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But it is bourgeois virtues as a system and as a whole that is good. A simplified version of bourgeois virtues takes Prudence as all. Re-Use virtue table here. The passions, however, played against the virtues, and not merely against the interests; it was not merely a balance of Interests that tamed the passions. Not all selfishness.

A different, republican view is that true virtue is extraordinary. It is Machiavelli's view, and implies that only a few are fit to participate in politics. The republican pessimism of Italy merged in the 16th century with Protestantism in the north to produce a theory of passions barely under control. The fallen state of humans required societies to conserve on love, not depend on it. It was the great achievement of the Dutch Republic, says my colleague the historian Robert von Friedeburg, to govern among strangers. Literally strangers, as Wiep van Bunge noted on the same occasion: the Dutch term vreemdelingen was used for the lowest class of the Dutch cities, below the invoners, that is, unprivileged but resident population, and far below the burgerij, the guildsmen and holders of public office. "Republican provincialism," not some optimistic theory of democracy, ruled.

But the rise of prudence and quantification could, and in the event did, undermine the other virtues. The rise of prudence led naturally but unhappily in Europe to a collapsing of all virtues into it. Remember Midgley: sin is one or two virtues unbalanced. Collapsing all virtues into Love and Faith results in a theocracy. Collapsing all virtues into Hope and Courage results in war. Collapsing all virtues into Prudence results in the Enlightenment, but also alas Thomas Gradgrind.

The philosophical version of Prudence Only is often called Hobbesian. The identification of Thomas Hobbes with a modern, Prudence-Alone version of economics and political science is by now conventional, based on such passages as this, following on his axiom that the state of nature is a "war of all against all":

where every man is enemy to every man. . . . there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, . . . . no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Leviathan 1651, I, 13, p. 64f.

It is a fine statement of how prosperity for all depends on private property for some. And in the next chapter another passage that without the "-eths" could come from a 20th-century economist:

If a covenant be made wherein neither of the parties perform presently, but trust one another, in the condition of mere nature (which is a condition of war of every man against every man) upon any reasonable suspicion, it is void . . . . For he that performeth first has no assurance the other will perform after, because the bonds of words are too weak to bridle men's ambition, avarice, anger, and other passions, without the fear of some coercive power. . . . And therefore he which performeth first does but betray himself to his enemy.

Lev. I. 14, p. 70f.

The obvious mistake is the axiom ("upon any reasonable suspicion . . . the bonds of words are too weak") that family, civil society, ethical conviction has no effect, that power is all that "really" motivates people. Hobbes supposes here (though not consistently in all his work) that there is nothing aside from coercive power making people perform — it is part of his strict materialism. The axiom is of course false. And he leaps from a logically valid assertion about the condition of mere nature, under his erroneous axioms about why people behave as they do, to a scientific assertion about the extant world. Two faults in logic. So much for Thomas Hobbes.

But one must take care. Michael Oakeshott, who characterized Leviathan as "the greatest, perhaps the sole, masterpiece of political philosophy written in the English language," noted "a deplorable overconfidence about the exposure of faults in Hobbes' philosophy. Few accounts of it do not end with the detection of a score of simple errors." Unlike some of his modern rational-choice followers in, say, international relations, Hobbes was in truth quite aware of the power of words, as his very self-contradictions on the matter show. Stephen Holmes uses a reading of the posthumous work (posthumous because his friend Charles II thought it unwise to have it published) Behemoth: The History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England (finished in 1668) to argue that "Hobbes' preoccupation with the sources of human irrationality . . . clashes rudely with the 'rational-actor' approach that many commentators project onto his works. Despite a few memorable and citable passages, he does not conceive of man as an economic animal."

People in Hobbes-for example the royal and Parliamentary actors in the Civil War he had perilously lived through — are motivated by words, beliefs, norms, S-variables as much as by coolly calculated Interest. Thus Ronald Reagan's "evil empire" insult to the Russians was more than froth. It outraged the Soviet communists because they knew its truth, and felt the shame. Calculating machines would not be shaken by mere rhetoric, because Prudence-Alone is not a complete ethical world. Though Hobbes was interpreted as a theorist of rationality in his own time, by Christopher Wren, for example, and later by almost everyone, that is not his theory. He is a theorist of the passions, which he was vividly aware could be aroused by mere rhetoric. The word "rhetoric" first begins to acquire its present-day air of disrepute in the 17th century. No wonder Hobbes's readers have missed the point of his criticism of false speech. He has been misread the same way that Adam Smith has, as a Prudence-Alone theorist who thinks P rules without the bonds of words.

In the extant world, of course, as Hobbes would have agreed, some words do bind. We are governed by little else: the proverbs learned at Mother's knee, the ethical system of the playground, a teacher's rules, a friend's advice, an enemy's jibe, a highway code (written and enacted, two different ones), a lover's complaint; movies, cartoons, jokes; scriptures and sermons; advertising; gossip. Because this is evidently so, and because Europe was engaged in religious wars nominally about words such as "eucharist" and "predestination," Hobbes like many of his contemporaries was suspicious of eloquence. He and Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Newton, and the others devalued it at every turn, though of course practicing it with great skill. Among numerous self-contradicting assertions in this regard is, from Leviathan: "for metaphors . . . . seeing they openly profess deceit . . . to admit them into counsel, or reasoning, were manifest folly." Yes, dear Thomas, like speaking of a metaphor "professing" deceit, as though it were a man, or of a metaphor "admitted" into a council chamber. Yet one can sympathize with Hobbes, writing in England's time of troubles, or with any of those rhetorically brilliant enemies of rhetoric in the 16th century trying to bring sense to a continent which had taken leave of it.

The modern cynic (and he is legion) replies that "basically" or "really" or "ultimately" behind all the words is individual passion and the coercion that controls it. Hobbes does appear to believe that passions are usually men's motives. What he does not believe, Holmes shows, is that the passionless Prudence of the rational man dominates human affairs. Hobbes was no cool utilitarian, either in his own person or in his view of how people behaved.

* * * * *

He had nonetheless some strange beliefs about behavior, as behaviorists often do. When Hobbes speaks of families, for example, he attributes their cohesion to sexual attraction alone. No words of love bind. Concord in "the government of small families," he declares offhandedly in the great Chapter 13 of Leviathan, "dependeth on natural lust." He later repeats that he means "where there are supposed no laws of matrimony; no laws for the education of children," that is, in the state of mere nature. But he does not mention love within the family, and was never married himself (though he did father an illegitimate daughter, to whom he behaved honorably). Only the laws bind people, he says, with the cudgel propped in the corner. His brief mentions of human love in Leviathan would satisfy the crudest utilitarian: "That which men desire, the are also said to LOVE. . . . so that desire and love are the same thing." In Elements of Law (23.10; cf. Leviathan II.20) he identified the patriarch as a little king (a very common figure of speech in a patriarchal century), "and therefore I shall no more speak of [family and kingdom], as distinct, but as of monarchy in general." The very word "love" is not common in Hobbes, used often (one might say metaphorically) in the sense of prideful delight, as a "love" for ones own opinions. Perhaps Hobbes' life experience overcame his common sense. He was abandoned by his father and raised by an uncle. Still, he was treated lovingly all his life by the Cavendish family.

We are unsurprised to read in the Essays of Hobbes' employer and model that love, construed merely as lust and irrational infatuation, is "the child of folly":

They do best who, if they cannot but admit love [that is, banish it entirely], yet make it keep quarter [within its proper limits], and sever it wholly from their serious affairs and actions of life; for if it check [i.e., interfere] once with business, it troubleth men's fortunes, and maketh men that they can no ways be true to their own ends.

Bacon, Essays, "Of Love"

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

Is this Knight? "Nothing further from the law of love can be imagined, or indeed from ordinary human life. Our ends are not given at the outset of the game but are made by cumulated acts of sewing or severing. The serious affairs and actions of life entail human connection. ." Max U has those …… that Frank Knight described. One of them is love: "Concern for ourselves," as David Schmidtz puts it, "gives us something to live for. Concern for others as well as ourselves gives us more."

* * * * *

We have all seen the dissolution of "intentional communities," as they are called by sociologists, and it pains us. 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." 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. The S variables. 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." 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, George, an observation that annihilates the anti-Smithian theory before it has had time to speak.

The economist Tyler Cowen [sp?] 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 (... since the invention of language c. 60,000 BC). 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." 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 Ur-story 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 13th 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?"

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." 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." 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." In the men's talk.

To accept such an absurd mental experiment as the frame for answering all questions about why societies hang together, in other words, is a scientific mistake. Like the Voting Paradox, the Hobbes Problem is 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, P-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 Benthamite economist's level of defection are . . . Benthamite economists. 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 tested implication 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. The Prudence-Alone character, that Max U, will of course offer to give the other player only 1 cent, since he has no Justice or Love in his makeup. If his companion Maxine U is also a Prudence-Alone 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 or even 50-50. 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 was going to evoke an accepting attitude. Yet exactly such lunacy is the prestigious theory in modern economics.

A riff in the S&P section:

If you see a $20 bill on the floor you will, unless you are Bill Gates, trouble to pick it up. If you see a penny you will not. Therefore people regard P. This is obvious but not trivial, since it is the basis for most economic arguments. Arbitrage, or equilibrium.

But the ultimatum game implies that they regard S, too.

Paul Heyne:

The average split is 60-40. The modal split is 50-50.

Ensminger, Jean [a woman]. 2004 or so. "Market Integration and Fairness: Evidence from Ultimatum, Dictator, and Public Goods Experiments in East Africa." Forthcoming in Cooperation, Reciprocity and Punishment: Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies. Oxford University Press.

She finds on the basis of experiments since 1978 that people in market societies are more fair minded, not less. "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." (Ensminger, p. 33) Yes. But one sees this behavior in playgrounds, well before anyone has engaged in selling or buying. 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.

This must be the Ensminger thing.

Henrich writes, "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" (p. 38). 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 and Sarah's warm hospitality to the three strangers [read this]. Hostis/hospes etymology;; analogy in Greek? But the explicitness of the custom shows how egregious . . .

A simple answer to Friedman's +max value of firm argument, suggested by a remark by the philosopher of economics Daniel Hausman: if Max U is supposed to characterize managers, it is "mysterious," Hausman notes, how they are supposed to be 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 preaching virtue — a particularly narrow version of virtue, to be sure, but both preaching and virtue. It is inconsistent to claim that preaching virtue within corporations is bad. But in truth Friedman does not. Hausman, "Rationality and Knavery," "Rationality and Knavery," in Werner Leinfellner and Eckehart Köhler, eds. Game Theory, Experience, Rationality; Foundations of Social Sciences; Economics and Ethics: In Honor of John C. Harsanyi. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998, pp. 67-79. at http://philosophy.wisc.edu/hausman/papers/knave.htm

"I would argue that game theory has taught economists modesty. It is not easy to say what knaves are or what games they are playing." [p. 76]

"But a system with too few possibilities for free-riding can undermine public-spiritedness and moral commitments as well. Workers who have to punch a time clock may be more likely to leave when they have put in their eight hours than workers who are trusted to fulfill their responsibilities. People can become what they are assumed to be, and with too much regulation people may not be able to make trust-inducing overtures to one another." p. 75 of Hausman, referring [not quoting] (Pettit 1995, p. 225). Philip Pettit, "The Cunning of Trust", in: Philosophy and Public Affairs 24, 1995, pp. 202-25.

Sic transit all manner of histories of the economy and polity that suppose that all we need to grasp is Prudence.

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 in a republic of Prudence over Justice or Love. James Q. Wilson, for example, starts his chapter on Duty (I would call it Faith) by admitting that "we usually tell the truth and keep our promises because it is useful to do so" (1993, p. 99). The concession is necessary to be credible. 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 17th-century Holland or 18th-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." 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."

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, 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."

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-Alone 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." 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 BCE. 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 Will Shakespeare (so he is) 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 P variables alone. To express the point in the high-school version of an antique positivism in which economists find comfort, P variables 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, and S variables now apply, though limited by the doggy absence of language — thus the little sculptured dog carved curled up on a Victorian tomb stone, the emblem of a sentimental version of true love. 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, B = α + ΒP + yS + E.

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

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. Both men's arms were blown off. But a dozen lives were saved.

Rational behavior, P-variable style, or not? If the sergeant had had ten or fifteen minutes 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 Minister 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 P-variable 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 here that is too 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 didnot 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 they proved successful in defending the Dutch Republic his 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 the howl of 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.

As Albert Hirschman notes, vexation about "the imperviousness of the passions to reason" justified a good deal of cynicism about the virtues in the 17th and 18th centuries. Perhaps that is why the virtues dropped out of favor. A Machiavellian, virtù -Alone view seemed only common sense in a Europe willing to burn and pillage for a doctrine. Preaching the virtues has since then been accounted naïve. 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 1910-60 were 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. But the English moralists and the Scottish Enlightenment argued that is prudence within other virtues and vices is the better model. John Dwyer 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."

Like John Mueller and Philippa Foot and Y and James Q. Wilson, I write my own book "to help people recover the confidence with which they once spoke about virtue and morality." All these writers have complained, as Wilson puts it, about the strange modern "effort to talk ourselves out of having a moral sense." Humean skepticism about ought/is has long since been exploded, but you will find economists ignorant of philosophy expounding it as fresh 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." And as Robert Solomon (well named), who has written 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 [sic] for himself,' is the direct denial of the Aristotelian view that we are all . . . members of a community." 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 poly-ads, or polis-ads, members of families or other loving groups.

Clemens Hirsch [studert a EIPE] has challenged me to give an account of doves facing at least some hawks. 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?" {Hirsch 2006 "Can Max U and Max V Ever Become Good Neighbours?" Unpublished paper, Rotterdam: EIPE.], p. 4.