"The virtues and vices are all put in motion by interest"
About this Quote
Cold comfort, this: morality doesn`t descend from heaven so much as it rises from the ledger. La Rochefoucauld`s line is built like a trapdoor, dropping the reader from the flattering story we tell about virtue into the less glamorous mechanics underneath. "Put in motion" matters. Virtues and vices aren`t fixed traits; they`re responses, activated when something is at stake. Interest is the hidden spring in the clockwork, the motive force that makes generosity, courage, prudence, cruelty, and hypocrisy suddenly appear right on cue.
The sting is his refusal to grant virtue a special exemption. If both saintliness and sin are animated by interest, then the moral world looks less like a battlefield between good and evil and more like a marketplace of incentives, where even nobility can be a well-disguised strategy. That`s not quite the same as saying everyone is selfish; it`s sharper. He suggests we are skilled at laundering interest into principled language, and that society is complicit because it prefers the clean story to the accurate one.
Context does a lot of work here. Writing in the orbit of 17th-century French court life, La Rochefoucauld watched reputation function as currency and etiquette as a mask. In that environment, disinterestedness is not a virtue; it`s a liability. His maxim reads like field notes from a place where survival depends on reading motives, where "character" is often just ambition with better manners. The brilliance is its portability: it indicts courtly flattery, but it also anticipates modern politics, branding, and virtue-signaling, all powered by the same engine - interest, dressed for the occasion.
The sting is his refusal to grant virtue a special exemption. If both saintliness and sin are animated by interest, then the moral world looks less like a battlefield between good and evil and more like a marketplace of incentives, where even nobility can be a well-disguised strategy. That`s not quite the same as saying everyone is selfish; it`s sharper. He suggests we are skilled at laundering interest into principled language, and that society is complicit because it prefers the clean story to the accurate one.
Context does a lot of work here. Writing in the orbit of 17th-century French court life, La Rochefoucauld watched reputation function as currency and etiquette as a mask. In that environment, disinterestedness is not a virtue; it`s a liability. His maxim reads like field notes from a place where survival depends on reading motives, where "character" is often just ambition with better manners. The brilliance is its portability: it indicts courtly flattery, but it also anticipates modern politics, branding, and virtue-signaling, all powered by the same engine - interest, dressed for the occasion.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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