McCloskey holds that market exchange cultivates moral virtues in participants.

Evidence

The Chicago School economist and virtue ethicist Deirdre McCloskey is one of the most explicit contemporary defenders of the thesis that commerce is sweet and civilising; she argues that, in making it necessary to negotiate mutually beneficial market exchanges, ‘as a civilized people must’, capitalism instils a series of ‘bourgeois virtues’: prudence, temperance, justice, courage, love, faith and hope. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 74

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘doux commerce’ thesis and to debates on the ethics of markets central to the reader’s purpose. — connects to: Competitive market culture displaces moral self-reflection in traders. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1468; Market making enforces a reciprocity norm that sustains the market itself — Karin Knorr Cetina & Urs Bruegger, Global Microstructures: The Virtual…, 87
• CANDY: Nerdy but light: the ‘bourgeois virtues’ list includes love, faith and hope — a fun fact about the market-as-moralist framing.

Broader Connections

• Competitive market culture displaces moral self-reflection in traders. #contradicts (0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1468
• Market making enforces a reciprocity norm that sustains the market itself #qualifies (0.75) — Karin Knorr Cetina & Urs Bruegger, Global Microstructures, 87