the salesman of a defective product, The Mechanics of Virtue, Matt Berry, aphorism 160

160

To ask the salesman of a defective product to be honest is to ask him to find another profession. If he should do so, he might now claim integrity. He has let go of a lower standard and lower image of himself and grasps the higher standard from which he now esteems himself to be not only superior to his previous identity but superior to all who hold to the previous standard. To say that he has been virtuous for the sake of virtue is to deny that he had the end of an imagined promotion within the ranks of society. It is a form of dishonesty to thrust this fact into the black box of unwanted and therefore unresolved facts. But that is precisely what integrity requires. Now he sells a defective morality.



A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism



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