Edith Wharton’s Ordinary Vices

Abstract

This essay develops a framework for exploring interpersonal ethics in Edith Wharton’s writing. Using political philosopher Judith Shklar’s analysis of “ordinary vices”—the commonplace harms we inflict on one another—it identifies four central vices in Wharton’s moral imagination: hypocrisy, cruelty, intellectual incuriosity, and moral inattentiveness. After exploring the status of these vices in Wharton’s fiction and nonfiction, the essay proceeds to rank them, suggesting that moral inattentiveness—the thoughtless pain caused by self-absorption rather than malice—stands at the top of Wharton’s hierarchy of vices. Unlike Shklar’s “liberalism of fear,” which worries about the cruelty caused by social institutions and state violence, Wharton’s ranking of the vices flows from her “conservatism of fear”—a position organized around a concern with cultural disintegration. Her prioritizing of moral inattentiveness, the essay concludes by arguing, amounts to a privatization and depoliticization of morality, reflecting an ethic of personal responsibility rather than social change.