Truth, Politics, Morality

Pragmatism and Deliberation

Cheryl Misak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134826179
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Cheryl Misak argues that truth ought to be reinstated to a central position in moral and political philosophy. She argues that the correct account of truth is one found in a certain kind of pragmatism: a true belief is one upon which inquiry could not improve, a belief which would not be defeated by experience and argument. This account is not only an improvement on the views of central figures such as Rawls and Habermas, but it can also make sense of the idea that, despite conflict, pluralism, and the expression of difference, our moral and political beliefs aim at truth and can be subject to criticism.
Anyone interested in a fresh discussion of political theory and philosophy will find this a fascinating read.

1 The problem of justification

Carl Schmitt and the aim of substantive homogeneity

Colonialisation, immigration, war, movement of refugees, redrawing of boundaries, and increased mobility and communication have made contemporary society highly pluralistic. Within any nation state, there are competing conceptions about how best to live a life, about what is good, and about appropriate religious, educational, and moral values. These differences may be magnified where there is civil strife or war, or between nations states where there is competition for territory or for dominance. Often disagreements become intractable and turn violent. Indeed, the liberal democratic hope for a peaceful future might seem these days rather naive. Michael Ignatieff captures the disappointment nicely:

With blithe lightness of mind, we assumed that the world was moving irrevocably beyond nationalism, beyond tribalism, beyond the provincial confines of the identities inscribed in our passports, towards a global market culture which was to be our new home. In retrospect, we were whistling in the dark. The repressed has returned, and its name is nationalism.

(1993: 2)

Of course, pluralism has been around for a long time and the need for moral and political philosophers to respond to it is not new. In this chapter I shall articulate some responses to the fact that values conflict and I shall display the anxiety about truth that often accompanies such responses. It appears to many that it is so difficult, and so dangerous, to maintain that there is one and only one truth that we ought to stay away from truth-talk in morals and politics.

One way philosophers and political theorists have responded to the fact of pluralism has been to try to set out some universally applicable, categorical standards which will, in principle at least, objectively resolve the conflicts which arise. But, on inspection, none of the proposed standards really is universal and none of the proposed systems really does justice to the situations in which we find ourselves. Indeed, it has been argued that the proposed standards are simply those thought best by a particular group - usually comfortable white liberal male theorists.

I shall nod in the direction of some of these arguments against the standardsetting liberal later on. Here I want to examine an alternative liberal response to the fact of pluralism. For it leads quickly to a disturbing problem, one which we will encounter again and again in the pages to come.

A second way liberal political theorists try to cope with the fact that there are many competing moral ideals or conceptions of the good life is to take a hands-off attitude. It is urged that the state be neutral about what is worthwhile and what is not. This kind of liberal is a sceptic about objectively right standards - we cannot know what is good and what is not.¹ If we cannot adjudicate between competing conceptions of the good, then we should tolerate them all or treat them all as equally worthy. This requires us to refrain from supporting laws or policies on the basis of our conception of the good.

A problem which is supposed to arise for this view is the problem of relativism, of having to say that rightness is always a matter of merely being right-for-us. There is supposed to be an air of inconsistency here, for the relativist seems to want to make one non-relative claim - that relativism is correct. We shall see, when we turn to Richard Rorty’s view, that this sort of charge is easy enough for the hands-off liberal to sidestep. And this way of putting the problem for the hands-off view fails, I think, to get the heart of the matter.

To see what is at issue here, let us not insist that there is something incoherent about relativism. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that moral and political judgements can be right-for-us and wrong-for-others. One response to this thought is the liberal-designed response. If there is no way of determining which set of beliefs, which way of life, is best, then everyone must tolerate the ways of life which differ from his or her own. But another, all too frequent, response to the relativist idea is that which was most famously and most frighteningly put by the philosopher of fascism, Carl Schmitt.²

Schmitt was a Weimar legal scholar who found the Nazi bandwagon so congenial to his view that he for a time jumped aboard it. He held that there is no truth or rational adjudication in post-Enlightenment ethics and politics. Rather, politics is a matter of conviction, akin to theological fervour. He concluded, not that the beliefs of all must be respected, but that politics is a battleground between self-defined friends and enemies where the strongest will win:

… each has to decide for himself whether in the concrete situation the otherness of the stranger signifies the negation of his own way of life so that he has to be fended off and fought in order to preserve the way of life that is existentially important.

(Schmitt [1932](1976): 27)

Of course, a way of life can lose out in a political battle. Schmitt argued that a mark of the political is intensity and ‘the real possibility of physical killing … the existential negation of the enemy’. ([1932](1976): 33) He seems to have seen no moral problem here:

When a people no longer has the power or the will to maintain itself in the political sphere, so politics does not disappear from the world. All that disappears is a weak people.

([1932](1976): 53–4)

The way of life Schmitt favoured was fascism or a right wing nationalism. He argued, moreover, that liberals are bound to lose the battle against such nationalism. Liberalism is an ideology which supposedly does not carry with it a conviction of its truth, for it claims to be neutral between or tolerant of all ideologies. And here Schmitt saw a tension at liberalism’s centre. Liberalism is an ideology based on the conviction that a neutral state is best, while at the same time claiming that the pluralism of ideologies is to be tolerated. Liberalism’s institutions try to prevent any one of those ideologies from dominating the others. In fact, however, the ideology of liberal neutrality then dominates the others.

It is this tension, Schmitt argued, which makes liberalism sow the seeds of its own destruction. Liberalism attempts to institutionalise neutrality by giving the individual certain rights against the state. These rights, however, enable the individual to get together with like-minded sorts and try to establish the particular conception of the good which he or she believes to be true. Liberalism thus opens its door to crises and power struggles. Because it survives only if no particular group wins the battle, liberalism poses a great threat to itself. It can deal with the threat only if the pluralism within society is watery; only if there is a good deal of taken-for-granted homogeneity. As soon as pluralism thickens, liberalism is in serious trouble.

The authoritarian solution to this dilemma, Schmitt argued, is irresistible. A sovereign decision must end the continual crisis of liberal democracy. ‘Substantive homogeneity’ amongst the population is what is to be strived for. The best political arrangement is one where a strong, centralised, authoritarian state is recognised as the source of political legitimacy.

There is a lot more to Schmitt than this. But the little I have said is enough to make his views sound familiar in today’s resurgence of nationalism (indeed, Schmitt is still very popular in Germany and attracting interest in the United States, France, Italy, and Spain³) and it is enough to set the problem.

We can put it this way. If there is no objective right or wrong in moral matters, then what prevents one from adopting Schmitt’s line rather than the line of tolerance? What can the hands-off liberal say to the Schmittian? If nothing can be said, then that is an indictment of that kind of liberalism. For the problem which presses at us from all sides is that the response to pluralism and to the absence of a universal basis of adjudication has too often been intolerance, an intolerance which has sometimes culminated in genocide. A political or moral theory cannot simply ignore such responses. It must have resources to deal with them; it must have something to say about why it is that such responses are mistaken. It must have some way of engaging the illiberal’s arguments.

This problem for political philosophy has a parallel in moral philosophy, insofar as a distinction between the two can be drawn. The non-cognitivist in morals thinks that statements about what is right and wrong are not true or false. They merely express preferences.⁴ But the non-cognitivist, like the hands-off liberal, also seems unable to say anything much against actions and views which she thinks abhorrent. What she can say is that torture or gratuitous cruelty to children is something which she has been brought up to react against. But her reasons for so reacting will be reasons which can only be local to her and those brought up like her.

The view of truth and justification I elaborate in the next two chapters will try to resolve this conundrum for political theory and moral philosophy. For the pragmatism one finds there does not give up altogether on a universal conception of truth. It is a view on which moral and political judgements can be true or false, despite the fact that people, within specific cultures and contexts, bring moral and political principles into being. And it is a view which offers a justification of tolerance and democracy which bypasses the principle of neutrality.

But before that view is set out, I want to try to show, by example, just how difficult it is to get such matters right.

Rorty and the abandonment of justification

Richard Rorty has campaigned over the last two decades to explode an old philosophical picture of truth and objectivity and replace it with his version of pragmatism. In some quarters he has been so successful that the first task for any other kind of pragmatist is to wrest the label from him.

Many of Rorty’s negative points are well within what I take to be the real spirit of pragmatism. We must, he urges, cease thinking of the mind as a ‘great mirror, containing various representations’ of the world. (1980: 12) For this thought requires us to attempt the impossible - to try to get outside of our own minds and see the world as it really is. And we must resist the temptation to seek answers to questions such as ‘Is reality instrinsically determinate, or is its determinacy a result of our activity?’ All the potential answers share presuppositions which we would be better off dropping. We cannot find solutions to insoluble problems - problems which are mischaracterised and which take us down ill-chosen paths.

It is Rorty’s positive arguments which, upon scrutiny, break with the pragmatist aim of elucidating the notions of truth and knowledge in human terms. Rorty thinks that the philosopher should happily jettison the notion of truth altogether and speak rather of justification relative to one group of inquirers or another. Truth, right reason, rationality, validity, and the like are myths. Truth is merely what passes for good belief; it ‘is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about’. (1982: xiii) Indeed, Rorty is generally dismissive of theory. We must simply describe practice as we find it.

Were we to hold on to the term ‘truth’, against Rorty’s advice, we would have to take it to mean that beliefs which are currently approved of are true. The notion of objectivity must be reinterpreted to mean intersubjectivity or ‘solidarity’. (1991a: 13) It is what we have come to take as true.

What, we might well ask, is left of philosophy? Sometimes Rorty suggests that the role left for the philosopher is to become a ‘kibitzer’ (1982: 73) - a kind of informal cultural critic. We must abandon the ‘spirit of seriousness’ and get down to some ‘play’. (1991a: 193–4). At other times, he says that philosophy must lower its sights and become a genre of literature or cultural studies. (1982: xli-xliii) It is a conversation governed not by truth and reasonableness, but by convention, culture, and personal interests. And at yet other times, he says that the philosopher’s job is to produce generations of ‘nice’ liberal students (1993: 127).

Of course, if truth is as Rorty describes, philosophy is not the only area of inquiry which must face up to the fact. Even in science, on his view, we can identify no standards over and beyond the ones we happen to find ourselves with. Rorty thinks that it has been a pernicious mistake for humanists (philosophers, historians, literary critics, etc.) to take the ‘objectivity’ of science for their model, for there is there no objectivity there either (see 1991a: 36).

And in politics, morals, and political philosophy, we should not expect to find a rational justification of democracy or liberalism, or of this or that conception of the good, for nowhere are rational justifications to be had. What we have is the ongoing conversation in which we must make our decisions, form our policies, and live our lives. Here, as everywhere, we are to ‘substitute the idea of “unforced agreement” for that of “objectivity”’ (1991a: 38).

Rorty is a democrat and a liberal. The fact that he has given up the search for foundations does not, of course, lead him to give up his beliefs. But how, we will want to ask, can he assert that democracy, liberalism, and unforced agreement are best, if what is best is simply what is taken by some group to be best? It turns out that the ‘we’ in his claim that truth is what we take to be true is spelled out as follows: ‘us twentieth-century Western social democrats’ (1991a: 214), ‘Western liberal intellectuals’ (1982: 44), ‘us postmodernist bourgeois liberals’ (1991a: 199). What is best to believe is what democrats and liberals take to be best to believe.

To see just how Rorty thinks he can maintain that liberalism is the best view, while at the same time holding that there are no objective standards of reasonableness, let us turn to some familiar and related criticisms of his position.

First, it has seemed to many that Rorty’s liberalism is especially smug and clubby - it seems that we are to determine what we are to believe and do by engaging in a playful, ironic conversation amongst those who agree with us. But of course, to the disenfranchised and the marginalised, it looks as if the powerful have simply formed an elite from which they are excluded. The deliberation that will issue in what ‘we’ take to be justified leaves out the voices of many.

A second charge, or set of charges, that Rorty has had to face is that his view results in a relativism where any view is as good as any other. This is then said to be an incoherent doctrine, or incompatible with Rorty’s own commitment to democratic liberalism, or incompatible with Rorty’s doing philosophy at all.

One of Rorty’s responses to this clutch of criticisms is to say that he does not assert the bankrupt doctrine of relativism. Once we drop the vocabulary of truth, right reason, and objectivity, he thinks that we shall see that both realism and relativism are spurious. The very notion of a claim’s being relative or having relative validity only makes sense if we have something with which to contrast it - something like absolute or objective validity. (1989: 47) Rorty is not putting forward any theory of truth, hence he is not putting forward a relativist theory (1991a: 24, 1989: 53).

But the dangers associated with relativism do not go away so easily. Calling for the dissolution of a dualism such as that between absolutism and relativism does not guarantee that one succeeds in escaping the pitfalls of one of the two positions. That is, after the call for an abandonment of a way of looking at things, that way must be replaced by another which really does undercut the old way. Rorty, like Schmitt, inveighs against the appeal to anything absolute, to criteria which pretend to be objective or neutral, and takes the only alternative to be to think that there are no criteria at all. But this is just to reproduce the dichotomy which he is set against.⁵ The point of pragmatism, I shall argue, is to do something different - to put forward some modestly justified criteria, never pretending that they are neutral or that they mirror a reality which is utterly independent of what we think about it.

The best kind of pragmatist, that is, offers us a different way of looking at truth and objectivity. The best kind of pragmatist replaces the old dichotomy between neutral standards and no-standards-at-all with a substantive, low profile, conception of truth and objectivity, a conception which nonetheless can guide us in inquiry.

Another of Rorty’s responses to the above set of problems is a response to the objection that someone who rejects philosophy cannot wield a philosophical theory to declare philosophical theorising spurious. Rorty argues that if one has a ‘taste’ for philosophy, as he does, then one will play with notions such as the ‘self’, ‘language’, ‘knowledge’, etc. and he commends his own picture ‘to those with similar tastes’ (1991a: 192). He is not going to argue, in the usual philosopher’s way, for his position. Rather, he will try to make the vocabulary he favours ‘look attractive by showing how it may be used to describe a variety of topics’ (1989: 9).

But as Bernstein (1991) suggests, this defence is not convincing. Rorty does more than commend his view - he argues against absolutism and other associated philosophical positions. The standards of reasoning he uses in these arguments are ones he believes are good, not merely ones which he happens to have picked up and developed a fondness for.

Rorty does, however, think that in one respect his set of standards, what he plugs for, really is better than others. The ‘ironic liberalism’ he recommends has a strategy for ‘avoiding the disadvantage of ethnoce...