The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

334 chapter 29epistemology between the two, are necessary to prevent “permissiveness”and, as they invariably put it, “anything goes.” They fear a “lack of discipline.”Their fear is neurotic and authoritarian. As James observed, “Therationalist, radically taken, is of a doctrinaire and authoritative complexion:the phrase ‘must be’ is ever on its lips.” 4 The material realists sound like aMonty Python skit on sado-masochism. John Cleese as the philosopher.And look: when the material realists become indignant about the terriblesophists like James and Rorty and McCloskey they are making an ethicalclaim that it is bad not to be a material realist. As I said.I have been saying so for quite a while, but have only recently grasped whatI was saying. In the first edition of The Rhetoric of Economics (1985) I wrote,You are more strongly persuaded that it is wrong to murder than that inflation isalways and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. ...To deny the comparison isto deny that reason and the partial certitude it can bring applies to nonscientificsubjects, a common but unreasonable opinion. There is no reason why the . . .pseudoscientific [assertion such as that] “at the .05 level the coefficient on M in aregression . . . is insignificantly different from 1.0” . . . should take over the wholeof persuasiveness, leaving moral persuasiveness incomparably inferior to it. 5I was reflecting Wayne Booth’s demonstration that to make ethics into“mere” opinion is a mistake. 6 Then I discovered that other people had saidapproximately the same thing. The philosopher Hilary Putnam, for example,declared that “to claim of any statement that it is true . . . is, roughly, to claimthat it would be justified were epistemic conditions good enough” and that“in my fantasy of myself as a metaphysical super-hero, all ‘facts’ would dissolveonto ‘values.’ ...To say that a belief is justified is to say that it is whatwe ought to believe; justification is a normative notion on the face of it.” 7Realism is a social, that is, a rhetorical, that is, an ethical necessity for anyscience. “Men demonstrate their rationality,” wrote Stephen Toulmin in1972, “not by ordering their concepts and beliefs in tidy formal structures,but by their preparedness to respond to novel situations with open minds.” 8Compare the virtue of humility. Such a definition of “rationality” casts in anew light the conventional philosophy of science about “rationally reconstructedresearch programs.” The philosopher and social psychologist RomHarré wrote in 1986 that “knowledge claims are tacitly prefixed with a performativeof trust.” 9 Compare the virtues of justice and good faith. Theeconomist Marc Blaug, who in other moods and in the same book supportsthe conventional philosophy of science, agrees: “There are no empirical,