Levy Rivers's Library tagged virtues → View Popular

02 Oct 08

classical republican virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and prudence, which are the political virtues that contribute to the ancient sense of contributing to the survival and flourishing of a polis,
you 'can test their adequacy by imagining a person or a community that notably lacks one of them. A loveless life is terrible; a community without justice is, too.'
2 more annotations...
- Neither lead to the ethical world of citizenship.
- McCloskey adds that Nussbaum is right: you can't get virtue Y from a starting point consisting only of virtue X. Y has to be in from the start. You have to put the rabbits in the hat if you are going to pull them out.That is, in order to have a society that shows prudence, justice, love, faith, hope, courage, and temperance we need to arrange to have people who are . . . . prudent, just, loving, faithful, hopeful, courageous, and temperate "from the start."

09 Apr 08

The argument
is an apologia in the theological
sense of giving reasons, with room
for doubt, directed to nonbelievers.
"Bourgeois virtues" is neither. Modern
capitalism does not need to be offset to
be good. Capitalism can, on the contrary,
be virtuous. In a fallen world the bourgeois
life is not perfect. But it's better
than any available alternative. American
capitalism needs to be inspirited, moralized,
completed. Two and a half cheers
for the midwestern bourgeoisie.
1 more annotations...
- I don't much care how "capitalism" is
  defined, so long as it is not defined a priori
  to mean vice incarnate.