The ethics of Rortian redescription

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 32, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 461-492

  Frazier, Brad ^a  

^a LEE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

contingency; democracy; irony; public private distinction; redescription; Richard Rorty; self creation; truthfulness

Indexed keywords

EID: 43249169818     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453706064020     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. Michele Moody-Adams, ‘Theory, Practice, and the Contingency of Rorty's Irony’, Journal of Social Philosophy 25 (1994): 209–27 (214–15).
2. Jean Bethke Elshtain, ‘Don't Be Cruel: Reflections on Rortyian Liberalism’, in The Politics of Irony: Essays in Self-Betrayal, ed. Daniel W. Conway and John E. Seery (New York: St Martin's Press, 1992), p. 206.
3. Elshtain recently has published a slightly modified version of this essay. See her article with the same title in Richard Rorty, ed. Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 147. My subsequent citations of Elshtain's work, however, all refer to the first instantiation of her article, since she does not substantially revise her objections to Rorty's position in her more recent essay.
4. Elshtain, ‘Don't Be Cruel’, pp. 206–7.
5. Cf. Richard J. Bernstein, ‘Rorty's Liberal Utopia’, in The New Constellations: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), p. 274; who states, ‘To suggest that the horrors and Holocausts of the twentieth century can be redescribed to “look good” might seem to count as a reductio ad absurdum of his [i.e. Rorty's] position.’
6. Richard Rorty, ‘Robustness: A Reply to Jean Bethke Elshtain’, in Politics of Irony, ed. Conway and Seery, p. 220, 219–20.
7. Robert Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 388.
8. Rorty, ‘Robustness’, p. 223. The ethics to which Rorty refers is a decosmologized ethics that refuses to ground our rejection of Nazi values, for instance, in meta-narratives about God, or the human condition.
9. Moody-Adams, ‘Theory’, pp. 215, 217.
10. Cf. Ruth L. Smith, ‘Morals and Their Ironies’, Journal of Religious Ethics 26 (1998): 367–88 (378).
11. Richard Rorty, ‘Feminism and Pragmatism’, in his Philosophical Papers, vol. 3, Truth and Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 210. Moody-Adams has in view Rorty's essay as it was first published, as a Tanner Lecture.
12. Moody-Adams, ‘Theory’, pp. 217–18.
13. Richard Rorty, ‘Truth and Freedom: a Reply to Thomas McCarthy’, Critical Inquiry 16 (Spring 1990): 633–43 (639).
14. Rorty's position on truth is notoriously difficult to pin down. The obvious truth is that Rorty almost entirely rejects all vestiges of a correspondence theory of truth. Suffice it to say here that it is highly unlikely that Rorty holds a position that implies even unwittingly that victimizers have a ‘correct’ description that trumps competing descriptions. For an instructive and insightful discussion of Rorty's views on truth and justification, see Gary Gutting, Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 15–47.
15. See also the interesting exchanges between Rorty and other philosophers such as John McDowell, Hilary Putnam and James Conant, in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert B. Brandom (Malden: Blackwell, 2000).
16. Bernstein, ‘Rorty's Liberal Utopia’, p. 283.
17. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1999), p. 151, 150–1, 152.
18. See James Conant, ‘Freedom, Cruelty, and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell’, in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Brandom, p. 294–5, 308–9.
19. Richard Rorty, ‘Response to Conant’, in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Brandom, p. 347.
20. For a helpful and concise summation of some standard criticisms, see Daniel W. Conway, ‘Irony, State and Utopia: Rorty's “We” and the Problem of Transitional Praxis’, in Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, ed. Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2001), p. 78.
21. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 91.
22. Nancy Fraser, ‘Solidarity or Singularity? Richard Rorty between Romanticism and Technocracy’, in Reading Rorty, ed. Alan R. Malachowski (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 312–13.
23. Richard Rorty, ‘Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: a Conversation with Richard Rorty’, interview by Derek Nystrom and Kent Puckett, in Prickly Pear Pamphlets, no. 11, ed. Matthew Engelke and Mark Harris (Charlottesville, VA: Prickly Pear Pamphlets, 1998), p. 60.
24. Response to Daniel Conway', in Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, ed. Festenstein and Thompson, p. 91.
25. In fairness to Rorty, this other way of construing his private-public distinction is already detectable in Contingency, even if it is not emphasized. See, for instance, Contingency, pp. xiv–xv.
26. Rorty, ‘Against Bosses’, p. 61.
27. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 59. These are the conditions that Rawls sets forth for a comprehensive doctrine to count as reasonable. Rawls also refers to the first two conditions as a comprehensive view's being (1) an exercise of theoretical reason and (2) an exercise of practical reason, respectively.