The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce by Deirdre N. McCloskey
McCloskey’s sweeping, charming, and even humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities—from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich—overturns every assumption we have about being bourgeois. Can you be virtuous and bourgeois? Do markets improve ethics? Has capitalism made us better as well as richer? Yes, yes, and yes, argues McCloskey, who takes on centuries of capitalism’s critics with her erudition and sheer scope of knowledge. Applying a new tradition of “virtue ethics” to our lives in modern economies, she affirms American capitalism without ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical foundations.
Any reference on the economic history of moral development? Seems like a potentially important topic for research on moral circle expansion.
The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce by Deirdre N. McCloskey
h/t Gavin
Fwiw, I started reading this book but found it long-winded and not carefully argued so put it aside.