July 28, 2018 Dear Reader

Bacon, Essays, “Of Love”

(first included in the 1612 edition), p. 27.

This is madness, except under a 17^th-century theory that any strong virtue is a “passion.” One among its many faults is that it imparts no point to the “serious affairs and actions of life.” "Concern for ourselves," as the philosopher David Schmidtz puts it, "gives us something to live for. Concern for others as well as ourselves gives us more."²⁸²

* * * * *
The dissolution of "intentional communities," as they are called by sociologists, is painful. The loss of friendship, the divorce of lovers, the fall of business collaborations, the breakup of that old gang of mine are little deaths of human solidarity. Generation upon generation of utopian communalists, monks of the desert, English folk in New Harmony, Indiana, have seen it and cried out. William Bradford in his old age, about 1650, after serving faithfully and well as governor of Plymouth Plantation for over three decades, wrote of the community there, early and late, "O sacred bond, whilst inviolably preserved! How sweet and precious were the fruits that flowed! . . . But (alas) that subtle serpent hath slyly wound in himself under fair pretenses of necessity and the like, to untwist these sacred bonds."²⁸³ Intentional cooperation does have sweet and precious fruits But also bad. But unintentional too. We need to prepare for that possibility.
Whether Hobbes was a consistent Hobbesian, then, is doubtful. But he did express vividly the results of selfishness. An example of the “Hobbesian” confusion in modern thinking is what is known in economics as the Voting Paradox. It is “paradoxical,” notes the economist, that people bother to vote at all in large elections, because prudence would keep them at home. No one vote will affect the outcome---unless the American presidential election of, say, 1856 was literally an exact tie, a vanishingly improbable event in prospect, and false in retrospect. A prudent man would therefore never vote, if voting had (as it does) the tiniest inconvenience.

And yet people do vote, and did in 1856. Uh, oh. Well. Some other motives than prudence must be explaining the behavior. Love, perhaps. Or Justice. What I have called the S variables of society, speech, the Sacred as against the P variables of profit, price, prudence, the Profane.²⁸⁴ As George Santayana said of English liberties in America, “These institutions are ceremonial, almost sacramental. . . . They would not be useful, or work at all as they should, if people did not smack their lips over them and feel a profound pleasure in carrying them out.”²⁸⁵ Sic transit an entirely self-interested theory of voting for the Northern tariff before the Civil War, or the free coinage of silver, or New Deal spending. It won’t do to say, as the great economist George Stigler said to me once in angry rebuttal, that if the “observable implications” of the prudence-only model fit, that is all we need to know. Considerations of statistical power and specification error aside (I say to my economist colleagues), participation in elections is an observation, too, my dear George, an observation that annihilates the anti-Smithian theory before it has had time to speak.

The economist Tyler Cowen is one of the numerous recent challengers of the Hobbesian line of prudence-only in the social sciences. The virtues of faith and hope are also demanded by human societies, especially human societies with language. True, the mere survival of a society depends on solving the problem of order, through what Hume called the “artificial” (that is, profitable, technical, social, interested, and quantitative) virtues of prudence, temperance, and justice. But as Cowen notes “the developed Western democracies do not appear to face imminent collapse” of the sort that Hobbes worried about (a worry quite reasonable in 1651). “The liberal tradition. . . should turn its attentions to questions of symbolic and aesthetic value, such as what we imagine ourselves to be, what symbols we demand from our government, and what we find beautiful.”²⁸⁶ As Machiavelli realized in his republican writings (as against The Prince), there is no reason why the aestheticization of politics should be a monopoly of fascists of the extreme right or of the extreme left (thus Mussolini, who started as a socialist: “I am not a statesman, I am a mad poet”). We need to encourage also, Cowen argues, what Hume called the “natural” (that is, sacred, spontaneous, private, passionate, and qualitative) virtues of courage and love, faith and hope in the arts. Cowen believes that beauty is a support for a free society (in his earlier books he has argued that it is a product of a free society). “The developed Western democracies do not appear to face imminent collapse or revolution, and at least temporarily they appear to have solved the problem of political stability. The liberal tradition therefore should turn its attention to . . . what we imagine ourselves to be, what symbols we demand from our government, and what we find beautiful,” which is to say faith and hope, courage and love, and elevated forms of justice and temperance, and even prudence.

A central example in the modern understanding of Hobbes is the so-called prisoner’s dilemma. The original story from early 1950s game theory here is: two prisoners in an alleged conspiracy, Jack and Jill, are questioned by the police separately. What should Jack do? If he keeps faith, and Jill in a distant cell does, too, they will both have to set be free: no evidence. But if he keeps faith and Jill defects he gets 20 years. If on the other hand he defects and Jill does, too, each gets 5 years—each gets time off for admitting to the conspiracy. Since Jack can't be sure of Jill's faithfulness, he defects, rationally. By choosing defection he assures that he worst that can happen to him, regardless of what she does, is 5 years. If he keeps faith the worst that can happen to him is a lot worse: 20 years. But she reasons the same way. So they both defect, rationally, and both get five years, though if they had (irrationally) kept faith they could have gone free.

Prisoner's dilemmas litter the social landscape. For example, if all fishers restrained themselves a little the lake would restock. But each individual fisher has an incentive to defect from social cooperation, and fish early and late. So cooperation breaks down, and the lake is overfished. Prudence, argued Hobbes, would lead men in a state of nature to defect from social arrangements. At least this is what he says in his famous 13^th chapter of Leviathan: “If a covenant be made wherein. . . the parties [must] . . . trust one another . . . it is void.”

The Hobbes Problem has misled most serious thinkers about society since he posed it. The exciting and endlessly formalizable problem is, Will a mass of unsocialized brutes form spontaneously a civil society? Will the prisoners and the fishers cooperate to save their collective selves? Hobbes’ answer was, No, not without a leviathan state; otherwise one can expect society to be a war of all against all and the life of man, etc., etc. Hundreds of other men have provided their own solutions.

The Hobbes Problem, when you think of it, is very peculiar. Its methodological error is taking the condition of mere nature, “before” all laws, as relevant to actual societies. It is the blackboard error. Why would it be interesting to know about the behavior of a mass of unsocialized brutes, when every human being is in fact already socialized, already under the eye in Smith’s terms of an Impartial Spectator? Such a doubt simply does not occur to most men, such as the political scientist Robert Putnam or the economic historian Douglass North. Bernard Williams remarked that “If the test of what men are really like is made, rather, of how men behave in conditions of great stress, deprivation, or scarcity (the test that Hobbes, in his picture of the state of nature, imposed), one can only ask again, why would that be the test?”²⁸⁷

Women already know that humans, for example, are raised in families, and therefore are already socialized. Yet men have been fixated on the Hobbes Problem, without making the slightest progress in solving it, for three centuries now. From both the left and the right it is considered clever among men to say, as they used to say in the Party, “it is no accident that” interest reigns. As Annette Baier puts it, “preoccupation with prisoner’s and prisoners’ dilemmas is a big boys’ game, and a pretty silly one too.”²⁸⁸ Or Virginia Held: "By now, as many wounds have healed, I have come to see not only that not all my life was or need be Hobbesian, but that perhaps little of life for most people is best prescribed for in terms drawn from the contractualist tradition."²⁸⁹ Or Carol Rose: “The lapse of community may occur only infrequently in our everyday lives, but this world of estrangement has had a robust life in the talk about politics and economics since the seventeenth century.”²⁹⁰ In the men’s talk.

The men’s talk became particular strange in the so-called “separation of spheres” around 1800. The political scientist Joan Tronto, for example, argues persuasively, that at the level of ethical theory the late 18^th-century saw a breaking up of a unified view, in which the virtues of the household and the marketplace were the same. She assumes with many others that the male realm of long-distance trade was the cause, since it was without morality. It was a field of “unlimited economic acquisition,” she says, as though greed were peculiar to modern capitalism.²⁹¹ In fact trade always requires morality. It often turns out that people who write this way are depending on Karl Polanyi’s account of economic history.²⁹² I don’t think Polanyi’s mistake is necessary for Tronto’s own argument. It is not necessary for 18^th-century long-distance trade to represent a qualitative break with earlier forms of economy, as it was not.

The separation of spheres did not make a great deal of sense, either as ethics or as science. An example. A common property resource, such as a lake for fishing or a park for picnicking, will always be overused if people are prudence-only, unspeaking (or perhaps “unspeakable”) Max U types. The fish will be overharvested, to extinction. The park will be strewn with trash, and the life of man will be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. In 1994 three economists at the University of Indiana, Elinor Ostrom, Roy Gardner, and James Walker, looked into the matter in full historical (“field settings”) and experimental detail. As they note, Thomas Hobbes “justified the necessity of a Leviathan on the frailty of mere words” (Ostrom et al., 1994, p. 145). In his own words, "the bonds of words are too weak to bridle men's ambition, avarice, anger, and other passions, without the fear of some coercive power" (Hobbes, 1651/1914, p. 71).

But this is not so. In the world as it is people don't behave always as Max U, ignoring every virtue but the virtue of prudence. In Ostrom et al.'s amusingly stilted language, "Studies of repetitive common property resource situations in field settings show that appropriators [e.g. fishers in a common lake] in many, but by no means all, settings adopt cooperative strategies that enhance their joint strategies without the presence of external enforcers" (p. 148). That is, in the real world, and even without a Leviathan government making it happen, you find that people often cooperate in getting the most out of a resource such as fish in a lake, instead of cheating for their personal gain and ruining the resource for all.

Ostrom et al. tried it out in the laboratory, letting the experimental subjects talk to each other, sometimes just one time and sometimes many times. They found that when the players were not allowed to talk at all the joint rewards were low. But when they talked, everything changed. The more the kids were allowed to talk the closer they came to achieving the best payoff for the group. The talking players certainly never adopted what is known in game theory as the "trigger" strategy, that is, punishing defectors by initiating a war of all against all. As someone put it, "Yeah, someone is cheating [he didn't know who it was], but that is the best we can do" (p. 156). In another experiment someone said, "Go for a free-for-all? Shucks, no, we all lose" (p. 159). The “shucks” makes one worry that the choice of genial Hoosiers as experimental subjects is biasing the result; but such results have for twenty years been pouring out of all the economic laboratories, such as those in fifteen small-scale societies worldwide studied by Heinrich et al. in 2004. Time to take the science seriously.

And communication, whether free or costly---Ostrom et al. charged the players money to engage in periods of negotiation---radically increased the amount of cooperation. True, the "experiments should not be interpreted as supporting arguments that communication alone is sufficient to overcome repeated dilemma problems in general. . . . [Players] might well want to add the sword to a covenant" (p. 169). That is, the pious hope that "better communication" can solve all the world's problems---Darfur, for example, or Kosovo---is often vain. But the opposite conclusion is not sustainable either---that talk is merely "cheap" and language does not matter for economic outcomes in foreign relations or in marketplaces.

Prudence doesn’t work as politics; nor does it work as economic history---this contrary to my former beliefs. It is language, and the ethical commitments of an open-ended Oakeshottian conversation that make the modern world. Rationality (against Weber) is not our lives. The decades around 1700 in Europe saw an ethical turn, a business civilization, bourgeois virtues, taking place in language.

Chapter 16:

Prudence-Only is Refuted

by Experience and Experiment
To accept such an absurd mental experiment as the prisoner’s dilemma as the only frame for answering all questions about why societies hang together is, in other words, a scientific mistake. It depends, as the Voting Paradox and the Hobbes Problem do, on a Max-U, prudence-only premise which is commonly contradicted by the facts. People do not always cooperate, true. But neither do they always defect, which is what the prisoner's dilemma implies, strictly, always. The life of man even without subordination to a leviathan state is only sometimes a state of war. Often enough, as Hobbes recognized, the very leviathan was the cause of the war.

In actual prisoner’s-dilemma experiments men and women cooperate far above the level predicted by the prudence-only model. A revealing feature of the experiments is that the only people who do not cooperate at such levels, and who do approach the trained Benthamite economist’s level of defection are . . . trained Benthamite economists.²⁹³ Another revealing feature is that if the experiments allow the participants to speak to each other the percentage of cooperation rather than defection shoots up. Language (as Adam Smith noted) is the great social binder.

The “ultimatum game” is another widely used test of prudence-only. One of the parties is endowed with (say) $10 under the following conditions: he is to propose to the other player a split of the $10 between them, such as $5 each, or more selfishly $9.99 to himself and 1 cent to the other, or whatever. The other player must without discussion accept or reject the offer. If she rejects it, neither party gets anything at all. The game is society in a nutshell. If we will but cooperate with each other we will all gain, as we do under the gigantic cooperative game of modern market capitalism. The prudence-only character, Max U, will of course offer to give the other player only 1 cent, since he has not an ounce of justice or love in his makeup. If his companion Maxine U is also a prudence-only character, she will count herself lucky to get even the 1 cent. Both are better off under Max’s unjust offer, so both if motivated by prudence-only should be satisfied.

But they aren’t. In actual experiments people routinely make offers closer to 40-60 (the average outcome) or even 50-50 (the most common outcome). That is, justice matters, and people regard justice as equality. No one will be surprised, by the way, that women in such experiments are notably fairer than men; nor that allowing the players to talk to each other dramatically reduces inegalitarian offers. In an inegalitarian society, such as England in 1600 or Japan in 1867 (or even in 1941), a Proposer who was the Duke of Norfolk or the daimyo Satsuma would presume that he was due in justice a large share, say 90%, and the peasant Acceptor, too, would presume that he should justly, humbly accept his 10%. But no one except a lunatic of prudence would suppose in any society that going all the way to $9.99 and 1 cent is going to evoke an accepting attitude. Yet exactly such lunacy is the prestigious theory in modern economics.

The criticism of prudence-only does not imply that the virtue of prudence is a nullity, that justice-only or love-only reign instead. The loony version of prudence is what is being criticized, the version that says it operates without any other virtues, always.

If you see a $20 bill on the floor you will, unless you are Bill Gates, stoop to pick it up. If you see a penny you probably will not. People attend to prudence, and they must attend to it if they are to flourish in a fallen world. This is obvious. Prudence is a virtue, and widely practiced, even if modified by other virtues---modified by a proper self-esteem, for example, that resists picking up the penny; or a love that resists charging ones children for lunch. Only the modified, “satisficing” approximation to prudence makes much sense anyway, considering the limited powers of calculation in humans and, especially, their attention to other virtues, such as courage and love and faith.

A modified prudence suffices for most economic arguments, and some of the most surprising. Economists have contributed mightily to social theory by working out the implications of an approximate, $20-bill prudence. Their models are often expressed as exactly prudence-only, and the mathematization of economic theory, and especially the adoption of the theorem-and-proof values of the Department of Mathematics as against the simulation-and-approximation values of the Department of Physics, has encouraged such unnecessary exactitude.²⁹⁴ But approximate prudence does 99% of the analytic work. For example, you might think that a scheme in a famine to buy bread and sell it to the poor at subsidized prices would benefit the poor. No, said the Irish economist Mountiford Longfield (1802-1884), using an approximate, $20-prudence. The scarce bread has somehow to be allocated. So buying it in order to sell it cheap would merely double the market price, leaving the price at which it is then sold to the poor unchanged. Or again, you might think that selling admission to the King Tut exhibit at the Field Museum at a price that results in long lines would be good for the customers, since the price is low. No, any economist would say. You are missing the value of the queuing time, which in equilibrium must, even for moderately prudent customers, become roughly equal the difference between the market-clearing price and the too-low actual price. And so on for hundreds of more or less startling pages of books on economics.²⁹⁵

So real people do pay attention to approximate prudence. But the experimental results and the ordinary experience of life shows that they regard temperance, courage, justice, love, hope, and faith, too. Christina Bicchieri wrote in DDDD a devastating survey. . . . Crushing evidence from game theory, Herb Gintis, etc.

And the experiments, and common experience if judged free of anti-bourgeois prejudice, suggests that market societies are more, not less, concerned with non-prudential considerations. Jean Ensminger, summarizing experimental results since 1978, writes that “something appears to trigger fair-mindedness in association with exposure to market institutions. . . . Among those selling either their labor or their goods, there may be a higher premium placed on reputation, and . . . one way of signaling a good reputation is to behave fair-mindedly. Eventually, this norm appears to be internalized.”²⁹⁶ Yes. But one sees this behavior in playgrounds, well before much selling or buying. The anthropologist NNNN Fiske regards fair-mindedness as an early developmental stage in children, to be followed at age 8 or so by an acknowledgement of exchange value.²⁹⁷ A society of adults taught to be fair-minded may then teach their children, who henceforth take it as a faithful habit. But this doesn’t appear to explain the playground. Joseph Henrich writes in the same volume (edited by him) of experiments in non-market societies: “Those who do not customarily deal with strangers in mutually advantageous ways may be more likely to treat anonymous interactions as hostile, threatening, or occasions for opportunistic pursuit of self-interest.”²⁹⁸

And the evidence is overwhelming that they do. Against it is the custom of hospitality to strangers that so startles city people venturing into non-city societies. Genesis 18:1-15 tells of Abraham’s warm hospitality to the three strangers, one of whom turns out to be Yahweh Himself. In the folk tales such hospitality is commonly rewarded---here by the birth of Isaac---as though to encourage it in societies without Holiday Inns. The words for “guest” and “enemy” in Latin both derive from Indo-European *ghostis, “stranger,” from which comes English “guest.” The uneasiness is echoed in the double meaning of “host” as “one who treats guests,” derived from Latin hospes, and as “a large army,” derived from the related Latin hostis. But the explicitness of the custom, and the terrible punishments in the folk tales for its violation (Jack in the Beanstalk is one example), shows how egregious is any consideration for strangers.

The job in modern ethics is to distinguished the other virtues from prudence. You get no ethical credit for doing well by doing good. Machiavelli thought it likely that “corruption” was the natural state, that is, the elevation of a selfish prudence over justice or love in a republic. The political scientist James Q. Wilson, who during the 1950s and 1960s was well known for being eager to bring considerations of “rational choice theory” into his field, for example, starts his chapter on duty (I would call it faith) by arguing that “we usually tell the truth and keep our promises because it is useful to do so” (1993, p. 99). His argument is necessary to be credible in the prudence-worshipping culture we have had in English since the 18^th century. The modern jibe---and it does seem to be modern, something new in the past couple of centuries in the West---is to uncover a selfish interest in every good deed. Remember the historians’ suspicion about the motives for charity in 17^th-century Holland or 18^th-century England. Having made the modern concession to ethical cynicism Wilson ventures that “sometimes,” even “often,” we “may” evince faith against what prudence would call for.

Hume skewered the argument, so common in Bentham and Benthamites, that if one is found to get some pleasure for a virtuous act, then mere pleasure must be the only motivation. Such philosophers “found, that every act of virtue or friendship was attended with a secret pleasure; whence they concluded, that friendship and virtue could not be disinterested. But the fallacy of this is obvious. The virtuous sentiment or passion produces the pleasure, and does not arise from it. I feel a pleasure in doing good to my friend, because I love him; but do not love him for the sake of that pleasure.”²⁹⁹ If a mother gets some entertainment from her child, then she must be motivated entirely by the entertainment value, right? No, not right. The argument is widespread among social philosophers who regard Ockam’s Razor as the only principle of science worth attending to: as Hume remarked elsewhere, it seems “to have proceeded entirely from that love of simplicity which has been the source of so much false reasoning in philosophy.”³⁰⁰

Wilson is in his maturer years eloquent on the subject. “Hiding behind what Hervey Cleckley called ‘the mask of sanity,’ the psychopath is the extreme case of the nonsocial personality,” that is, someone motivated by prudence only. “If man were simply the pure calculator that some economists and game theorists imagine, this is what he would be.”³⁰¹

Nor does biology rescue the “Hobbesian” hypothesis of selfishness, as many recent enthusiasts for evolutionary psychology and sociobiology have believed it does. For there is a biology of love as well of prudence. Robert Axelrod, relying on the work of the British sociologist Tony Ashworth, recounts the birth of ethics in the trenches of World War I. A German unit from Saxony apologized loudly to a British unit facing it when (as the Saxon spokesman put it) “that damned Prussian artillery” back behind the front lines lobbed a shell into the British lines during an informal truce. “The cooperative [and vocal] exchanges of mutual restraint,” writes Axelrod, “tended to make the two sides care about each other’s welfare.” Prudence-only breaks down when the payoffs to prudence include love: “the very experience of sustained mutual cooperation altered the payoffs of the players, making mutual cooperation even more valued than it was before.”³⁰² Axelrod draws the moral: “behavior and outcomes. . . affected preferences.”

A dog, such as my own, or yours, may have a predisposition to love from a prudent biological instinct for survival. The current theory is that dogs evolved themselves, so to speak, as genial scavengers in Chinese camps of hunter-gatherers c. 12,000 B.C. A modern dog may then, if handled kindly and given tactically sound treats of Liva-Snaps, come to love her particular mistress. That is: love can be entirely “selfishly” generated, by a selfish gene in Canis familiaris or by self-preserving ingratiation by a particular dog or by Pavlovian response evoked by a mistress running an experiment in behaviorism. Some behavior of Canis familiaris or my dog, named Will Shakespeare, can be explained, then, as prudence only in the narrow sense.

But once an actual dog (Willie, say) has “selfishly” acquired the character of loving, say, Deirdre, there is no longer any point in describing his behavior as selfish, run by prudence only. To express the point in the high-school version of an antique positivism in which economists find comfort, prudence will not “predict well.” Willie will now sacrifice his life for his mistress. He will tolerate any abuse. He simply loves. He regards his mistress to some degree as sacred, though limited by the doggy absence of language. An actual dog, Greyfriars' Bobby, a Skye terrier, so loved John that when John died the dog guarded the tomb in Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh for fourteen years, until 1872, when he himself died. Such loving parts of my Willie’s behavior will not be explicable as rational or selfish. In other words, Willie loves.

I had a student who during his service in the Swedish army was being taught with other recruits how to activate large, modern grenades and then throw them over a little earthen hill, where they exploded harmlessly. Alongside every recruit, furthermore, stood a wide, upright steel pipe with a cave under its earth-side end, where you could drop the live grenade if for some reason you suddenly didn’t want to throw it over the hill. The sergeant in charge had warned the recruits to take off any rings, to prevent a live grenade getting entangled in the ring, becoming unthrowable and killing everybody.

The worst happened: a recruit had not taken off his wedding ring, had pulled the pin on the grenade, and only then had found to his horror that he couldn’t get rid of it, entangled in the ring. The sergeant leapt to the side of the terrified young man, seized the arm with the about-to-explode grenade held fast, and plunged the recruit’s arm and of course his own into the nearest pipe. Not a moment too soon. Both men’s arms were blown off. But a dozen lives were saved.

Rational behavior, prudence-only style, or not? If the sergeant had had hour or so to work out the costs and benefits on a rough balance sheet, with the help of an investment counselor and a personnel specialist from the Swedish Ministry of Defense at hand, yes, it could perhaps be counted rational. He would lose his arm but gain lasting glory. His career would flourish. Or at least his pension would be safe. But in the actual event no one believes that a prudence-only calculation “explains” his behavior. He did what he did because he was a trained soldier, who had made himself and been made by others to have a certain character, so that in the crisis he would act well. It is a tradition in the Swedish army back to Gustavus Adolphus.

The sergeant’s training might have been “rational.” His action was not. We might say the Swedish sergeant acted “instinctively,” but that is a loose a way of talking. Would you yourself do such a thing “instinctively”? He acted out of his socially formed, sacred identity as a non-commissioned officer responsible for other soldiers, instantly, unreflectively, uncalculatingly, just as he had to. Remember Lord Jim in Conrad’s novel, who did not fulfill his life’s training as a merchant marine officer, deserting an apparently sinking boatload of pilgrims bound for Mecca.

And even “irrational” training can create a character of use, as medical-school deans and hospital administrators seem to believe in subjecting their students and residents to 24-hour shifts. Maurice of Nassau, who commanded the Dutch wars in the first decades of the Republic, invented the modern system of drill in musket armies. He was inspired by classical models (he was an educated man: thus did Erasmian literacy pay off on the battlefield). When his drills proved successful in defending the Dutch Republic against mighty Spain the drills were adopted by everyone in Europe with any sense, as for example Gustavus Adolphus, and Louis XIV’s Lieutenant Colonel “Martinet” and Cromwell’s New Model army and the armies of little Prussia coming into her own. The apparently bizarre parade-ground drill in fact instilled a character of instant obedience far from the parade. When told in the face of onrushing cavalry or man-crushing cannon balls to stand and load their muskets (following the fully 42 orders into which Maurice broke the whole) they would follow orders strictly, contrary to every prudent passion.³⁰³

As Albert Hirschman notes, vexation about “the imperviousness of the passions to reason” justified a good deal of cynicism about the virtues in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.³⁰⁴ Perhaps that is why the virtues dropped out of favor. A Machiavellian, virtù-only view seemed only common sense in a Europe willing to burn and pillage for a doctrine of justification by faith in the love of Jesus Christ alone. Preaching the virtues has since then been accounted naïve, if not pernicious. It is the passions and the interests we must study. Western Europeans then were fixated on “the passions” in the way they were 1890-1945 on “race” or 1910-70 on the “unconscious.”

Yet among our passions is a passion for the Good. This is what is missing in the Hirschman view. Passions offset by prudence is the world of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Mandeville. They are certainly part of the story of intellectual Europe n the transition to a business-dominated civilization. But the English moralists and the Scottish Enlightenment argued that is prudence within other virtues and vices is the better model. John Dwyer, for example, has argued that the Scottish moralists “attempted to mold modern yet moral social leaders who could assert the values of community over the selfish interests of the market place.”³⁰⁵

Like John Mueller and Philippa Foot and James Q. Wilson, I write my own book “to help people recover the confidence with which they once spoke about virtue and morality.”³⁰⁶ All these writers have complained, as Wilson puts it, about the strange modern “effort to talk ourselves out of having a moral sense.”³⁰⁷ Humean skepticism about ought/is has long since been exploded, but you will find economists ignorant of philosophy expounding it as fresh and decisive news. The anthropologists’ discovery that not everyone dresses for dinner and the psychologists’ claim that much of what we do has subconscious motivations are too easily taken as good reasons to dump the virtues, supplementing the cruder and older argument, still lively, based on disdain for organized religion (because the priests are hypocritical about virtues, we lay people have a license). Some modern businesspeople---and more plainly the artists and intellectuals who talk of modern businesspeople---have tried to talk themselves out of having a moral sense. A rhetoric of savvy and cynical prudence has crowded out the other virtues.

Especially in business. Like Wilson and especially like John Mueller I think that in fact business has been founded on ethics. But the modern temper has denied the foundation. The results have been a frank amoralism that is unnecessary for business; indeed, bad for it; and anyway bad for businesspeople, which is what most of us are in these latter days. As Adam Smith put it, complaining of an early contributor to the dissing of ethics, to imagine that the world runs on prudence only “taught that vice which arose from other causes to appear with more effrontery, and to avow the corruption of its motives with a profligate audaciousness.”³⁰⁸ And as the late Robert Solomon (well named), who wrote a good deal on the matter, says about business ethics, “the philosophical myth that has grown almost cancerous in many business circles, the neo-Hobbesian view that ‘it’s a jungle out there’ and ‘it’s every man for himself,’ is the direct denial of the Aristotelian view that we are all . . . members of a community.”³⁰⁹ Participation in a polis or a market or a corporation, Solomon argues, results in an “enlargement of the self as a thoroughly social self and not an isolated Hobbesian or Lockean self”[p. 257], or as Leibnitz put it at the time, a “monad.” We are in fact, said the wise Scots, poly-ads, or polis-ads, members of families or other loving groups.

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A modern case in point is a famous article by the dear departed Milton Friedman that is supposed to have argued that the only responsibility of the manager of a corporation is to maximize the value of the stock held by its owners. I have noted elsewhere that Friedman is misread, and that the actual sentence in which he asserts this duty ends with a clause "while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom."³¹⁰ But anyway Friedman has been read as prudence only, to which the philosopher Daniel Hausman has offered a devastating criticism. If Max U is supposed to characterize managers, it is "mysterious," Hausman notes, how they came to be so faithfully subordinated to the owners. "Just how the internal structure of a firm is supposed to insure that a set of knaves acts so as to maximize the net returns for the firm is deeply mysterious" [p. 75]. Friedman is here said to be preaching virtue—a particularly narrow version of virtue, to be sure, but both preaching and a virtue. It is inconsistent to claim that preaching virtue within corporations is bad if you say it is bad for managers to increase their personal prestige in a community, say, by giving away the shareholders’ money to local charities, or taking the corporation off on programs of social responsibility with which the shareholders do not agree.³¹¹

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A philosophy student of mine, Clemens Hirsch, has challenged me to give an account of doves facing at least some hawks. He refers to the toy “biological” model in game theory in which some people are doves (that is, cooperators) but others are hawks who eat doves (that is, takers of advantage). In a world with no doves, the hawks would starve---so that can’t be an equilibrium. In a world with only a few hawks the population of hawks would grow, so that can’t be an equilibrium, either. Some sort of balance arises.

But experiments and experience suggest that dovish behavior often results in induced dovish behavior by the other. And I would claim that the mere, incessant chatter since Machiavelli about hawks has damaged such cooperation. Yet Hirsch is surely correct that we need to ask “How does the virtuous agent Max V [Hirsch’s witticism: “maximum Virtue,’ as contrasted with “maximum Utility”] behave in interactions with less virtuous agents? How does max V behave in an interaction with Max U, somebody who will take every opportunity to gain short-term [or I would say, long-term] advantage?”³¹² The answer I think lies in the development of what Pocock calls “manners” and I would call “bourgeois virtues,” in England, 1600-1776.