Like Helvétius before him, d'Holbach presents an ethics in which virtue consists in enlightened self-interest.
Instead, the story revolves around real people attempting to get on with real lives in this universe - one in which virtue is not necessarily rewarded, in which a serial rapist and murderer can be glimpsed ascending to heaven because he has seen God's light, while a good man who does not love God will be cast out.
I have written no play in which virtue has been more celebrated than in this one.
I don't think there was a conspiracy, just an irony of history, in which virtues conflict in surprising ways.
All of this reinforces the important point that, as I put it early in this crisis, we've entered a looking-glass world in which virtue is vice and prudence is folly, and in which doing the responsible thing is a recipe for economic failure.
More broadly, if our economy has a persistent tendency toward depression, we're going to be living under the looking-glass rules of depression economics — in which virtue is vice and prudence is folly, in which attempts to save more (including attempts to reduce budget deficits) make everyone worse off — for a long time.
The Dhammapada ("Verses on the Buddhist Doctrine") is a fine example of the moralistic, aphoristic strain in Indian literature, in which virtue is extolled and vice condemned.
For example, when Kendrick Lamar says "Poetic justice, put it in a song" he's referring to the 1993 film "Poetic Justice" with rapper Tupac Shakur and Janet Jackson (who's sampled on the track), and "the literary device in which virtue is ultimately rewarded or vice punished, often in modern literature by a twist of fate".
Hardship isn't necessarily the crucible in which virtue is formed.
The priority is not justice and the public infrastructure to support it, in which virtue is achieved by collective effort.
