The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

ethical realism 333The kind of realist I am, and am recommending that you admit you are,is an ethical realist. By this I do not mean that I am good, and you, if you donot agree, are bad. I mean that these agreements about Reality, such as thereality about the Battle of Gettysburg, are ethical judgments, things that weassert together we should believe in.We all admit, whatever our philosophical convictions, that the tablebefore us is real (small r) and that if we step heedlessly into the Oostzeedijkin Rotterdam on a busy Monday morning we are likely to get run down bya bicycle or a car or a tram. I don’t think that serious philosophical disagreementsare really—there it is again, signaling again a feature of ourspeech community—about such matters. The material realists, opposed tothe ethical realists, are fond of invoking the solidity of the table or the dangersof the Oostzeedijk Straat to criticize other philosophers. They say, “Youwould not for a moment survive out there without believing in our kind ofRealism.” But notice that material realist philosophers are not any better atsurviving the Oostzeedijk than are relativists and postmodernists like me.So it must be that the anti-material realists and the material realists themselvesare really talking about something other than tables and trams.I say they are talking about ethics, and I say it’s a good thing. An ethicalrealist says that what we know is not the objective world. She points out thatthere is no known test, to repeat, for whether we have correctly attached ourwords to the reality of Gettysburg. To put it philosophically, there is noknown test for ultimate ontology. And in any case, as literary critics note,the notion of “attaching” words to reality is a metaphor, since words arewords, not “reality.” The statement “the cat is on the mat” is not the samething as the fact of the cat being on the mat. The ethical realist thereforewants to give up the 2,500-year-old project of finding the test for attachmentbetween ways of saying things and Reality. It has not worked out, thehopeful project to find “Reality with the big R, reality that makes the timelessclaim, reality to which defeat can’t happen,” as William James put it. 2 AsRichard Rorty puts it, “It might, of course, have turned out otherwise. Peoplehave, oddly enough, found something interesting to say about theessence of Force and the definition of ‘number.’ They might have foundsomething interesting to say about the essence of Truth. But in fact theyhaven’t.” 3To this the material realists reply that their claim of True statementson the one hand and Real existence on the other, and a Brooklyn Bridge of