Hobbes, Rawls, Nussbaum, Buchanan, and All Seven of the Virtues
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Deirdre N McCloskey
Virtue ethics proposes a set of seven—four pagan virtues and three Christian—as a roughly adequate philosophical psychology. Hobbes tried to get along with one virtue, prudence, to which Rawls added a veiled virtue of justice. Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice adds the virtue of love. But in criticizing Rawls, she enunciates a “Nussbaum Lemma,” that is, a good society is unlikely to arise from over-simple models of ethical life. Since virtuous, flourishing societies are what we wish, we had better insert the virtues, as she puts it, “from the start.” James Buchanan's constitutionalism, for example, solves moral hazards in a Nussbaumian world, but leaves hanging the ethical start. To start a project ending in constitutional citizenship—or human capabilities, or justice as fairness, or a Leviathan state, or the categorical imperative, or the greatest happiness of the greatest number—we need already an ethical actor, embodying the seven principal virtues.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- Review of Robust Political Economy: Classical Liberalism and the Future of Public Policy
- Division of Labour in some Classical Concepts--An Attempt of Contemporary Theoretical Synthesis
- Hobbes, Rawls, Nussbaum, Buchanan, and All Seven of the Virtues
- Are Regulators Rational?
- "He Who is Unfit to Serve his Fellow Citizens Wants to Rule Them"--the Political Dimensions of Mises' Theory of Bureaucracy
Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- Review of Robust Political Economy: Classical Liberalism and the Future of Public Policy
- Division of Labour in some Classical Concepts--An Attempt of Contemporary Theoretical Synthesis
- Hobbes, Rawls, Nussbaum, Buchanan, and All Seven of the Virtues
- Are Regulators Rational?
- "He Who is Unfit to Serve his Fellow Citizens Wants to Rule Them"--the Political Dimensions of Mises' Theory of Bureaucracy
