Sources of Virtue: The Market and the Community
探讨现代社会中市场与社区如何影响美德的形成,分析个体自主性增强后市场是否仍能催生支撑其运转的美德。
Abstract: Virtues are habits of character that advance excellence in all of ones endeavors. In the Aristotelian formulation, training in the virtues is driven by a sense of the “good,” that is, by a widely shared agreement on the components of a good society and on the roles (and appropriate virtues or excellencies) of the “social animals” that energize that society. In the modern era, however, a strong sense of community has been much diminished. Freedom from the restraints of the Church and other social institutions and an emphasis on individual autonomy has fostered a different ethical perspective, a perspective in which the market enters importantly into one’s conception of the good. Does the market generate virtues which in turn sustain it? What guides the development of virtue in market economies that are entering the “information superhighway,” and a new millennium as well?