Might we distinguish morally fortunate from morally admirable character traits? It seems like these could come apart, e.g. if a trickster God decided to reward humanity with eternal bliss only if we all came to sincerely hate each other here on Earth. Hate would still be vicious, I take it; it's just that we've found a situation where vicious character is ultimately more beneficial than virtuous character. (It's not a logical truth that good people cause better consequences. So much the worse for being a good person, you might say in that case.)

Having said that, I like your point that the proper expression of virtuous character depends on one's institutional environment, and this may change over time faster than our cultural assumptions. But you can maintain this insight without falling into the conflation I warn against above.

At a minimum, we might think that a virtuous agent not only acts beneficially (“rightly”), but does so for the right reasons, i.e. because he appreciates – at least on some level – that his motivations are for the best. It had better not be a brute *coincidence* that he tends to serve the good. This sort of picture still allows for significant context-sensitivity in determining the proper expression or implementation of virtue, without collapsing it into the cruder evaluation of simply whether the character trait is beneficial.

Well yes, but most people think that certain activities are *good* not simply because they are particularly fit for achieving moral ends, but because they are part of, or ordered toward, the ultimate end: human flourishing (whatever that may be). In so far as free markets change the conditions and circumstances of attaining the “constituents of human welfare,” then obviously some of our ethical judgments will and should change. However, in so far as free markets adversely affect activities that aren't just instrumental in achieving various goods but are good in themselves, then I think there is a case to be made that free markets can corrode moral character.

Unless of course you think that no human act is per se moral or immoral and that the goodness or the badness of an action should be determined merely by its effectiveness in achieving the “various constituents of human welfare.” As many of the participants in the Templeton Foundation forum seem to deny this, it's not surprising you're disappointed in their answers. In other words, I don't think your disappointment is the result of the forum participants somehow missing the distinction and connection between moral ends and moral means or, for that matter, failing to appreciate “cultural lag.”

You know when Adam Smith says it is not through the benevolence of the butcher, baker and brewer that we expect our dinner, but through their regard of their self-interest? He didn't mean my this that regard of their self-interest *was* benevolence. Is this what you mean?

When you discuss moral virtue as a means to an end, however, let me hasten to add – as I think you intend – that the means-ends relationship is internal. We cannot characterize the end separately outside of any characterization of the means.

It is the telos of man that determines what qualities are virtues; and man moves towards the telos. To the extent that markets aggregate human action, they speed the move to that telos and give us new vehicles to continue that movement more efficiently.

This is perhaps an interesting feature of our form of capitalism – it does enormous good without requiring a perfectly pure heart of any agent.

Aggregation of what good there is in action ensues, while the manipulative and negative is largely canceled out in the competition of desire. Not that it's perfect, for no human institution can be so. But it is, demonstrably, improved and improvable.