Two arguments to couch Realism
Take the following sketch.
Peaceful nations will only be succesful if other nations are peaceful. Cooperation is possible in peace. Warring nations however, by breaking the circle of confidence, can take undue advantage of other peaceful nations, as covered in games theory.
By acknowledging that any ethical theory is accessory to these types of such game theoretic political relations, we can avoid the pitfalls of idealism, such as political liberalism.
Now, you might say that it is pretty weak to justify a political personality based on the dubious application of a theory about rational choices. Well, game theoretic choices are an appropriate description of countless of choices that humans make on different levels – from the real life interrogation rooms to the strategic nuclear actions nations make. Caution! Realism is certainly not a theory of behavoir. Countless other factors affect the behavior of an individual, or a nation – sometimes contrary to rationality, or sometimes just irrelevant to whatever realism says, which is just another piece of intellectual artefact. No, Realism is an ethical choice, it is a guide to action, but it is also rooted in the belief that the adoption of its principle will advance a unit in a competitive environment. (Competitive means scarcity of different sources and endangerement to reproduction.) So in a way, there is a prediction made about the bahavior of something: the prediction is made about a population, about those who will reproduce – ie those who will exhibit the correct or optimal game theoretic answer, either by choice or by accident.
2) The nature of ethics
Ok, suppose that you still reject this argument. Then I have another one that is independent of rational choice theories. This has to do with a critique of our ethical reason, a la Kant – except I do NOT come up with the same results. His results are manifestedly wrong when you look at his treatment of lying. Out ethical sense is not rooted into anything transcendantal. You can find the error in Kant in just 2-3 paragraphs, where he commits an illegal operation. To illustrate, he first starts to question and doubt the common ethical sense and then asks where can its source be? The problem is that he asks the question only rhetorically, only as a litterary or oratory face front for his answer which he already has. This was the common method of writing and arguing in the 17th 18th c. I guess and his results suffered accordingly. The answer is that there is no answer to the question of source in ethics. If there were, ethics would be a science, which it is not. I mean we can make a science about ethics – which is kinda what I’m doing here, trying to describe the beast, but ethical choices cannot be justified by natural laws. Natural laws can inform the ethical choice – and indeed, perhaps we could push it and try to say that science is servile to our ethical sense, which would be appropriately pragmatic, but ethical guidelines cannot be elevated to the rank of natural law – ever. The two discourses are anti-thetical, and many a mistake was commited when the boundaries were trespassed.
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