The intelligentsia thunders at the middle class, but offers no advice on how to be good within it. The only way to become a good bourgeois, say Flaubert and Sinclair Lewis and Paolo Pasolini, is to stop being one. Not having an ideal of bourgeois virtue, or devaluing the ideal by comparison with Christian and aristocratic virtue, leaves us unable to talk about virtue at all. We bourgeois are left without reasons for ethical standards. Good day, sir.
Ethics courses in business and in medical schools exhibit the dilemma.
Harvard Medical School has waxed ethical, too. The professors staffing the courses believe that ethical questions are matters of crisis. It is local knowledge, not universal, located in the camp or common or town. Consider the virtues of the three classes, matched to their character. The point is not to elevate bourgeois virtue over the others in some universal sense.