The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

29ethical realismThe virtues in the moral universe within really do exist, as much as thosestarry skies above. We claim to be “realists” of whatever sort because wewant to be able to use against others the rhetorical turn of declaring that“such and such [which we wish to hold] is really the case, True.” For example,we will want to if we are German pioneers of scientific history wie eseigentlich gewesen, “as it actually was.”There is no known test for whether we as historians of, say, the Battle ofGettysburg are in possession of the battle’s Reality, that Wesen. We can testwhether we have this or that fact right—Lee was suffering from a heartproblem, Longstreet had a cold, a professor of rhetoric was in command atLittle Roundtop. But the number of particular facts about the battle is infinite.As John Keegan observes, the history of a battle has a “rhetoric” thatinvolves choosing from the infinitude of particulars some few facts consideredimportant. 1 The only test for importance is our human rhetoric. Thereis no standpoint outside of humanity from which we can view the truth.The freshman who wrote on the final exam that “all history is bias becausewe can’t get outside our human point of view” was, as freshman often are,unconsciously wise.We are all in this sense realists. The warrant for Reality is that the statement“X is really true”—for example, the truth that Lee did not go rightbecause of his illness—amounts to saying that “in our rhetorical communityone should at least admit X.” For example, among us serious students ofthe battle, Marse Roberts is agreed to have been ill in July 1863, and his illnessis agreed to have been crucial.