The Ethics, Epistemology, and Politics of Richard Rorty

Giancarlo Marchetti, Giancarlo Marchetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000472745
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Pragmatisme en philosophie

This book features fourteen original essays that critically engage the philosophy of Richard Rorty, with an emphasis on his ethics, epistemology, and politics. Inspired by James' and Dewey's pragmatism, Rorty urged us to rethink the role of science and truth with a liberal-democratic vision of politics. In doing so, he criticized philosophy as a sheer scholastic endeavor and put it back in touch with our most pressing cultural and human needs. The essays in this volume employ the conceptual tools and argumentative techniques of analytic philosophy and pragmatism and demonstrate the relevance of Rorty's thought to the most urgent questions of our time. They touch on a number of topics, including but not limited to structural injustice, rule-following, Black feminist philosophy, legal pragmatism, moral progress, relativism, and skepticism. This book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars across disciplines who are engaging with the work of Richard Rorty.

Part I Ethics

1 Rorty as Liberal Ironist Peace Warrior

Sharyn Clough

DOI: 10.4324/9780429324734-3

1 Introduction

I write from an office at Oregon State University (OSU), a university brought into being by a series of Land-Grant College Acts beginning during the US Civil War in 1862 (The Morrill Act) and expanded in 1890. According to the terms of the Acts, federal land was granted to each of the states (initially only the northern states but eventually expanded to all) with two main goals: (1) “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life,” i.e., to build agricultural and engineering programs to help new white settlers in job training and (2) to promote military training, most often in the form of Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs. The federal government needed a standing army. By the mid-twentieth century, OSU had the largest ROTC program west of the Mississippi and was called the “West Point of the West” (OSU Army ROTC). Both of these goals of the Land-Grant Acts are relevant to discussions of Rorty and ethnocentrism and so are germane to this paper. But even if they weren’t, I am compelled to acknowledge that the land and resources availed to me as I write this chapter were taken from Indigenous peoples, often through force (often by militaries trained in Land Grant Colleges), without appeal to treaty-making between nations, or, as was more often the case, in violation of these treaties. Indeed, the land granted to OSU by the federal government was originally under the stewardship of the Chepenefa (“Marys River”) band of the Kalapuya. The land was ceded to the US government through the Kalapuya Treaty (Treaty of Dayton, Oregon) in 1855, though the treaty conditions were controversial enough to the Kalapuya people that they did not in fact leave the land ceded in the Treaty and were forcibly removed to what are now the Grand Ronde and Siletz reservations. While their numbers were diminished (by disease and design), their descendants can be counted among the contemporary members of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians.

Additionally, I grew up and was educated in Western Canada, all the while benefitting from a public primary school education not available to Indigenous peoples, who were instead forcibly removed from their homes as children, and made to attend residential schools often in remote settings well away from their families. The aim of the residential school programs was to destroy Indigenous cultures, languages, and family ties, and to “re-educate” the students in colonialist cultures and languages (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015a). Abuse of a variety of kinds was routine and deaths commonplace—and most of these traumatic events were neither reported nor investigated. At the time of this writing, over 1000 unmarked graves of children have been detected on the grounds of residential schools across Canada. The last of these schools, run initially by the Catholic Church and then by the Canadian government, was not closed until 1996, over a decade after I graduated from an exceptional public high school. After high school, I further benefitted from a public university education in Canada, that was made available to Indigenous peoples only relatively recently and only if they agreed to give up their Indian Status (the necessity of change of status was challenged in a federal bill in 1985). I became explicitly aware of the full terms of my good fortune in education and employment, and at what cost, and for whom, only recently, i.e., my settler colonialist inheritance meant I was able to remain ignorant of all of this until recently.

My discussion of peace literacy is offered in the spirit of reconciliation and solidarity with Indigenous peoples here and around the globe. I make this offering, recognizing that the reconciliation project in Canada is being questioned for a number of reasons, including the failure of relevant authorities to follow the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action, such as the call to share documentation of the deaths of children at residential schools and the location of their graves (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015b) and also because Indigenous groups, having engaged in nonviolent direct action to protect their lands (and all of us) from short-sighted extractive business interests, continue to be met with violence and arrest by federal authorities. Federal authorities are acting in violation not only of the spirit of reconciliation but also, according to a number of legal scholars, in violation of the law (Jacobs et al. 2020).

Reconciliation, like democracy, is fragile and needs constant, active, care-full nurturing, protection, and energy. Liberal irony cautions us against the arrogance of thinking that reconciliation or democracy are projects that can ever be complete. These projects are less like running a race with a finish line, and more like tending a garden or maintaining health that requires constant upkeep. As I argue in Section 5, nonviolence is the activity that provides the upkeep; that nurtures and supports reconciliation and democracy. Even or especially now, I call on all of us, for any “us”, to take up the challenge of becoming liberal ironist peace warriors; to nurture and support our democratic projects through nonviolent reconciliation.

The liberal ironist is, of course, the metaphilosophical position endorsed by Richard Rorty, and I argue here that it offers a powerful model for twenty-first-century peace-making. My argument requires a recommitment to the anti-foundationalist, anti-essentialist, and fallibilist themes underlying Rorty’s liberal irony. I show how understanding this three-part commitment can better help us recognize the community-widening, solidarity-building elements of the provocatively titled “ethnocentrism” that drives Rorty’s project. Without a good grasp of this three-part commitment, his rhetorical urging of ethnocentrism can seem vulnerable to a number of criticisms.

One of these criticisms is that Rorty’s use of ethnocentrism is too weak in its support for (a very few but still important features of) Western liberal democracy. According to this concern, those of us Western liberals who value the ideals (if not always the practice) of procedural justice and human equality, for example, ought to support these ideals with a robust commitment to their objectivity, understood as an appeal to a theoretical foundation itself free of contingent, fallible appeals to the evidence of human experience. But Rorty does not do this – instead he encourages a commitment to these ideals read through what he believes to be the necessarily ethnocentric lens of human experience in all its historical contingency. And so, the concern continues, because he falls short of appealing to theoretical foundations that derive from something other than or beyond human experience, his support for our Western liberal ideals collapses into a self-refuting relativism that, in the end, is unable to support any ethical commitments at all. For if, the relativist worry goes, we have no theoretical apparatus outside of human experience, then we have no reliable criteria against which to judge the worth of any cultural project (even or especially our own!) and so anything goes. This concern is attributed by Clifford Geertz (1984) to anti-relativists William Gass and Ian Jarvie. In Section 2.1, I respond to the concern that Rorty’s ethnocentrism embraces a relativistic approach to ethics and epistemology. I show that rejecting foundationalism does not free us from epistemic and ethical demands, rather it places even greater demands on us. We must show through our community-building why our choices are better—we cannot make easy appeals to criteria outside of human experience, for, Rorty argues, there don’t seem to be any such criteria available to us.

In Section 2.2, I take up another criticism, namely that Rorty’s ethnocentric support for key features of Western liberal democracy, rather than being too weak and relativistic, instead over-states the case, standing as an endorsement of a particular ethnos (“ours”), over and against all others, in ways that are both epistemically and ethically irresponsible to the available evidence. Rorty’s view comes across as epistemically overstated insofar as a full-throated acknowledgment of the evidence of cultural diversity makes it unlikely that any one ethnos (even or especially “ours”) somehow has it “right,” and it comes across as ethically irresponsible insofar as ethnocentrism has historically and into the present day encouraged at best a provincial condescension to other others, and at worst, a variety of pernicious ethical commitments, including settler colonialism and the violence that typically accompanies it. This concern with Rorty’s ethnocentrism is voiced by Geertz himself (1984, 1986). Geertz describes his own position not as pro-relativism necessarily, but rather as anti anti-relativism. In support of Rorty against Geertz’ criticism, I argue that Rorty’s model of liberal irony encourages us to resist settler colonialist violence.

In his response to Geertz’ anti anti-relativist position, Rorty argued that his own position is best read not as ethnocentrism but as anti anti-ethnocentrism (Rorty 1991). In other words, instead of endorsing or prescribing what Rorty calls a “vicious” ethnocentrism often associated with settler colonialism, Rorty means by his use of the term “ethnocentrism” to offer an ironic description of the state of affairs we liberals find ourselves in as we encounter other others and engage in the utopian project of widening the bounds of our communities; of including more fellow creatures in our solidarity building (Ibid.). From now on, I will refer to Rorty’s position as “anti anti-ethnocentrism,” recognizing that this change of label does not in itself obviate the need to respond to the criticisms listed above.

The anti anti-relativist concern expressed by Geertz, namely that Rorty’s model of liberal irony can be associated with settler colonialism and other oppressive anthropological encounters between would-be dominant cultures and the cultures that come to be marginalized or destroyed through the encounter, has also been expressed by Scott Pratt (2016). In his essay “Imperial Irony” Pratt discusses Richard Henry Pratt (no relation) who was a central figure in the nineteenth-century US government project of “educating” Native American children in residential school settings so they would better fit within dominant settler culture. The rationale for this project shares some of Rorty’s language around liberal irony. Given the genocidal outcomes of residential school systems for Indigenous peoples in the USA (and Canada), these parallels sound alarm bells, all the more so when Rorty’s use of “ethnocentrism” is read as a colonialist championing of, or a resigned attitude toward the inevitability of, violent outcomes.

In Section 3, I argue that regardless of what Rorty may himself have said or been able to imagine about the Indigenous peoples on whose land he and his settler ancestors occupied. He was surely constrained by his own ethnos, as we later readers are by ours. His utopian poject of community expansion provides those of us living in Western liberal democracies with the conceptual tools we need both to support our anti anti-ethnocentric commitment to key features of Western liberal democracy such as procedural justice and human rights, and to resist vicious ethnocentric colonialist agendas. And he does this by modeling an anti-foundationalist, anti-essentialist, and fallibilist approach to belief and believers, i.e., by his articulation of liberal irony in the service of solidarity building.

In Section 4, I support this reading of Rorty’s liberal irony by exploring the deep and abiding ethical commitments that animate Rorty’s work. Here, I build on Voparil’s essay “Rorty’s Ethics of Responsibility” (2020). Voparil shows that while Rorty is known more for his work in epistemology and philosophy of language (especially Rorty’s earlier works, e.g., leadi...