[MD] Rorty's Relativism

[Steve Peterson]

Hi DMB,


> dmb says:
> ... Let's say the "real issue" is just as Rorty says. In this case, if 
> you think our culture, purposes or intuitions CAN be supported by 
> something more than conversation...Anyway, if we accept Rorty's notion 
> of the "real issue" then relativism is not the belief that all 
> opinions are equally valid but the belief that there is no way to sort 
> that out except through conversation...
>
> The problem is that this conversational restraint leads to a kind of 
> ethno-centrism wherein you can only convince your peers. That's one of 
> the things Rorty was getting at in the quote about educating his 
> bigoted, fundamentalist students. He concluded that comment saying, "I 
> am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made 
> their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a 
> better cause." This is something to be concerned about. This is why 
> people think he's a relativist, because there is no way to escape 
> one's provincial context, no way to assert values or principles beyond 
> our culture.

Steve:
I snipped out the places where you conflated warrant and truth above, 
and I think what's left is the heart of the matter. We can put aside 
the label "relativist" for now and focus on the question of whether 
there is a way to justify beliefs that is ahistoric, transcultural, 
universal, etc, or if the best we can is tell our stories to one 
another. I don't think that there is a way to escape one's context to 
some God's-Eye-View that can claim a universal foundation that everyone 
else will have no choice but to bow to. Your objection here sound a bit 
like someone losing his faith getting angry at the person who raised 
doubts. Rorty is saying, let's acknowledge that no one has ever found 
the sort of grounding that philosophers have always told us to demand 
and just stop demanding it. If anyone ever comes up with a way to give 
us that sort of foundation for our beliefs, then great. But in the 
absence of such a way of grounding our current beliefs in eternal 
principles, let's focus instead on creating a better future. This is 
what Rorty means by "changing the subject." It's not a cop-out, he's 
just pointing toward a better project.




DMB:
> This is what I was getting at a few days ago when I mentioned how 
> relativism poses a problem for those of us who wish to assert the 
> universality of human rights. This sort of attitude is intellectually 
> paralyzing to the extent that it weakens the possibility of 
> international laws such as the Geneva conventions. At the risk of 
> sounding hyperbolic, this sort of attitude is pretty damn likely to 
> lead to a humanitarian catastrophe.

Steve:
Rorty is all for universal human rights, but I don't think he would 
have ever wanted it to be so static a notion as to never be able to 
some day be expanded to include a public option for health care or 
other things we haven't yet thought of.

In Philosophy and Social Hope, Rorty says that unconditional human 
right "is not a target for philosophical analysis." "..[it is] a way of 
saying, 'Here I stand: I can do no other.'" It is an announcement "that 
one has thought the issue through and come to a decision" or "exhausted 
his conversational resources." He thinks that it is pressing the notion 
to far when people ask, "but do human beings REALLY have these rights?" 
This is the sort of question that we only ask because philosophers have 
told us to demand the sprt of foundation that we will never have. Also, 
"Such questions presuppose that moral progress is at least in part a 
matter of increasing moral knowledge" of something like The Will of God 
or Human Nature. Instead Rorty suggests we see moral progress like 
biological evolution as not having any end in mind. That we should hope 
not for our future to "conform to a plan...but rather [that it] will 
astonish and exhilarate. Just as fans of the avant garde go to art 
galleries to be astonished rather than having to have any particular 
expectation fulfilled."

Rather than portraing progress as increasing knowledge, "pragmatists 
hope to make it impossible for the sceptic to ask the question, 'Is our 
knowledge of things [whether scientific or ethical] adequate to the way 
things really are?' They substitute for this traditional question the 
practical question, 'Are our ways of describing things...as good as 
possible? Or can we do better. Can our future be made better than our 
present?"' Pragmatists like Rorty don't want to think of inquiry as 
having the goal of unearthing eternal truths. Rorty sees this as a bad 
goal since we could never know when we've achieved it even if we had. 
So the question of whether such eternal moral principles exist such as 
unconditional human rights is one that pragmatists would prefer to be 
unasked. But while we can't aim at truth, we can aim at better 
justification for our beliefs. If inquiry is a search for truth as 
traditionally understood, there is no way to talk about progress 
without already knowing what the truth is. But if inquiry is concerned 
with justification, then we can measure progress in terms of assuaging 
doubts.

This still leaves the question of what we can mean by moral progress, 
but since I've already argued that moral assertions have truth-value, 
what I said about Rorty's perspective about inquiry in general applies 
to inquiry into ethics. Just as we can't aim at truth as a goal, we 
also can't aim at "doing what is right" because as with truth, we can 
never know when we've hit the mark. You can't aim at being morally 
perfect, but you can aim at being more sensitive to the pain of others, 
at seeing others as part of yourself which is where his 
panrelationalism fits in with ethics. Rorty descibes moral progress as 
"a matter of wider and wider sympathy." We can aim at "taking more 
people's needs into account than you did previously."

Rorty's pragmatic view of morality is not so much about what we should 
forbid in conforming to a Moral Law, but who we should open ourselves 
up to and how we can better meet their needs. The movie fable Chocolat 
starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp illustrates the difference in 
these ethical views when the young priest near the end of the movie 
tells his pious congregation:

     "I think we can't go around measuring our goodness by what we don't 
do - by
     what we deny ourselves, what we resist and who we exclude. I think 
we've got to
     measure goodness by what we embrace, what we create and who we 
include."

To me that is a far cry from a recipe for humanitarian catastrophe.

Best,
Steve