In its ethical capacity exemplary rhetoric has been maligned at least since the time of Kant's fatal pronouncement, “worse service cannot be rendered morality than that an attempt be made to derive it from examples.” The eighteenth-century rationalist could not accept that moral philosophy might legitimately be based upon the rhetoric of example, or rather, as it was known, reasoning from cases a posteriori. When it came to the metaphysical grounding of morals Kant famously rejected cases and everything circumstantial for that matter, preferring “categorical imperatives” over all things “hypothetical.” Such a tectonic shift away from rhetoric towards pure a priori reason comes as close as we're likely to get to locating the real modernity of Enlightenment thought and the origins of what Wittgenstein lamented as “the philosophers' contempt for the particular case.” Wittgenstein himself defied modern prejudice, invoking the example routinely in his own investigations (e.g., about the meaning of good), and a number of theorists, often following his example, now extol its virtues and acknowledge that moral reason “cannot be elucidated apart from its exemplifications.” Actually, examples have always been employed in philosophical ethics (e.g., Gyges' Ring, the Trolley Dilemma, the Brain in a Vat, etc.), serving in practice as a form of persuasion if not also assisting the formulation of solutions. In Kant's case it is now widely accepted that his ethics founders on an unwillingness to give the example, irrepressible in his own moral rhetoric, a rightful place in theory.