And not about money. Damn money. I can make all the money we will need; certainly there seems to be no limit to what I can invent on the theme of female sex troubles. I don’t mean that, nor Utah either. I mean us. Love, if you will. Because it can’t last. There is no place for it in the world today, not even in Utah. We have eliminated it. It took us a long time, but man is resourceful and limitless in inventing too, and so we have got rid of love as last just as we have got rid of Christ.

“There is no place for it in the world today, not even in Utah.” — interesting comment on non-commercial values.

I think Nate may be suggesting that all too often the merchant is exluded from the “virtues” club. It goes without saying that the above mentioned virtues may be found in all worthy endeavors.

But why limit the discussion of these virtues to merchants amd commercialism? It seems to me these pedestrian virtues apply to almost any endeavor (warriors included) and do not signify some moral superiority to mercantilism per se. A vow of poverty can exhibit the same virtues, as can driving a race car or dancing on Broadway.

Now I am being intentionally vague about the meta-ethics. It may be that we think that all ethics ought to be thought of in terms of virtues. (I actually think that this is Ben Huff’s particular academic schtick and provided that I am not utterly mangling the philosophical concepts, I would be interested in what he has to say.) On this view, to be ethical is to cultivate the attributes associated with human excellence and perfection. I don’t know what role the perfection of something other than humanity operates as a good meta-ethical point of departure. However, I do think that something like Warrior Virtues hang together in a coherent normative way that is more than simply descriptive. They form an ethos. The same is true of merchants, I would suggest. My invocation of the language of virtue was meant to convey two important points: (1) I admire and value the mercantile ethos; and, (2) I recognize it as a seperate ethos whose connection to the the Gospel (or the ethos of the Gospel, or perhaps ethoi of the Gospel) is unclear to me.

There, doesn’t that make everything easier?

It doesn’t seem to me that the semantic origin of “virtue” supports ruthlessness or cruelty as being real “virtues.”

My least favorite workplaces have always been the one’s where the employees were the most critical of their own status. In a self-fulfilling way all the joy got sucked out the environment.

- attributed to Genghis Kahn