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The Economy of Virtue and the Primacy of Prudence

Moral philosophy and the philosophy of moral education entail distinct projects. Moral philosophy aims, for example, at sketching the architecture of "the moral institution of life," whereas the philosophy of moral education must aim at describing how we enter it. How we are brought from our first nature as nonmoral creatures to our second nature as moral human beings--this is a central problem of moral education, but not of moral theory. If instead of asking what virtue is, we were to ask how it is acquired, we might approach an understanding of this passage from first to second nature and, therefore, of how the spread of virtue can take place. There are two views, one that the acquisition of virtue must not be difficult, the other that it cannot be easy. The first of these I call the prudential view, the second, the hard or Kantian view. An economic analysis of the matter will show that the best and second best worlds for the spread of virtue are those in which the cost of exercising virtue is small, not that its benefits are large, and those in which the benefits of evil are slight, not that its costs are great. This result argues for a view of incentives opposed to the usual one according to which we encourage virtue by increasing its rewards and discourage evil by enlarging its costs. But why study such economic dicta if they are notoriously prudential rather than moral? The answer is first, that the best and second best worlds for the spread of virtue may not be morally best, and second, that prudence is prior to morality in the order of learning. If we were not already, as a part of our first nature, prudential creatures, we could not later, as a part of our second nature, become moral creatures.