. You have to want to be good. You have to care about what Frankfurt calls “ideals” and I and the rest of the Western ethical tradition call “transcendentals.” Only then will you have an interest in following, say, the categorical imperative or the true happiness of all people in your dealings with others. The ethical-theorizing “constructed self” that the social psychologist Timothy Wilson speaks of wants to work with the ethical-behaving “adaptive unconscious.” Being good, in Frankfurt’s account and in mine, is a consequence of “what we regard as important to ourselves,” not itself derivable from Kantian or utilitarian maxims.[12]
* * * *
arryh
Left to right in the diagram exhibits the gendered character of the virtues, masculine and feminine in the conventional tales. That is, left-right expresses the gender of the ethical actor. Women of course are supposed conventionally to think of the world from the perspective of right-side Love, or its corresponding vices, such as envy and jealousy. Men are supposed to think of the world from the perspective of left-side Courage, or cowardice, vainglory, self-absorption, and so forth.
Another name for the right side in the diagram is “connection”; and for the left, “autonomy.” Knight believed that even ordinary desires could be reduced “in astonishingly large measure to the desire to be like other people, and the desire to be different.”[13] Tillich called them “participation” and “individualization,” and noted that there is a “courage to be as a part,” that is, to participate. Michael Ignatieff called the one side “connection and rootedness” and the other side “freedom”: “a potential contradiction. . . arises between our need for social solidarity and our need for freedom.” We have rights, which is good, allowing us to achieve our left-side projects of hope and courage regulated by justice. But we need “love, respect, honor, dignity, solidarity with others,” Ignatieff notes, on the other, upper-right-hand side, and these cannot be compelled by law.[14] Hence Hume’s vocabulary of “natural” as against “artificial,” law-enforced virtues.
Whether or not men in general do actually fall on the left, autonomous side, the male non-Scottish, non-virtue-ethics ethical philosophers of the 18th century certainly did. The Kantian and Benthamite men, for example, are just that, men deciding ethical issues without regard to connection, men fiercely autonomous, adults always in their primes, rational beings never dependent. So they believed. They are as the feminists put it with irritation and amusement “separative selves.”
The third fresh option in 17th- and 18th-century ethical philosophy, contractarianism, is likewise gendered. A Hobbesian/Lockean/ Rousseauian “contract” is not the usual metaphor with which women describe their lives. Rather: love, caring, obligations of affection, “a view of the self as relational.”[15] Women in fact find themselves with children and parents and friends and husbands and lovers to take care of. Men seem to think of such connections as optional, wholly contractual, even as relationships of exchange. Thus Marcel Mauss, a leading male anthropologist of the early 20th century, encouraged people to think of the gift, too, as a sort of exchange.
The feminists such as Carol Gilligan and Virginia Held resist. Annette Baier, following them, observes that not all male ethical philosophers take the side of autonomy. She gives passing grades on the matter to Aristotle (connection in the polis), Marx (class), Mill (progressive sympathy), and MacIntyre (dependent rational animals, and practices), and then she studies Hume from the feminine, connective perspective in detail. Hume is, she argues, “uncannily womanly” in emphasizing the role of sympathy as against higher law, having others to share experiences with, and the love of children as the exemplum for ethical theory. She finds in Hume a stress on “the inescapable mutual vulnerability and mutual enrichment . . . [of] the human conditions. . . [which] make[s] autonomy not even an ideal.”[16]
A socialist like Paul Tillich would have viewed the right side of Love, Temperance, Justice, and Faith as commendably anti-capitalist, as against the left-side enterprise of Courage, Prudence, and Hope. Capitalism is, after all, the system supporting the virtue of enterprise, and that is the left-side virtues—though I have emphasized that in fact even capitalism depends of the loving right side, too. Tillich among others would have quarreled with placing Courage only on the left, masculine side.[17]
The pioneering feminist economist/philosopher Julie Nelson would argue that any left-right, top-bottom has the danger of privileging one over the other. Any one over any other. I’ve said why I think all the virtues work in any serious ethical life. So I am not saying that Hope and Faith are superior to Prudence and Temperance, or that Love trumps Courage every time. Nelson would use positive and negative versions of each virtue, deconstructing the geometry of a “top” thought superior to a bottom, or a “left” sinister.[18] So Love of others can be negative as love of others only, without sufficient self-love: self-abnegation, the womanly sin.[19]
And indeed the placement of the virtues in the diagram is that of mythical convention, not God’s truth, or even science’s. Thus upper-and-right pertains to the past, lower-and-left to the future: well . . . perhaps. The four virtues in bold are the signature virtues of the mythically ancient social classes: warrior (Courage, daring), peasant (Love, loyalty), merchant (Prudence, know how), and priest/brahmin (Temperance, wisdom). More mythical convention. But that is how we talk.
* * * *
There is no reason why the number of sins should equal the number of virtues, though of course in Western tradition, thanks to Pope Gregory, there are also seven, and deadly. In modern English they are Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, Anger, Envy, Sloth—that is, Acedia, from Greek, spiritual sloth, a lack of Hope, replacing “Sadness” in the 17th century— and mastering above all Pride.[20] They can be paired off by social class, Pride being the characteristic sin of the rich, such as the Florida woman in her mink who on TV in 2004 while clinging to her husband said about the poor, “We aren’t losers.” Acedia is the corresponding sin of the poor and hopeless. Avarice-Gluttony are again sins of the rich and Envy-Anger of the poor, similarly paired. And Lust, after the Fall, is ubiquitous.
Sin or vice, I have argued, is the notable lack of any one or more of the virtues, and so the seven virtues lead to seven single lacks, Imprudence, Injustice, Intemperance, and so forth. But as Hursthouse notes, “although our list of generally recognized virtue terms is, I think, quite short, our list of vice terms is remarkably—and usefully—long.”[21] She notes that the list far exceeds the number of rules that Kantians imagine might be formulated to summarize ethical ideas. The list of vices shows how we actually reason ethically. We call people names. Hursthouse instances “irresponsible, feckless, lazy, inconsiderate, uncooperative, harsh, intolerant, indiscreet, incautious, unenterprising, pusillanimous, feeble, hypocritical, self-indulgent, materialistic, grasping, short-sighted, . . . and on and on.”
Take down your Roget’s International Thesaurus, the Third Edition of 1962, for example. Virtue itself (category number 978) takes up about half a column of words; the two opposites that follow, Vice (979) and Wrongdoing (980) take up two full columns. Asceticism (989), Temperance (990), Fasting (993), and Sobriety (995) fit handily into about two columns, interlarded with seven and a half columns on Intemperance, Gluttony, and Intoxication (which by itself accounts for 5½ columns). Respect (962) has a column of words, followed by two and half columns on Disrespect, Contempt, and Ridicule. Courage (891), in two columns, is surrounded by Anxiety, Fear, Cowardice (888-889) and Rashness, totaling six and a half columns. Cut the six-and-a-half in half to allow for Roget’s habit of alternating opposites and it still works out to 3.25 pusillanimous vices to every virtue of Courage.
The richness of our vocabulary of abuse comes from the stories and images that ground ethical thinking. We remember Billy in kindergarten who would not lovingly and justly cooperate, and he becomes our exemplar for the lack of those qualities. Judas Iscariot becomes the exemplar of intemperance and faithlessness.
If there are seven virtues and if the lack of any combination constitutes a vice, then the combinatorial mathematics implies that there would be. . . let me see, 7 items taken 6 at a time plus 7 taken 5 at a time plus 7 taken 4 at a time. . . exactly 126 vices. I jest. Seriously, there’s no guarantee that every language has a word for any random failure, such as a lack of Faith, Justice, and Prudence in the presence of the other four, Love, Hope, Courage, and Temperance. A man like this would have no rootedness or identity, would not give people respect, or even their due, and would be careless and uncalculating. Yet he would be affectionate, brightly hopeful about something turning up, courageous over present fears, and modest in his needs. Not a Mr. McCawber, precisely. But it’s Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman to a T. The play lets us reflect, then, about this uncategorized vice.
Such a system for reflection has behind it a library of philosophizing, which is one reason for taking seriously the particular septet. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, and at the very end, before Kant, Adam Smith, and now the women and men exploring virtue ethics, did not merely copy each other. They built on each other’s thought a great engine of analysis.
Hursthouse argues, following Gary Watson and Neera Badhwar, that “we believe the virtues form some sort of unity.”[22] To put it in an economist’s terms, the separate virtues are complements; or to put it statistically, they are not independent. That is, we are startled when on some occasion a bad man behaves well, apparently, and tend to doubt the claim that he did in fact behave well on this occasion. And we expect good men never to behave badly. So as academics we are surprised when a “good” economist behaves badly in other ways, a Nobel laureate at the University of Chicago expressing a virulent homophobia, for example. At least we are a little surprised.
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] Aquinas Summa Theologiae, c. 1270, Iae-Ia Q. 96, art. 3; and Q. 54 art. 2, to which he refers, quoted in Lisska, Aquinas’s Theory of Natural Law, 1996, p. 285.
[2] See the discussion of this in Rudi Keller, On Language Change, 1990, for example p. 46.
[3] Smith, Moral Sentiments, 1790, p. 237.
[4] Smith, Moral Sentiments, 1790, same place and page following. Compare pp. 268f, 271. He has a confusing discussion on p. 189 (an older section) in which he analyses Prudence as Temperance plus Wisdom, Sophia. But in the passage I quote he is adhering to Aquinian divisions.
[5] MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, 1999, p. 5; compare p. 155f.
[6] Charry, “Happiness,” 2004, p. 28.
[7] Frankfurt, Reasons of Love,2004, p. 7.
[8] Frankfurt, Reasons of Love, 2004, p. 8.
[9] Frankfurt, Reasons of Love,, p. 11.
[10] Frankfurt, Reasons of Love,, p. 28.
[11] Foot, Natural Goodness, 2001, p. 14.
[12] The phrase from Frankfurt, Reasons of Love, is from p. 29.
[13] Knight 1922, in Knight 1935, p. 22.
[14] Ignatieff, Needs of Strangers, 1984, pp. 17, 15.
[15] Held, Feminist Morality, 1993, p. 62.
[16] Baier, Moral Prejudices 1994, pp. 53, 62f.
[17] Tillich, Courage to Be, 1952, pp. 86-96
[18] Nelson, Feminism, Objectivity, 1996, pp. 10-19, 28-34, 45.
[19] Nelson, Feminism, Objectivity, 1996, p. 136.
[20] http://deadlysins.com/sins/history.html is amusing. Luxuria, Gula, Tristia, Avaritia, Ira, Invidia, Superbia are specified in St. Gregory’s Moralia in Job, XXXI cap. xlv. The sin ‘Tristia’ was later replaced by ‘Accidia’, or Sloth, or Despair (Wenzel (1967), 38).
[21] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, p. 41.
[22] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, p. 155,