Redescribing human rights

Millenium

Volumn 27, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 1-22

  Langlois, Anthony J ^a  

^a AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0039356398     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298980270010601     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
2. Richard Rorty, 'Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality', in Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (eds.), On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993 (London: Basic Books, 1993), pp. 112-14. The 1998 Northedge Essay demonstrates that an integral part of Richard Rorty's 'postmodernist bourgeois liberalism' is the 'human rights culture' which has grown steadily around the world since the end of the Second World War. Rorty seeks to establish a new way of talking about human rights that is not entrapped by the metaphysical and essentialist doctrines they are usually associated with. The article uses general criticisms against Rorty's liberalism and focuses them on his approach to human rights. 3. J.G.A. Pocock has spoken with great insight about the way in which the terms 'we', 'us', and 'they' are enactments of power that immediately as said draw political boundaries. As soon as we use the word 'we', there is an expression of power as over against 'you' and 'them'.
3. Rorty, op. cit., in note 1, p. 20.
4. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).
5. Ibid., p. 3.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., p. 175.
8. Ibid., p. 335.
9. Rorty, op. cit., in note 1, p. 21.
10. Ibid., pp. 6-17.
11. Ibid., p. 19.
12. Ibid., p. 20.
13. Ibid., p. 73
14. Ibid.,
15. Ibid.
16. Rorty, op. cit., in note 5, p. 170.
17. Rorty, op. cit., in note 1, p .9.
18. Keith Topper, 'Richard Rorty, Liberalism and the Politics of Redescription', American Political Science Review (Vol. 89, No. 4, 1995), pp. 954-65, 954.
19. Rorty, op. cit., in note 2, p. 112.
20. Ibid., p. 115.
21. Ibid., p. 116.
22. Ibid., pp. 118-19.
23. Ibid., p. 119.
24. Ibid., p. 122.
25. Ibid., p. 125.
26. Rorty, op. cit., in note 2, p. 122.
27. Ibid., p. 127.
28. Ibid., p. 128.
29. Ibid., p. 133
30. Ibid.,
31. Norman Geras, 'Language, Truth and Justice', New Left Review. No. 209 (Jan/Feb. 1995), p. 120.
32. Rorty, op. cit., in note 2, p. 118.
33. Geras, op. cit., in note 32, p. 121.
34. Ibid., p. 123.
35. My thanks to two anonymous Millennium referees for suggestions about these points.
36. Martin Mollis, 'The Poetics of Personhood', in Alan R. Malachowski (ed.), Reading Rorty: Critical Responses to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (and beyond), (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 252.
37. Ibid.
38. Gene Outka and John P. Reeder Jr., (eds.), Prospects for a Common Morality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 141.
39. The core project of the Enlightenment was the displacement of local, customary, or traditional moralities, and of all forms of transcendental faith, by a critical or rational morality, which was projected as the basis of a universal civilisation. Whether it was conceived in utilitarian or contractarian, rights-based or duty-based terms, this morality would be secular and humanist, and it would set universal standards for the assessment of human institutions. The core project of the Enlightenment was the construction of such a critical morality, rationally binding on all human beings, and, as a corollary, the creation of a universal civilisation. See John Gray, Enlightenment's Wake (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 123.
40. Ibid., p. 172.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., p. 173.
43. Ibid., p. 172.
44. Ibid., p. 172-73.
45. Ibid., p. 174-75.
46. Rorty, op. cit., in note 2, p. 116
47. Rorty, op. cit., in note 5. p. xv.
48. For example, Rorty says 'one reason (non-cultural relativists) reject (relativism) is that such relativism seems to them incompatible with the fact that our human rights culture ... is morally superior to other cultures. I quite agree that ours is morally superior...'. Rorty, op. cit., in note 1, p. 116.
49. John Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. 62-63.
50. Rorty, op. cit., in note 5, p. 120.
51. Topper, op. cit., in note 19, p. 956.
52. Rorty, op. cit., 68; and Topper, op. cit., in note 19, p. 956
53. Rorty, op. cit., 68; and Topper, op. cit., in note 19, p. 956
54. Topper, op. cit., in note 19, p.957.
55. Rorty, op. cit., in note 5, p. 87.
56. Topper, op. cit., in note 19, p. 957.
57. Molly Cochran, 'The Liberal Ironist, Ethics and International Relations Theory', Millennium: Journal of Internalional Studies (Vol 25, No. 1, 1996), p. 36.
58. Ibid., p. 48.
59. Ibid., p. 49.
60. Topper, op. cit., in note 19, p. 959.
61. Cochran. op. cit., in note 58, p. 51. Topper cites the work of Carole Pateman as witness to the historical evidence that there has never been a simple divide between the public and the private spheres of life. Rather, the two are imransigently intertwined. Topper, op. cit., in note 19, p. 961. As an anonymous Millennium referee pointed out, Rorty's dichotomy is admittedly ad hoc. It is also subject to Rorty's rhetorical, as opposed to empirical or historical, account of facts. If 'man is the measure of all things', then Rorty is not to be questioned in his rhetorical dismissal of other canons by which contributions may be judged. It is, nonetheless, a moot point as to whether 'man' is accepted as the measure, or is. indeed, the only measure. If Rorty is right that 'man is the measure', then he must be prepared to accept the existence and rhetorical efficacy of measurements other than his own. There are other 'men'. This issue is a complex one and I am grateful to the referee for his/her comments, and acknowledge that I am still pondering these points.
62. Cochran. op. cit., in note 58, p. 51. Topper cites the work of Carole Pateman as witness to the historical evidence that there has never been a simple divide between the public and the private spheres of life. Rather, the two are imransigently intertwined. Topper, op. cit., in note 19, p. 961. As an anonymous Millennium referee pointed out, Rorty's dichotomy is admittedly ad hoc. It is also subject to Rorty's rhetorical, as opposed to empirical or historical, account of facts. If 'man is the measure of all things', then Rorty is not to be questioned in his rhetorical dismissal of other canons by which contributions may be judged. It is, nonetheless, a moot point as to whether 'man' is accepted as the measure, or is. indeed, the only measure. If Rorty is right that 'man is the measure', then he must be prepared to accept the existence and rhetorical efficacy of measurements other than his own. There are other 'men'. This issue is a complex one and I am grateful to the referee for his/her comments, and acknowledge that I am still pondering these points.
63. Ibid., p. 961.
64. Rorty, op. cit., in note 2, p. 122.
65. On this fascinating point, see Richard Campbell, Truth and Historicity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), especially the last chapter.
66. The unfortunate late of Truth, as dealt with by analytic philosophers in the English speaking world. Campbell notes that these philosophers share three presuppositions: (1) 'that truth is a feature only of items with a linguistic structure' (sentences, statements, propositions); (2) 'that truth and falsity are opposites of the same order, to be accounted for in the same sort of way'; and (3) 'that the account to be given of truth must be in terms of some relation of agreement which the statement (proposition, sentence, etc) bears to something else; the arguments arc usually over what kind of item a true statement agrees with: facts, the general state of the world, other statements, practices, etc.'. Ibid., p. 356. Campbell argues that this is a curious revival of Platonism in which philosophers, having abandoned Plato's forms, nonetheless seek for another 'bearer of truth so as to maintain the Platonic thesis that truth is eternal, unchanging, and perspectivally neutral'. Ibid., p. 357. It has also led to a wide gulf appearing between the ways in which philosophers speak of truth, using highly complex and technical discourses, and the way in which truth is conceived of by non-philosophers.
67. The unfortunate late of Truth, as dealt with by analytic philosophers in the English speaking world. Campbell notes that these philosophers share three presuppositions: (1) 'that truth is a feature only of items with a linguistic structure' (sentences, statements, propositions); (2) 'that truth and falsity are opposites of the same order, to be accounted for in the same sort of way'; and (3) 'that the account to be given of truth must be in terms of some relation of agreement which the statement (proposition, sentence, etc) bears to something else; the arguments arc usually over what kind of item a true statement agrees with: facts, the general state of the world, other statements, practices, etc.'. Ibid., p. 356. Campbell argues that this is a curious revival of Platonism in which philosophers, having abandoned Plato's forms, nonetheless seek for another 'bearer of truth so as to maintain the Platonic thesis that truth is eternal, unchanging, and perspectivally neutral'. Ibid., p. 357. It has also led to a wide gulf appearing between the ways in which philosophers speak of truth, using highly complex and technical discourses, and the way in which truth is conceived of by non-philosophers.