Or perhaps something other than our human rationalityin any plausible meaningis at stake. Perhaps some other feature that allor almost allhuman beings possess. I shall not attempt to explore his reasons for this denial. It is time to ask: what is left of human rights if we follow him and deny the existence of morally relevant transcultural facts?
He takes this phrase from the Argentinian jurist and philosopher Eduardo Rabossi. This, he suggests, is what is left of human rights when we give up the idea that there are natural rights grounded in some aspect of our humanity itself. With Rabossi, Rorty sees our Human Rights culture as a something to be welcomedwithout philosophical fuss. Such issues are, he believes, beside the practical point.
What is to the practical point? The crucial sentiment here, he suggests, is sympathy. What they have in common is that they are like us. Clearly, Mr. Jefferson was ripe for a serious dose of sentimental education….. It was a pleasure to be asked to deliver a lecture at the conference in honor of Richard Rorty whom I have known since we were colleagues at Princeton University many years ago.
This text represents the lecture as delivered and thus does not include bibliographical or page references. It is not for circulation, quotation, or paraphrase in any publication without express permission of the author who can be reached at Margaret.
Thanks to Christopher Lay for helpful comments on the previous draft. A New World Order? Creating cosmopolitans: the case for literature By Troy Jollimore. Download PDF. Instead, we should strive to understand human rights norms from the non-foundationalist perspective of what be refers to as "the contemporary human rights culture.
Instead, this culture of human rights is a simple historical fact that ought to be pragmatically accepted as such, and also, ought to be made more powerful and effective by discarding the rationalistic baggage of moral philosophy. Rorty adds that the key to strengthening this human rights culture is a more self-conscious inclusion of sentimental education.
The question, then, is whatdoes Rorty mean by sentimental education? Drawing upon the work of David Hume and Annette Baier, Rorty describes sentimental education as a refinement of the sympathetic capacity to perceive the similarity between ourselves and others based on the pain we all experience, and to let that similarity outweigh the differences between us.
In doing so, Rorty believes we will be "less tempted to think of those different" from ourselves "as only quasi-human" and will therefore expand the frame of reference for the phrase "people like us. Reading stories about the oppression of others can lead to the realization that they also suffer like we do, that they are similar to us in that respect, and therefore that they are entitled to the dignity afforded by human rights.
There is nothing id people except what has been socialized into them. Simply by being human we do not have a common bond. For all we share with all other humans is the same thing we share with all other animals—the ability to feel pain. E For Rorty, sentimental education is committed to providing us an allegedly non-foundauonal, non-ra- lionalistic version of moral obligation to respect the dignity and interests of other human beings.
However, it is difficult to see in what ways Rorty's appeal to a "shared human ability to feel pain" can avoid the charge of universalism he has critically aimed at moral philosophy. In effect, what Rorty has done is to make this ability, shared by all humans, the premise of his account of a morality which is universal. It is also unclear how a sympathetic sense of recognizing the pain felt by others as similar to our ownis supposed to be an improvement over, for instance, the Kantian vision of a community of rational beings who refrain from treating each other simply as means to ends.
The uncertainty of Rorty's position follows from the way in which he casually substitutes the ability to feel pain for the ability to reason as, in effect, a universal foundation for morality. Yet surely our emotional reactions toward others can, by themselves, lead us to feelings of envy or hatred just as easily as they can lead us to those of sympathy and tove.
In other words, the ability to recognize that others feel pain does not necessarily lead to the moral conclusion that we ought to respect those others because of theiT suffering or, significantly, that we ought to strive to eliminate the causes of their suffering and affirm their dignity as human beings.
Rorty believes, of course, that the appeal to sympathy is preferable to the formalism of Kantian ethics, which in Rorty's estimation treats morality as "something distinct from the ability to notice, and identify with, pain and humiliation.
If this is the case, is it not unrealistic for Rorty to suggest that qualitative human feelings are toprovide the most viable basis for the protection of human rights?
There is more to Rorty's argument that may deflect the criticism I have just raised, namely, the association he makes between sentimental education and social solidarity. He claims that the best approach to social solidarity is exemplified by the Western liberal-democratic tradition.
As portrayed by Rorty, this tradition holds that the shared human ability to experience pain and suffering creates a bond of similarity which overrides traditional exclusionary differences, such as those of race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. Rorty insists, however, that the ability to experience an emotional sense of solidarity with others because of their suffering is not to be confused with the ability to identify with another because of the existence of a human rationality which we all share.
In Rorty's view, sentimental empathy requires acquaintance with the concrete ways of existing and suffering found in the communities and languages of others, which are not reducible to an essential humanity within each of us. Here the role of sentimental education is crucial, for it allows us to become acquainted with the ways of others through thick, detailed descriptions of their customs, tribulations and pains.
These stories then allow us to understand that people different from ourselves also suffer. Indeed, he goes so far as to claim that "the emergence of the human rights culture seems to owe nothing to increased moral knowledge, and everything to hearing sad and sentimental stories. It appears to me that a sentimental education presupposes the kind of practical moral reasoning that Rorty wishes to replace. Yet, without such practical reasoning, how else arc we to come to a moral understanding that others deserve to be treated in the same way we do?
I believe this is aconsiderable oversight on Rorty's pan because the recognition of human rights requires that we provide justificatory reasons for why'we should act to protect those rights. As elaborated by John Rawls,13 Joseph Raz,14 Onora O'Neill" and others, the concept of practical reasoning illuminates the necessity of explaining the normative judgments of our moral discourse which are used to guide and evaluate our actions. Indeed, the basic question of practical reason is "What should I do?
At the very least, propositions about human rights refer to principles that are in some way general and universal, such as Kant's principle of treating all human beings as ends-in-themselves, so that what we choose to do exhibits respect for the human dignity of all persons.
Rorty misunderstands the importance of Kant's moral philosophy insofar as he fails to recognize the fundamental role of practical deliberation with regard to our moral actions. Rorty therefore underestimates just how much principles of practical reason provide motives for our actions, and serve to guide and justify behavior that is valid with respect to every individual within the domain of human rights concerns.
Practical reasoning, then, is a matter of recognizing and respecting the needs and interests not only of ourselves and our local communities, but also of the larger human community of which we are members. This is not to say that practical reasoning is divorced from the emotional realm featured in Rorty's theory of sentimental education. In fact, it might be argued that a sentimental education can make people more attentive to others, and therefore can help develop theircapacity to engage in reasoning processes leading to judgments that adhere to the norms and obligations characteristic of human rights.
Unfortunately, this is not the argument Rorty makes, which undermines the normative validity of his conception of human rights. Part of the problem I find with Rorty's argument is that he drops the question of justification from his account of human rights, or at least he reduces justification—why ought there to be universal human rights, or why certain norms or types of action are better than others—to some a-rational moral motivation—sympathy as a cause of action.
In other words, Rorty makes nu attempt at justificatory argument for human rights because he discards the notion of human rights as amoral concept. While the pain suffered by others may, though not necessarily, motivate us to act in some way to alleviate their suffering, this fact fails to explain how the ability to feel pain generates any rights persons may have as well as what duties others may have to respect those rights.
Stated simply, then, my claim here is that rationally justifiable moral principles are more likely to warrant institutional arrangements that secure human rights and a just social order, and are better able to sustain the solidarity needed to maintain a just social order, than are beliefs and actions dependent solely upon the contingent appearance of motivational sympathy.
This leads us 10 another problem. Although he has taken pains to denounce theories of moral universality, Rorty does not hesitate to assert that the liberal-democratic human rights culture is still "morally superior" to other cultures, because liberal societies are committed to tolerating pluralism. Rorty's claim is that, because the Western liberal tradition is anti- ethnocentric in its defense of human equality and plurality, it must become more self-consciously ethnocentric inpromoting its beliefs in, and vocabulary of, human rights.
In doing so, the liberal ethos will gradually be taken up by more people who then will be able to sympathize with the pain and suffering of others, thereby expanding the actual domain of social solidarity. The liberal belief in human autonomy and the equal worth and dignity of all persons, regardless of our differences, developed as a moral philosophical response to the partiality of our sympathetic identification with others. As even Hume recognized, while morality may be grounded in our emotional ties to others, the fact that those ties are first and foremost strongest for those closest to us means that in order to be effective, sympathy requires the addition of "artificial" rules of justice to lead our sentiments beyond their local partiality.
Hume draws this conclusion this way: But tho' this generosity must be acknowledg'd to the honour of human nature, we may at the same Philosophy in the Contemporary World Volume 6, Nos. For while each person loves himself better than any other single person, and in his love to others bears the greatest affection to his relation and acquaintance, this must necessarily produce an opposition of passions, and a consequent opposition of actions The remedy, then, is not deriv'd from nature, but from artifice; or more properly speaking, nature provides a remedy in the judgment and understanding, for what is irregular and incommodious in the affections.
We think that the most philosophy can hope to do is summarize our culturally influenced intuitions about the right thing to do in various situations. The summary is effected by formulating a generalization from which these intuitions can be deduced, with the help of noncontroversial lemmas. That generalization is not supposed to ground our intuitions, but rather to summarize them.
John Rawls's "Difference Principle" and the U. Supreme Court's construction, in recent decades, of a constitutional "right to privacy" are examples of this kind of summary. We see the formulation of such summarizing generalizations as increasing the predictability, and thus the power and efficiency, of our institutions, thereby heightening the sense of shared moral identity which brings us together in a moral community. Foundationalist philosophers, such as Plato, Aquinas, and Kant, have hoped to provide independent support for such summarizing generalizations.
They would like to infer these generalizations from further premises, premises capable of being known to be true independently of the truth of the moral intuitions which have been summarized. Such premises are supposed to justify our intuitions, by providing premises from which the content of those intuitions can be deduced.
I shall lump all such premises together under the label "claims to knowledge about the nature of human beings". In this broad sense, claims to know that our moral intuitions are recollections of the Form of the Good, or that we are the disobedient children of a loving God, or that human beings differ from other kinds of animals by having dignity rather than mere value, are all claims about human nature.
So are such counterclaims as that human beings are merely vehicles for selfish genes, or merely eruptions of the will to power. To claim such knowledge is to claim to know something which, though not itself a moral intuition, can correct moral intuitions. It is essential to this idea of moral knowledge that a whole community might come to know that most of their most salient intuitions about the right thing to do were wrong.
But now suppose we ask: Is there this sort of knowledge? What kind of question is that? On the traditional view, it is a philosophical question, belonging to a branch of epistemology known as "metaethics".
But on the pragmatist view which I favor, it is a question of efficiency, of how best to grab hold of history - how best to bring about the utopia sketched by the Enlightenment. If the activities of those who attempt to achieve this sort of knowledge seem of little use in actualizing this utopia, that is a reason to think there is no such knowledge. If it seems that most of the work of changing moral intuitions is being done by manipulating our feelings rather than increasing our knowledge, that will be a reason to think that there is no knowledge of the sort which philosophers like Plato, Aquinas, and Kant hoped to acquire.
This pragmatist argument against the Platonist has the same form as an argument for cutting off payment to the priests who are performing purportedly war-winning sacrifices - an argument which says that all the real work of winning the war seems to be getting done by the generals and admirals, not to mention the foot soldiers.
The argument does not say: Since there seem to be no gods, there is probably no need to support the priests. It says instead: Since there is apparently no need to support the priests, there probably are no gods.
We pragmatists argue from the fact that the emergence of the human rights culture seems to owe nothing to increased moral knowledge, and everything to hearing sad and sentimental stories, to the conclusion that there is probably no knowledge of the sort Plato envisaged. We go on to argue: Since no useful work seems to be done by insisting on a purportedly ahistorical human nature, there probably is no such nature, or at least nothing in that nature that is relevant to our moral choices.
In short, my doubts about the effectiveness of appeals to moral knowledge are doubts about causal efficacy, not about epistemic status. My doubts have nothing to do with any of the theoretical questions discussed under the heading of "metaethics", questions about the relation between facts and values, or between reason and passion, or between the cognitive and the noncognitive, or between descriptive statements and action-guiding statements.
Nor do they have anything to do with questions about realism and antirealism. The difference between the moral realist and the moral antirealist seems to pragmatists to be a difference which makes no practical difference.
Further, such metaethical questions presuppose the Platonic distinction between inquiry which aims at efficient problem-solving and inquiry which aims at a goal called "truth for its own sake". That distinction collapses if one follows Dewey in thinking of all inquiry - in physics as well as in ethics - as practical problem-solving, or if one follows Peirce in seeing every belief as action-guiding5.
Even after the priests have been pensioned off, however, the memories of certain priests may still be cherished by the community - especially the memories of their prophecies. We remain profoundly grateful to philosophers like Plato and Kant, not because they discovered truths but because they prophesied cosmopolitan utopias - utopias most of whose details they may have got wrong, but utopias we might never have struggled to reach had we not heard their prophecies.
As long as our ability to know, and in particular to discuss the question "What is man? But this ability, and those questions, have, in the course of the last two hundred years, come to seem much less important. Rabossi summarizes this cultural sea change in his claim that human rights foundationalism is outmoded. In the remainder of this lecture, I shall take up the questions: Why has knowledge become much less important to our self-image than it was two hundred years ago?
Why does the attempt to found culture on nature, and moral obligation on knowledge of transcultural universals, seem so much less important to us than it seemed in the Enlightenment?
Why is there so little resonance, and so little point, in asking whether human beings in fact have the rights listed in the Helsinki Declaration? Why, in short, has moral philosophy become such an inconspicuous part of our culture? A simple answer is that between Kant's time and ours Darwin argued most of the intellectuals out of the view that human beings contain a special added ingredient.
He convinced most of us that we were exceptionally talented animals, animals clever enough to take charge of our own future evolution. I think this answer is right as far as it goes, but it leads to a further question: Why did Darwin succeed, relatively speaking, so very easily? Why did he not cause the creative philosophical ferment caused by Galileo and Newton? The revival by the New Science of the seventeenth century of a Democritean-Lucretian corpuscularian picture of nature scared Kant into inventing transcendental philosophy, inventing a brand-new kind of knowledge, which could demote the corpuscularian world picture to the status of "appearance".
Kant's example encouraged the idea that the philosopher, as an expert on the nature and limits of knowledge, can serve as supreme cultural arbiter1. By the time of Darwin, however, this idea was already beginning to seem quaint.
The historicism which dominated the intellectual world of the early nineteenth century had created an antiessentialist mood.
So when Darwin came along, he fitted into the evolutionary niche which Herder and Hegel had begun to colonize. Intellectuals who populate this niche look to the future rather than to eternity. They prefer new ideas about how change can be effected to stable criteria for determining the desirability of change. They are the ones who think both Plato and Nietzsche outmoded. The best explanation of both Darwin's relatively easy triumph, and our own increasing willingness to substitute hope for knowledge, is that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw, among the Europeans and Americans, an extraordinary increase in wealth, literacy, and leisure.
This increase made possible an unprecedented acceleration in the rate of moral progress. Such events as the French Revolution and the ending of the trans-Atlantic slave trade prompted nineteenth-century intellectuals in the rich democracies to say: It is enough for us to know that we live in an age in which human beings can make things much better for ourselves7.
We do not need to dig behind this historical fact to nonhistorical facts about what we really are. In the two centuries since the French Revolution, we have learned that human beings are far more malleable than Plato or Kant had dreamed. The more we are impressed by this malleability, the less interested we become in questions about our ahistorical nature.
The more we see a chance to recreate ourselves, the more we read Darwin not as offering one more theory about what we really are but as providing reasons why we need not ask what we really are.
Nowadays, to say that we are clever animals is not to say something philosophical and pessimistic but something political and hopeful, namely: If we can work together, we can make ourselves into whatever we are clever and courageous enough to imagine ourselves becoming. This sets aside Kant's question "What is Man? The question "What is Man? The residual popularity of this answer accounts for the residual popularity of Kant's astonishing claim that sentimentality has nothing to do with morality, that there is something distinctively and transculturally human called "the sense of moral obligation" which has nothing to do with love, friendship, trust, or social solidarity.
As long as we believe that, people like Rabossi are going to have a tough time convincing us that human rights foundationalism is an outmoded project. To overcome this idea of a sui generis sense of moral obligation, it would help to stop answering the question "What makes us different from the other animals? We should substitute "We can feel for each other to a much greater extent than they can". This substitution would let us disentangle Christ's suggestion that love matters more than knowledge from the neo-Platonic suggestion that knowledge of the truth will make us free.
For as long as we think that there is an ahistorical power which makes for righteousness — a power called truth, or rationality — we shall not be able to put foundationalism behind us. The best, and probably the only, argument for putting foundationalism behind us is the one I have already suggested: It would be more efficient to do so, because it would let us concentrate our energies on manipulating sentiments, on sentimental education.
That sort of education sufficiently acquaints people of different kinds with one another so that they are less tempted to think of those different from themselves as only quasi-human. The goal of this manipulation of sentiment is to expand the reference of the terms "our kind of people" and "people like us". All I can do to supplement this argument from increased efficiency is to offer a suggestion about how Plato managed to convince us that knowledge of universal truths mattered as much as he thought it did.
Plato thought that the philosopher's task was to answer questions like "Why should I be moral? Why is it rational to be moral? Why is it in my interest to be moral? Why is it in the interest of human beings as such to be moral? He thought this because he believed the best way to deal with people like Thrasymachus and Callicles was to demonstrate to them that they had an interest of which they were unaware, an interest in being rational, in acquiring self-knowledge.
Plato thereby saddled us with a distinction between the true and the false self. That distinction was, by the time of Kant, transmuted into a distinction between categorical, rigid, moral obligation and flexible, empirically determinable, self-interest.
Contemporary moral philosophy is still lumbered with this opposition between self-interest and morality, an opposition which makes it hard to realize that my pride in being a part of the human rights culture is no more external to my self than my desire for financial success.
It would have been better if Plato had decided, as Aristotle was to decide, that there was nothing much to be done with people like Thrasymachus and Callicles, and that the problem was how to avoid having children who would be like Thrasymachus and Callicles.
By insisting that he could reeducate people who had matured without acquiring appropriate moral sentiments by invoking a higher power than sentiment, the power of reason, Plato got moral philosophy off on the wrong foot. He led moral philosophers to concentrate on the rather rare figure of the psychopath, the person who has no concern for any human being other than himself.
Moral philosophy has systematically neglected the much more common case: the person whose treatment of a rather narrow range of featherless bipeds is morally impeccable, but who remains indifferent to the suffering of those outside this range, the ones he or she thinks of as pseudohumans8. Plato set things up so that moral philosophers think they have failed unless they convince the rational egotist that he should not be an egotist — convince him by telling him about his true, unfortunately neglected, self.
But the rational egotist is not the problem. The problem is the gallant and honorable Serb who sees Muslims as circumcised dogs. It is the brave soldier and good comrade who loves and is loved by his mates, but who thinks of women as dangerous, malevolent whores and bitches. Plato thought that the way to get people to be nicer to each other was to point out what they all had in common — rationality.
But it does little good to point out, to the people I have just described, that many Muslims and women are good at mathematics or engineering or jurisprudence. Resentful young Nazi toughs were quite aware that many Jews were clever and learned, but this only added to the pleasure they took in beating them up. Nor does it do much good to get such people to read Kant, and agree that one should not treat rational agents simply as means.
For everything turns on who counts as a fellow human being, as a rational agent in the only relevant sense — the sense in which rational agency is synonomous with membership in our moral community.
For most white people, until very recently, most Black people did not so count. For most Christians, up until the seventeenth century or so, most heathen did not so count. For the Nazis, Jews did not so count. For most males in countries in which the average annual income is under four thousand dollars, most females still do not so count. Whenever tribal and national rivalries become important, members of rival tribes and nations will not so count. Kant's account of the respect due to rational agents tells you that you should extend the respect you feel for people like yourself to all featherless bipeds.
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