VALUES AND CRITERIA DEFY PRECISE OBJECTIVE MEASURES

VALUES AND CRITERIA DEFY PRECISE OBJECTIVE MEASURES

1. MORAL BELIEFS ARE FLEXIBLE AND CONTINGENT

Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities-Virginia, OBJECTIVITY, RELATIVISM, AND TRUTH, 1991, p. 181-2.

For the notion of basis is not in point. It is not that we know, on antecedent philosophical grounds, that it is of the essence of human beings to have rights, and then proceed to ask how a society might preserve and protect these rights. On the question of priority, as on the question of the relativity of justice to historical situations, Rawls is closer to Walzer than to Dworkin. Since Rawls does not believe that for purposes of political theory, we need think of ourselves as having an essence that precedes and antedates history, he would not agree with Sandel that for these purposes, we need have an account of “the nature of the moral subject,” which is “in some sense necessary, non-contingent and prior to any particular experience.

Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities-Virginia, PHILOSOPHY AND THE MIRROR OF NATURE, 1979, p. 190-91

Rationality, when viewed as the formation of syllogisms based on discovery of the facts and the application of such principles as “Pain should be minimized” or Intelligent life is always more valuable than beautiful unintelligent beings is a myth. Only the Platonic urge to say that every moral sentiment and indeed every emotion of any sort, should be based on the recognition of an objective quality in the recipient makes us think that our treatment of koalas or rights of Martians is a “matter of moral principle. For the “facts” which must be discovered to apply the principles are, in the case of the koala’s or the white’s “feelings” not discoverable independently of sentiment.
3. CANNOT DEFINE CRITERION FOR VALUES

Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities-Virginia, PHILOSOPHY AND THE MIRROR OF NATURE, 1979, p. 307.

There is also, however, an ordinary sense of ‘good,’ the sense the word has when used to commend--to remark that something answers to some interest. In this sense, too, one is not going to find a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for goodness which will enable one to find the Good Life, resolve moral dilemmas, grade apples, or whatever. There are too many different sorts of interests to answer to, too many kinds of things to commend and too many different reasons for commending them, for such a set of necessary and sufficient conditions to be found. But this is a quite different reason for the indefinabilty of “good” than the one I just gave for the in definability of the philosophical sense of “good.’
4. CANNOT DEFINE VALUES BECAUSE TOO MANY APPLICATIONS

Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities-Virginia, PHILOSOPHY AND THE MIRROR OF NATURE, 1979, p. 307.

In its homely and shopworn sense, the reason why “good” is indefinable is not that we might be altogether wrong about what good men or good apples are, but simply that no interesting descriptive term has any interesting necessary and sufficient conditions. In the first, philosophical sense of “good,’ the term is indefinable because anything we say about what is good may “logically” be quite irrelevant to what goodness is.
5. CANNOT UNDERSTAND SINGULAR VALUE CRITERIA

Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities-Virginia, PHILOSOPHY AND THE MIRROR OF NATURE, 1979, p. 374-75.

Philosophers thus condemn themselves to a Sisyphean task, for no sooner has an account of a transcendental term been perfected than it is labeled a “naturalistic fallacy,” a confusion between essence and accident. I think we get a clue to the cause of this self-defeating obsession from the fact that even philosophers who take the intuitive impossibility of finding conditions for the one right thing to do, as a reason for repudiating “objective values” am loath to take the impossibility of finding individuating conditions for the one true theory of the world as a reason for denying “objective physical reality.” Yet they should, for formally the two notions are on a par. The reasons for and against adopting a correspondence approach to moral truth are the same as those regarding truth about the physical world. The giveaway comes I think, when we find that the usual excuse for invidious treatment is that we are shoved around by physical reality but not by values.

MUST REJECT CURRENT PHILOSOPHY

1. PHILOSOPHY CREATES BIASED MORAL BELIEFS

Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities-Virginia, OBJECTIVITY, RELATIVISM, AND TRUTH, 1991, p. 175.

The Enlightenment idea of “reason” embodies such a theory: the theory that there is a relation between the ahistorical essence of the human soul and moral truth, a relation which ensures that free and open discussion will produce “one right answer” to moral as well as to scientific questions. Such a theory guarantees that a moral belief that cannot be justified to the mass of mankind is “irrational,” and thus is not really a product of our moral faculty at all. Rather it is a “prejudice,” a belief that comes from some other part of the soul than reason. It does not share in the sanctity of conscience, for it is the product of a sort of pseudoconscience--something whose loss is no sacrifice, but a purgation.

Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities-Virginia, “Pragmatism and Philosophy” in AFTER PHILOSOPHY: END OR TRANSFORMATION, 1989, p. 27-8.

All this is complicated by the fact that “philosophy,” like “truth” and “goodness,” is ambiguous. Uncapitalized, “truth” and “goodness” is ambiguous. Uncapitalized, “truth’ and “goodness” name properties of sentences, or of actions and situations. Capitalized, they are the proper names of objects--goals or standards that can be loved with all one’s heart and soul and mind, objects of ultimate concern. Similarly, “philosophy” can mean simply what Sellars calls “an attempt to see how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term.”
3. PHILOSOPHY’S DEFENSE CANNOT BE SCIENCE

Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities-Virginia, “Pragmatism and Philosophy” in AFTER PHILOSOPHY: END OR TRANSFORMATION, 1989, p. 55.

This hope is a correlate of the fear that if there is nothing quasi-scientific for philosophy as an academic discipline to do, if there is no properly professional Fach that distinguishes the philosophy professor from the historian or the literary critic, then something will have been lost that has been central to Western intellectual life. This fear is, to be sure, justified. If Philosophy disappears, something will have been lost that was central to Western intellectual life--just as something central was lost when religious intuitions were weeded out from among the intellectually respectable candidates for Philosophical articulation.
4. PHILOSOPHY’S INTERPRETATION OF KNOWLEDGE IS BANKRUPT

Calvin 0. Schrag, Professor of Philosophy-Purdue, THE RESOURCES OF RATIONALITY: A RESPONSE TO THE POSTMODERN CONDITION, 1992, p. 24.

Among those commonly consigned to the postmodernist camp, Richard Rorty has been the most ardent spokesperson for the poverty of epistemology. He finds it difficult to imagine what a rational reconstruction of knowledge would look like, purporting as it does to provide us with a species of “knowledge” about knowledge. Rorty links the epistemological project with a search for foundations that seeks to underwrite the knowledge claims in science, morality and art--the three culture-spheres of modernity. Such a project, however, is doomed to fail according to Rorty, principally because it succumbs to the aporias of representationalism.