Morality and Social Criticism: The Force of Reasons in Discursive Practice

Morality and Social Criticism The Force of Reasons in Discursive Practice

Richard Amesbury

Morality and Social Criticism

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Morality and Social Criticism The Force of Reasons in Discursive Practice Richard Amesbury

© Richard Amesbury 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–3822–0 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–3822–9 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Amesbury, Richard, 1972– Morality and social criticism : the force of reasons in discursive practice / Richard Amesbury. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–3822–9 (cloth) 1. Ethics. 2. Critical theory. I. Title. BJ1275.A43 2005 142–dc22

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For Amy

But if you have any reverence for Persuasion, the majesty of Persuasion, the spell of my voice that would appease your fury – Oh please stay … Aeschylus, The Eumenides

Contents Introduction

viii

1 Solidarity and Dissent: Rorty and the “Consequences of Pragmatism”

1

2 The Force of Reasons: Habermas on Norms and Justification

20

3 Norms, Interpretation, and Decision-Making: Derrida on Justice

46

4 Norms and Normativity: Between Regulism and Regularism

65

5 “In the Beginning was the Deed”: The Ungrounded Grounds of Rational Criticism

86

6 Agreeing to Disagree: Toward a More Capacious Conception of Tradition

117

7 The Return of Objectivity: Realism without (Rampant) Platonism

140

Postscript

166

Doing Justice: Criticism and Philosophy

Notes

174

Index

210

vii

Introduction The phrase “the legacy of the Enlightenment” means very different things to different people, and its ambiguity derives largely from the ambiguity of the legacy itself. The truth is that the Enlightenment left us with a number of different legacies. On the one hand, it bequeathed to us a compelling vision of the dignity of the individual and her power to shape society, together with a social agenda emphasizing the twin ideals of freedom and equality. On the other hand, it left us with a philosophical program characterized broadly by rationalism, foundationalism, and the privileging of universality over particularity – all of which have since come under sustained philosophical critique. Criticism is, of course, a celebrated instrument of enlightened reason – Kant called the Enlightenment the “age of criticism,” adding that “to criticism everything must submit” – and criticism of the Enlightenment might thus simply be regarded as its natural outgrowth.1 The problem, however, is that the philosophical doctrines that are currently the subject of post-metaphysical critique were said to serve as the ground on which the Enlightenment’s social hopes stood or fell. To be sure, the dismantling of metaphysics is itself often said to embody liberative ideals. If, as Kant maintained, enlightenment is humanity’s release from its “self-incurred tutelage,” then perhaps the aims of the Enlightenment can best be achieved by freeing us from the strictures of a totalizing philosophical “system.”2 There are, moreover, many good non-philosophical reasons to be deeply suspicious of an overly optimistic faith in historical progress and human perfectibility – among them the horrors of the last century. Indeed, it is worth remembering that many of these horrors were perpetrated precisely in the name of Reason.3 And yet it is not immediately apparent that the social hopes that seem to animate this postmodern critique of reason – themselves a gift of the Enlightenment – can survive, let alone thrive, in a “post-enlightened” philosophical climate. In seeking to liberate ourselves from the Enlightenment – it might be argued – we risk becoming post-critical. Can the Enlightenment’s critical spirit be preserved without its more problematic philosophical appurtenances? The present work seeks to address this question by examining the ethical implications of the rejection of what has been called platonism – namely, the aspiration to viii

Introduction ix

step outside the contingency of human language and practice in order to view the world from “sideways on.” I argue that it is possible to maintain a commitment to radical social criticism while rejecting its philosophical “foundation” – to borrow the imagery of the tradition I am seeking to supercede. In this regard, my views differ importantly from those of some of the post-Enlightenment philosophers I discuss – such as Richard Rorty – who adopt a revisionist approach to our moral discourse. As Hilary Putnam describes it, the picture latent in the latter approach “is that philosophy was not a reflection on the culture, a reflection some of whose ambitious projects failed, but a basis, a sort of pedestal, on which the culture rested, and which has been abruptly yanked out.”4 I suggest that this revisionism is itself a version of the very foundationalist enterprise it ostensibly seeks to discredit – albeit a skeptical version. By contrast, the alternative account for which I argue seeks to preserve the distinctions essential for moral criticism – distinctions that of course far pre-date the Enlightenment. In particular, my aim in this book is to develop a philosophical account of moral criticism that would enable us to overcome the current deadlock between discourse ethics (as championed by Jürgen Habermas) and deconstruction (as championed by Jacques Derrida).5 At first glance, Habermas and Derrida may appear as polar opposites – the former attempting to retrieve something of value from the wreckage of modernity and the latter representing the apotheosis of postmodernism – and it is true that there is much about which they disagree. However, as I will show, both are concerned to prevent the individual from being swallowed up by her society. Thus, insofar as each is anxious to preserve the possibility of social criticism, each is – to that extent – an heir to the Enlightenment’s social hopes. Unfortunately – or so I argue – their efforts to sustain these hopes are hampered by the fact that both misconceive the nature of our moral norms. According to the traditional account shared by Habermas and Derrida, moral norms are conceived as explicit rules governing human behavior, and moral judgment is conceived as the process whereby these rules are applied to particular circumstances. By contrast, I argue that explicit rules do not constitute an independent source of normative authority. A major aim of this book is to offer a pragmatic account of moral normativity. As Robert Brandom notes, “pragmatic theories of norms are distinguished from Platonist theories, in treating as fundamental norms implicit in practices rather than norms explicit in principles.”6 Whereas Habermas and Derrida treat moral reasoning as

x Introduction

analogous to legal reasoning, I argue that moral norms differ from laws in certain fundamental respects. To take as one’s point of departure the moral intuitions of ordinary people is, according to W.D. Ross, “the time-honoured method of ethics” – though, as Ross would have acknowledged, it is not a method that is pursued as assiduously or as universally as might be hoped.7 The task of the philosopher, on this account, is to do justice to the data of moral experience. I contend that in seeking to explain – or, alternatively, to explain away – these “data,” many of the rival moral theories I canvass here fall short. Of special interest in this regard are considerations of a religious nature. It is itself a legacy of the Enlightenment that many moral philosophers have wanted to deny such considerations any role in rational moral deliberation, while other philosophers have simply ignored the issue, as if religion were largely irrelevant to morality. However, as Jeffrey Stout notes, “[a]n account of moral language, undertaken in our culture at this point in its history and sensitive to its context, must sooner or later come to grips with the fate of religious ethics or else risk radical distortion.”8 Although it has been claimed that religion belongs to the “private” sphere – that it is a matter of what one does with one’s solitude – religion appears to be playing an increasingly significant role in people’s thinking about matters of “public” importance. Thus, it provides us with a helpful “litmus test” of the adequacy of philosophical theorizing about such matters. Stanley Cavell once remarked that “the other time-honored method of moral philosophers” – a method employed by both Ross and Cavell – is “their habit of comparing moral claims (or reasons) with our claims to knowledge.”9 Whereas some philosophers contrast the former unflatteringly with the latter, I argue that the latter can be conceived broadly so as to include the former. In seeking in this way to defend the rationality of moral discourse, however, it is important not to willfully blind ourselves to those characteristic features of that discourse that have seemed to many philosophers to render problematic the analogy between moral claims and (other kinds of) truth-claims. Of special concern here is the phenomenon of moral disagreement, which I discuss at length in Chapter 6. Ours – it cannot be denied – is a pluralistic context, and any adequate account of moral discourse must attempt to make sense of this profusion of voices. However, I also contend that despite the recent attention it has received, this diversity itself is not simply a recent phenomenon, and that it need not be interpreted as a threat to the rationality of criticism.

Introduction xi

The concepts articulated in the title of this work – reasons, criticism, and morality – are, I contend, closely intertwined. To be human is – among other things – to be the kind of being who, when properly educated, is susceptible to the force of reasons.10 One’s commitments are justifiable – in the relevant sense – when they are determined by means of what Kant referred to as “representations of reason” as opposed to “subjective causes.”11 Insofar as representations of reason are conceived objectively, an individual’s attitudes, beliefs, and actions cannot be treated simply as private matters – in the sense, say, that one’s emotions or sensations might not improperly in this context be termed “private.”12 Her commitments are thus not merely explicable, but defensible. On this account, rationality involves a social dimension: the individual is conceived as a participant in discourse – i.e., as a participant in what Brandom, following Wilfrid Sellars, calls the “game of giving and asking for reasons.” It is in this way that her commitments – by being made intelligible – are at the same time exposed to the possibility of criticism – to appraisal in terms of publicly accessible standards and criteria. The kind of criticism with which the present work is primarily concerned is moral criticism. My contention is that moral deliberation is a rational activity – a matter of giving and asking for reasons. Thus, I will draw analogies between moral discourse and what is sometimes called “theoretical discourse,” especially discourse about empirical matters. In the latter contexts, truth is at stake. Something similar is true – I shall argue – in moral contexts. To the extent that the account for which I argue emphasizes the importance to criticism of the notion of objectivity – a notion with which some postmodern philosophers and social critics have advised us to dispense – it seeks to preserve certain important features of our Enlightenment heritage. However, it attempts to do so without recourse to the problematic assumptions of which these philosophers and critics are rightly suspicious.

Overview of the chapters This book consists of seven chapters and a postscript. I begin in Chapter 1 by discussing Richard Rorty’s critique of platonism and his neo-pragmatic attempt to reconstruct our moral and theoretical discourse in purely immanent terms. The problem with platonism, Rorty argues, is that there is no Archimedean point of view from which it would be possible to assess the relation between language and the world. In rejecting the platonistic urge, we thus must abandon the

xii Introduction

realist notion of objectivity. Rorty denies the possibility of anchoring our piton in the hard rock of reality itself: instead of thinking of ourselves as answerable to the world, he contends, we ought to see ourselves as answerable to one another. In this way Rorty aims to exchange talk of truth for talk of justification and talk of moral obligation for talk of solidarity. Rorty sees his project as having an essentially emancipatory trajectory. By freeing us from the putative illusion that we are beholden to something larger and more powerful than ourselves, he seeks to promote more democratic, humanistic ways of thinking. However, I argue that by abandoning the notion of objectivity, Rorty also abandons important resources required for criticizing and reforming one’s culture. Since Rorty regards justification as a purely sociological affair – to be determined by observing the reactions of one’s cultural peers – he is unable adequately to account for the rationality of dissent. His antiauthoritarianism thus ironically seems to harbor a bias in favor of those in the majority. Rorty’s work consequently raises – in an acute way – the question of whether post-Enlightenment philosophical thought can be reconciled with the social hopes of the Enlightenment – hopes for what Rorty calls a “global, cosmopolitan, democratic, egalitarian, classless, casteless society.”13 In Chapter 2 I examine Habermas’s criticisms of Rorty and his attempt to carry forward the “unfinished project of modernity” by means of discourse ethics. Although he shares with Rorty a suspicion of the overweening ambitions of metaphysics, Habermas is concerned to distinguish the force of reasons from the merely causal efficacy of “strategic” uses of language and to establish an argumentative procedure for testing the universal validity of candidate moral norms. Whereas Rorty emphasizes solidarity with one’s cultural peers, Habermas seeks to promote a more inclusive “solidarity with strangers.” Although I agree with many of Habermas’s criticisms of Rorty’s version of pragmatism and am deeply sympathetic to the principle aims of his project, I contend that Habermas misconceives the nature of the norms whose validity he seeks to establish, and that when their nature is properly understood, his appeal to the principle of universalization – according to which a norm is said to be valid if all affected can accept the consequences of its general observance for everyone’s interests – can be recognized as misplaced. I criticize Habermas’s interrelated assumptions (a) that moral norms can be articulated without reference to their mode of application and (b) that morality is a means of satisfying interests that can be articulated prior to one’s initiation into a

Introduction xiii

morally appropriate way of seeing. I argue that the first assumption results in the threat of a regress of rules for ensuring the correct application of rules, and that the second assumption creates a free-rider dilemma. At the root of both assumptions lies an analogy between morality and law. Although Habermas is careful to distinguish the universality of moral principles from the more circumscribed scope of law, he argues that both kinds of rules perform a similar function – namely, the regulation of interpersonal relations. However, I contend that at crucial points the analogy between morality and law does not hold. Here I distinguish between regulative and constitutive rules and argue that moral norms should be understood as constitutive of interests rather than as contributing to their satisfaction. Chapter 3 examines Derrida’s claims that justice resides in the application of the moral norms he calls “laws,” and that, by their very nature, these rules can be applied in more than one way. Whereas discourse ethics seeks to resist Rorty’s identification of moral obligation with tradition and custom by establishing a procedure for distinguishing universalizable moral norms from merely localized ethical ones, deconstruction, while rejecting this distinction, attempts to achieve much the same result by distinguishing all norms from justice. In this way, Derrida seeks to relieve the insularity of Rorty’s neo-pragmatic account of our practices while, at the same time, tempering the Habermasian emphasis on universality with a deeper sensitivity to the particularity of the circumstances in which moral decisions are required. As Derrida notes, such decisions always involve irreplaceable individuals and singular events. But although I believe Derrida’s concern for particularity is not without its merits, I contend that his way of developing this point ultimately undermines the normativity of the norms in question. If – as Derrida contends – the act of making a decision about how to apply a norm is not itself normatively constrained, then it is difficult to see how to distinguish justice from the arbitrary and partial exercise of will. Insofar as justice is said to elude every concrete determination, Derrida leaves his ethics open to the charge of vacuity. By seeking to become radically critical, I argue, deconstruction ironically forfeits the resources required for substantive, rational criticism. In Chapter 4 I offer an alternative account of the nature of moral norms. I begin by examining Wittgenstein’s so-called “rule-following considerations.” In these remarks, Wittgenstein is attempting to steer a course between two rival accounts of normativity. According to the

xiv Introduction

first account – which Brandom terms regulism – the propriety of behavior is always to be assessed in relation to explicit rules. But since the application that is made of an explicit rule is itself a behavior the propriety of which – according to this account – stands in need of assessment, regulism leads to an infinite regress of explicit rules. The second account – which Brandom terms regularism – attempts to avoid this problem by suggesting that rules are summaries of past performance. According to this view, each new application made of a rule contributes to its meaning. However, regularism is unsatisfactory as an account of rule-following, since it fails adequately to account for the possibility of mistakes. I argue that Habermas’s account of norms is a broadly regulist account, and that Derrida’s account of norms is broadly regularist. Wittgenstein rejected both regulism and regularism in favor of a practice-based view of normativity. According to this latter view, which Brandom has developed in rich detail, explicit rules depend for their normativity on norms implicit in practices. Whereas Habermas and Derrida both treat moral norms as analogous to laws – i.e., as explicit rules that must somehow be applied to particular circumstances – I suggest that Brandom’s pragmatic account of norms provides us with the resources for developing an alternative account of moral reasoning – one that avoids the respective pitfalls of regulism and regularism. I argue that although moral norms can be given expression in the form of propositions (or proposition-like locutions), they operate at a different level in our discourse. I also take up the question of whether a practice-based view of moral normativity undercuts the kind of unconditionality and universality that Habermas is concerned to preserve. I argue that this worry arises only if – like Habermas – one insists upon a purely epistemic account of moral validity. If, by contrast, one treats moral validity as akin to truth (i.e., as justification-transcendent), then it can be appreciated that the universality of what is claimed is not compromised by the particularity of the context in which the claim is made. The aim of Chapter 5 is to build upon the view of norms articulated in Chapter 4 by developing a practice-based account of moral reasoning. I argue, with reference to Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, that just as the game of doubting in empirical contexts depends upon there being certain matters about which doubts do not ordinarily arise, so the game of giving and asking for reasons in moral contexts depends upon there being certain commitments that are not ordinarily subjected to criticism or demands for justification. According to this account, not

Introduction xv

all moral commitments are, at any given time, equally subject to critical appraisal, since some are basic in our critical activities. However, I argue that it is important to distinguish this logical claim from the more substantive moral claim – central to the concepts of moral censorship and “political correctness” – that there are certain things that one should not question. The point is not to disparage the questions that do arise, but to appreciate that such questions are intelligible only when there are matters about which questions do not arise. I argue that the logical limits of the critical enterprise are conditions rather than limitations. I also discuss the great moral distances that can divide people. Of special interest, in this respect, are religiously-based considerations. Neither discourse ethics nor deconstruction can adequately accommodate the roles played in moral discourse by determinate religious convictions, given the particularity of these commitments. I point out, however, that some degree of particularity is a feature of all contexts of moral reflection and justification. Here, I argue, it is important to appreciate the role of what Wittgenstein called “persuasion.” Unlike a merely strategic use of language, persuasion – in Wittgenstein’s sense – is logically, rather than simply causally, relevant to the commitments the critic aims to inculcate. It is a way of showing something that cannot be said. By the same token, persuasion – in the relevant sense – must be distinguished from the kind of appeals to passion that Rorty calls “sentimental education.” Chapter 6 focuses on the phenomenon of moral disagreement. Some philosophers – including, perhaps most notably, Alasdair MacIntyre – have argued that the prevalence of such disagreement calls into question the rationality of our contemporary moral discourse and renders the would-be social critic incapable of addressing those around her in an idiom they might understand. According to MacIntyre, the apparently unsettlable character of many contemporary debates – such as the debate over abortion – can be traced to the incommensurability of the premises from which the respective parties argue. However, although I acknowledge the existence of the kind of moral distances at which MacIntyre gestures, I deny that all – or even most – moral disagreement can be accounted for in this way. In contrast to MacIntyre, I contend that the potential for moral disagreement cannot be eliminated by securing prior consensus on what are to count as relevant moral considerations, and that consequently the prevalence of moral disagreement need not necessarily be regarded as evidence of the breakdown of our moral language.

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The view for which I argue recognizes with MacIntyre the importance of traditions, but it contends that these traditions should not be conceived as monological. Following Stanley Cavell, I argue that the modes of argument characteristic of moral debate are such as often to allow for the rationality of incompatible conclusions. Here I argue for a conception of “the personal” in ethics which does not reduce to the mere subjectivism and emotivism of which MacIntyre is rightly critical. I show that reason-giving continues to play a crucial role in moral discourse, even though the role it plays here is different than the role it plays in theoretical discourse. The view for which I argue recognizes that there is an internal relation between the positions for which one elects to take responsibility and one’s character as a moral agent. In Chapter 7 I argue – pace Rorty – that a rejection of platonism does not entail a rejection of the notion of objectivity. I contend that the choice with which Rorty confronts us – a choice between imagining ourselves as answerable to the world conceived platonistically and conceiving of ourselves as answerable only to our peers – does not reflect the full range of options, and that a more thoroughgoing pragmatism can enable us to articulate a third position, which I term “ordinary realism.” According to the latter way of thinking, the world to which we are answerable is located within the domain of what is thinkable, but is distinct from the thought which it serves to constrain. I also argue – contra Habermas – that the world to which we are answerable can be conceived as a realm of moral value, and that consequently moral validity, like truth, can be conceived in non-epistemic terms. Thus, I ultimately reject Habermas’s principle of universalization in favor not of the Rortian position against which it is intended to serve as a bulwark, but of the same kind of objectivity that characterizes our theoretical discourse. The account for which I argue recognizes that although it is indeed we who hold each other accountable, we hold each other accountable to something beyond ourselves – namely, the subject matter of our discourse. Whereas Rorty regards the notion of objectivity as parasitic on the platonistic urge to transcend our discursive practices, I argue that talk of “objectivity” is inscribed right into these practices. Following Brandom – himself a former student of Rorty – I attempt to elucidate the structure of these practices in terms of a “scorekeeping” model. On this account, interlocutors are continually engaged in keeping track of one another’s attitudes by distinguishing between what is taken to follow from what and what really follows from what – between commitments and entitlements. For Brandom, talk of “objectivity” is there-

Introduction xvii

fore grounded in a perspectival form rather than a trans-perspectival content. Thus, I conclude that in abandoning the Enlightenment’s search for philosophical foundations we bid farewell only to what Wittgenstein called “houses of cards” while retaining our grip on distinctions internal to our practices – distinctions essential to the possibility of social criticism. In the postscript I draw the book to a close by meditating on the perennially vexed question of the proper relation between the philosopher and the polis. Here I examine two rival conceptions of philosophy – two directions in which readers might be inclined to go, after having traveled together this far. The first takes its bearings from Wittgenstein’s remark that “the philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas,” while the second emphasizes Kierkegaard’s observation that the philosopher is also an existing human being. I argue that the strength of the first conception lies in its appreciation of the disinterested – not to say uninterested – character of philosophical contemplation, but that its weakness lies in its attempt to make sense of this character by postulating a special philosophical point of view, a distinctive social location. By contrast, I contend that the strength of the second conception lies in its recognition of the fact that the philosopher is also a participant in the game of giving and asking for reasons, but that its weakness lies in its failure adequately to distinguish a philosophical interest in the game from other kinds of interest. What both conceptions have in common, then, is their equation of a disinterested interest in the fray with a view of the fray “from above.” I argue for a third conception according to which philosophy differs from other kinds of activities, including social criticism, not because it is carried out from a special point of view, but because it aims to reflect from within the game of giving and asking for reasons on the game of giving and asking for reasons. In this sense philosophy is a descriptive activity pursued from within a particular normative space. The view for which I argue thus distinguishes between philosophy and social criticism, but not necessarily between the philosopher and the social critic. I conclude that there need be no contradiction between the view that philosophy should “leave everything as it is,” and the critic’s conviction that the point is not to interpret the world, but to change it.

Preliminary remarks The present book discusses the work of a variety of different thinkers, representing a variety of different perspectives in the philosophical

xviii Introduction

debate. In so doing, it attempts – in a modest way – to bridge the divide between “Anglo-American” and “continental” philosophy, as well as the internecine divide between discourse ethics and deconstruction. My contention is that such bridge-building can be achieved by focusing on the issues themselves – issues which transcend the sometimes vigilantly patrolled boundaries of particular philosophical “schools” or traditions. The task is greatly abetted by the fact that many of the thinkers on whose work I focus – including Rorty, Habermas and Derrida – have long been involved in dialogue across these philosophical fault lines. Nevertheless, there often remain significant differences among these thinkers not only in language, style, and terminology, but also in matters of philosophical method – differences arising in part, no doubt, as a result of differences among their respective social loci and audiences. As a result, the challenge has been to frame the issues here discussed in terms that might invite rather than foreclose further discussion. Whether I have succeeded in that task I must leave for the reader to decide. Of course, I too write from a particular philosophical locus, and thus this book ultimately contributes to the diversity rather than sublating it. The point of view from which I write is strongly influenced by Wittgenstein – although, as will become evident, I disagree with some dominant interpretations of his thought. Interestingly, Wittgenstein defies easy classification under either rubric of the analytic-continental schema. An Austrian who spent most of his professional life in Cambridge, Wittgenstein has variously been claimed and repudiated by each camp. Consequently, I believe he might be well positioned to help mediate a wider dialogue. Admittedly, to attempt to address concerns typically associated with critical social theory from a Wittgensteinian point of view might at first appear counter-productive. As Alice Crary observes, Wittgenstein is sometimes thought to have advocated “a view of meaning that inclines toward ruling out the very possibility of criticism of practices and traditions.”14 On this reading, Wittgenstein’s work is characterized by “a tendency to undermine the critical modes of thought required to make sense of demands for progressive change.”15 This is a reading that I will contest. It arises, I suggest, largely from misconceptions about the role of “agreement” in his account of normativity, as well as from the erroneous assumption that the so-called “limits of sense” constitute limitations on (or barriers to) what can be said. I will argue that Wittgenstein’s method, as well as some of his insights into the nature of our discursive practices, shed much light on the topics I aim to address.

Introduction xix

However, it should be noted that although I approach the problems of moral philosophy from a broadly Wittgensteinian point of view, I make no effort here to analyze the development of Wittgenstein’s views on ethics, much less his own notoriously critical moral and social opinions. Before proceeding further, I should also comment briefly on my use of the terms “ethics” and “morality.” Some philosophers – including Habermas, whose views I discuss in Chapter 2 – distinguish sharply between the two, although not always in the same way or for the same purposes. Historically, however, the two terms have been closely related – the former deriving from a Greek word and the latter from a Latin rendering of it by Cicero. When I am expositing Habermas’s views, I shall attempt to adhere to his usage; since, however, I ultimately reject Habermas’s criterion for distinguishing between ethics and morality, I use the two terms interchangeably in my own discussions. In order to avoid confusing second-order reflection with firstorder deliberation, I prefer the term “moral philosophy” over “ethics” in reference to philosophical contemplation of moral matters.

Acknowledgments The intellectual debts incurred in the writing of this book are many. The greatest of these is to my philosophical mentor, D.Z. Phillips. The present work – though substantially modified – began its life as a dissertation under his direction. A version of Chapter 3 was given as a paper at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, to which David Lamberth responded. I also am grateful to the following people for having read and commented helpfully on various portions of the manuscript, at various stages in its development: James Conant, Patrick Rogers Horn, Paul Hurley, Anselm Kyongsuk Min, George Newlands, Randy Ramal, and John Woell. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Barbara Green and the staff of the Churches’ Center for Theology and Public Policy in Washington, D.C., for their hospitality during my term as a visiting scholar at the Center during the summer of 2004.

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1 Solidarity and Dissent: Rorty and the “Consequences of Pragmatism”

Culture is like language, ever developing. There is no right and wrong, no purity from which there is decline. Usage sanctions everything. V.S. Naipaul1 Torture is not culture. Alice Walker2 “Words fail me,” says the narrator of J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, remembering his doomed confrontation with the ruthless Colonel Joll. As a mob of villagers looks on, Joll – a military officer dispatched from the capital to secure the borders of the Empire – prepares to make a spectacle of captured barbarians by crippling them with a hammer. Coetzee’s narrator, the aging magistrate of an obscure frontier outpost, is moved to object. “‘Look,’ I shout. ‘We are the great miracle of creation! But from some blows this miraculous body cannot repair itself! How –!’ Words fail me. ‘Look at these men!’ I recommence. ‘Men!’ … What I wanted to say next I cannot remember.”3 In the face of hitherto unimagined cruelty, as in the face of tragedy, words sometimes seem inadequate. Only tears, prayers, or inarticulate groans seem capable of conveying unspeakable horror. Moreover, it often is easier to acquiesce than to speak up. “Would I have dared to face the crowd to demand justice for these ridiculous barbarian prisoners …?” Coetzee’s disgraced magistrate wonders later. “Justice: once that word is uttered, where will it all end? Easier to shout No!”4 It is not that the magistrate is a coward. He is less afraid of the savagery to which his protest exposes his own miraculous body than of 1

2 Morality and Social Criticism

the broader implications of appealing to an authority beyond that of the Empire of which he is self-consciously very much still a part. Easier to lay my head on a block than to defend the cause of justice for the barbarians: for where can that argument lead but to laying down our arms and opening the gates of the town to the people whose land we have raped? The old magistrate, defender of the rule of law, enemy in his own way of the State, assaulted and imprisoned, impregnably virtuous, is not without his own twinges of doubt.5 The demands of justice are incompatible with those of the Empire: this is a conclusion to which it is perhaps better not to call attention. Within the context of the novel, the problem is not so much that the magistrate has nothing to say, as that he has trouble saying it. Consider, by contrast, the failure of language implied in the following remark by Richard Rorty: [W]hen the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form “There is something in you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond these practices which condemns you.”6 Rorty’s contention is that there is nothing of this kind to be said precisely because there is nothing beyond the practices of the totalitarian society that condemns the use of torture – no moral law, no God, no tribunal of reason. If Rorty is correct, then the magistrate’s inability to find the words with which to address Joll is perhaps symptomatic of an encounter with the limits of language itself. That – contrary to what the magistrate himself fears – these limits coincide with those of the political and social institutions that characterize a culture is also suggested by the following remark by Rorty: People in [totalitarian] societies are in the same position as people with real or purported psychotic delusions. They may never be able to reconcile their memories with what the people around them are saying… . There is no procedure called “turning to the facts” which will help them.7 In each case, the putative resources for which the critic is inclined to reach – the “facts” or the “moral law” – prove illusory, and the distinc-

Solidarity and Dissent: Rorty and the “Consequences of Pragmatism” 3

tion collapses between the intended object of criticism and the imagined external source of normative authority. As its title suggests, Waiting for the Barbarians is told from the point of view of a participant in the culture of the Empire – albeit a disillusioned participant who has not seen the capital in years. In a moment of searing lucidity, Coetzee’s magistrate concludes that for all their manifest differences, he is not “the indulgent pleasure-loving opposite of the cold rigid Colonel.”8 He too is implicated in the very conditions against which he rages indignantly. “I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow.”9 Coetzee – who was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature – is, of course, South Africa’s best-known novelist, and it is worth noting that Waiting for the Barbarians appeared in 1980, during the height of apartheid. In the final line of the novel, the narrator describes himself as “a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.”10 And yet, the irony in the novel’s title is difficult to miss: Coetzee is clearly not without the resources – moral as well as literary – to raise questions that transcend even the indeterminate time and geography in which the novel is set. Rorty’s remark about torture appears in the introduction to a collection of his essays entitled Consequences of Pragmatism. The core of pragmatism – if a mode of thought as anti-essentialist as pragmatism can be said to have a “core” – is an emphasis on what has been termed the primacy of practice.11 Speaking, on this account, is a kind of doing. To that extent, my own approach in this book – an approach influenced by the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein – will be pragmatic.12 However, although I find much that is admirable and important in Rorty’s writing, I hope to show that a philosophical approach that values practice is not incompatible with an appreciation of the moral and theoretical distinctions on which the possibility of rational social criticism depends.

From objectivity to solidarity To understand why Rorty feels compelled to deny these seemingly crucial distinctions, it will be helpful to examine his broader philosophical project. Rorty’s thought is rich and complex, and he can be credited with having almost single-handedly revived interest in the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism – in part by showing how what had come to be regarded as a dated and slightly parochial concern shares much in common with Wittgenstein’s later philosophy

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and contemporary continental thought.13 However, whereas the traditional pragmatists who are his heroes – Peirce, James, and particularly Dewey – were inclined to speak in empiricist fashion of “experience,” Rorty exchanges this vocabulary for talk of language. His project, at least since his 1979 book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, has revolved around drawing out what he takes to be the implications of the pragmatic insight that language and thought are embedded in contingent and historically conditioned contexts of social practice – or, as he puts it in his characteristically candid manner, that “what counts as rational argumentation is as historically determined, and as contextdependent, as what counts as good French.”14 Central to this project has been a sustained attack on epistemology, understood as that branch of philosophy charged with providing us with a “theory of knowledge.” Indeed, insofar as the epistemological enterprise has been central to the whole of philosophy, Rorty’s project can be understood as a critique of philosophy as such15 – a philosophical critique of Philosophy (with a capital P).16 Rorty characterizes this epistemological enterprise as guided by a picture of the mind (or, in more recent times, of language) as a mirror of reality. Knowledge is to be understood on this account as a reflection – or “representation” – of the world. And it is the task of the philosopher to “polish the mirror” – that is, to assess the relation between the various regions of a culture, understood as the totality of claims to knowledge, and the reality (or region of reality) each purports to represent. Rorty’s metaphilosophical aim is to reinterpret the role of philosophy in relation to the rest of the culture of which it is itself a part by deconstructing the accounts of mind and knowledge that are both the product and the justification of the epistemological enterprise. If – as Rorty contends – it is the notion of “representing reality” that is confused, then no particular vocabulary can be said to represent reality better than any other: there is no “privileged set of descriptions” on which inquiry must necessarily converge. The philosopher enjoys no special status as an expert on the nature or limits of knowledge and thus cannot make good on the claim to serve as a judge and arbiter of culture. When dethroned and practiced with due humility, philosophy thus “aims at continuing a conversation rather than at discovering truth.”17 Its goal is not to determine the appropriateness of our current vocabulary vis-àvis the world, but to suggest new, startling, and potentially more useful vocabularies. The term Rorty uses to denote the apparent antithesis of pragmatism is platonism. Although Rorty usually capitalizes the term, I have here

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chosen not to (except of course in quotations), in order to signal the fact that Rorty uses it in reference not simply to the philosophy of Plato, but to a much larger tradition within which distinctions such as the distinction between appearance and reality are central.18 Rorty contends that in order to maintain these distinctions – which he calls “dualisms” – the platonist must aspire to occupy an Archimedean point of view outside our language. But, Rorty argues, such a perspective and the world that would purportedly be visible from it are philosophical illusions. It is “impossible … to step outside our skins – the traditions, linguistic and other, within which we do our thinking and self-criticism – and compare ourselves with something absolute.”19 Any attempt to conceive of reality would itself require recourse to the concepts located within these traditions. Consequently, no rigorous distinction can be drawn between “mere opinion and genuine knowledge.”20 What Rorty calls the “platonic urge” is ultimately an urge to escape what Kierkegaard referred to as the “conditions of existence.” It is the aspiration to occupy a point of view that is not simply a point of view. But for Rorty, to deny the possibility of a God’s-eye perspective is simultaneously to recognize the majesty of the human perspective – i.e., to deny that there is anything with which the “merely human” can be contrasted invidiously. Thus, one way to think of Rorty’s project is as involving a reinterpretation not simply of philosophy, but – more significantly – of what it means to be human. To see the aim of philosophy as truth – namely, the truth about the terms which provide ultimate commensuration for all human inquiries and activities – is to see human beings as objects rather than subjects, as existing en-soi rather than as both pour-soi and en-soi, as both described objects and describing subjects.21 By contrast, “[t]o see keeping a conversation going as a sufficient aim of philosophy, to see wisdom as consisting in the ability to sustain a conversation, is to see human beings as generators of new descriptions rather than beings one hopes to be able to describe accurately.”22 Rorty sees the crucial difference between these two conceptions of what it is to be human as a difference over the question of whether there is anything non-human to which human beings are answerable. It is, at bottom, a question “about the whereabouts of power.”23 Rorty consequently understands his project to have an essentially liberative and humanistic trajectory. He describes his philosophical writings as

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“attempts to tie in my social hopes – hopes for a global, cosmopolitan, democratic, egalitarian, classless, casteless society – with my antagonism towards Platonism.”24 The metaphysical world to which the platonist would like to keep us subordinated is “a world well lost.” Insofar as we human beings create and maintain our own vocabularies – vocabularies which neither represent nor fail to represent – we must stand on our own two feet. Thus, Rorty approvingly quotes Protagoras’s claim that “man is the measure of all thing.”25 Rorty’s aim is not to do away with constraints altogether, but to situate these constraints within – rather than somewhere external to – the linguistic practices of human communities. Thus, his proposal is to replace objectivity – understood as answerability to the world or the moral law – with solidarity – understood as answerability to one another. At one point Rorty defines pragmatism as “the doctrine that there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones – no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow inquirers.”26 What we say and how we behave are governed not by reality itself, but by our peers. For the platonist, truth is thought to consist in a relation of correspondence between a belief and some fact about the world said to obtain independently of the belief. Knowledge – conceived as justified, true belief – is thus understood to comprise two relations: the relation between a belief and the world, and the relation between the belief and the believer. In this way, the production of knowledge can be said to involve a negotiation between the knowing subject and an objective reality. However, as Rorty and other critics of the socalled “correspondence theory of truth” are quick to point out, the problem is that we lack the capacity to decide what counts as a “fact” independently of the language – the concatenation of concepts – in which we formulate these beliefs. The correspondence theory is therefore parasitic on precisely the platonistic conception of the “world” Rorty rejects. Thus, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty assimilates truth to what Dewey called “warranted assertability.” In other words, a “true” belief (sentence, statement, proposition) is one that “our peers will, ceteris paribus, let us get away with saying.”27 By the same token, Rorty argues, “people are morally responsible for whatever their peers tend to hold them morally responsible for.”28 One’s peers may of course hold one responsible for having violated a moral rule, but every such rule is itself a social construct which depends

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for its vitality on a society’s willingness to enforce it. He contends that “moral obligation does not have a nature, or a source, different from tradition, habit and custom,”29 and that “[t]he pragmatist view of what opponents of pragmatism call ‘firm moral principles’ is that such principles are abbreviations of past practices.”30 According to Rorty, pragmatists must therefore reject the “illusory contrast between loyalty to a person or a historical community and [loyalty] to something ‘higher’ than either.”31 Rorty interprets this loyalty in terms of both answerability to and responsibility for one’s peers: one is answerable to one’s peers, and it is primarily one’s peers for whom one’s peers hold one responsible. Thus, it is to be expected, on Rorty’s view, that individuals regard themselves as morally responsible mainly for other members of their own immediate community. On this account, the question of what is true or of what is right is inseparable from the question of what is justified. Moreover, justification is itself an inherently contextual affair. “To say that there is no such thing as a proposition being justified tout court, or an argument better tout court, amounts to saying that all reasons are reasons for particular people, restrained (as people always are) by spatial, temporal, and social conditions.”32 A justified belief – one that an individual can be warranted in asserting – is a belief that coheres with what one’s peers believe. As Rorty puts it, “nothing counts as justification unless by reference to what we already accept, and … there is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than coherence.” 33 For Rorty, the epistemological enterprise represents “the attempt to see the patterns of justification within normal discourse as more than just such patterns” – to see them as somehow putting us in touch with the world as it really is, apart from our beliefs.34 If, however, we adopt “a Deweyan conception of knowledge, as what we are justified in believing, then we will not imagine that there are enduring constraints on what can count as knowledge, since we will see ‘justification’ as a social phenomenon rather than a transaction between ‘the knowing subject’ and ‘reality.’”35

Why Rorty’s pragmatism is “hard to live with” Rorty claims that “[g]etting rid of our sense of being responsible to something other than, and larger than, our fellow human beings” – whether it be God, the moral law, or reality itself – “is a good idea.”36 But as Rorty himself admits, it is also an idea the implications of which

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can be troubling. In Consequences of Pragmatism he imagines an interlocutor asking: [I]sn’t there something terribly dangerous about the notion that truth can only be characterized as ‘the outcome of doing more of what we are doing now’? What if the ‘we’ is the Orwellian state? When tyrants employ Lenin’s blood-curdling sense of ‘objective’ to describe their lies as ‘objectively true,’ what is to prevent them from citing Peirce in Lenin’s defense?37 In reply, Rorty first considers the claim – which he attributes to Jürgen Habermas – that “such a definition of truth works only for the outcome of undistorted conversation, and that the Orwellian state is the paradigm of distortion.” But on what basis can we distinguish between distorted and undistorted conversation? The only plausible answer, Rorty says, is that “‘undistorted’ means employing our criteria of relevance, where we are the people who have read and pondered Plato, Newton, Kant, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Dewey, etc.”38 Rorty’s canon is a curious one insofar as it includes philosophers who insisted on precisely the distinctions – e.g., between appearance and reality and between what is held to be true and what is true – that Rorty rejects. Moreover, it would be naïve to suppose that the architects of totalitarianism had failed to read Marx, Darwin, Freud and so forth. In any case, Rorty’s reply seems merely to beg the initial question: what if “we” are the Orwellian state? And what if we have read Peirce?39 In his book Realism with a Human Face, Hilary Putnam asks Rorty whether he would accept the principle that “[w]hether a statement is warranted or not is independent of whether the majority of one’s cultural peers would say it is warranted or unwarranted.”40 In reply Rorty writes: Well, maybe a majority can be wrong. But suppose everybody in the community, except for one or two dubious characters notorious for making assertions even stranger than p, thinks S must be a bit crazy. They think this even after patiently sitting through S’s defense of p, and after sustained attempts to talk her out of it. Might S still be warranted in asserting p? Only if there were some way of determining warrant sub specie aeternitatis, some natural order of reasons which determines, quite apart from S’s ability to justify p to those around her, whether she is really justified in holding p.41

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Rorty bases his rejection of Putnam’s principle on his view that warrant is a “sociological matter, to be ascertained by observing the reception of S’s statement by her peers.”42 If, as Rorty argues, justification is a social phenomenon rather than a transaction with reality itself, then one cannot be justified in affirming what the rest of one’s society denies, or in denying what the rest of one’s society affirms. Consider Winston Smith, the protagonist of Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. As the plot progresses, Winston finds himself unable to reconcile certain of his beliefs with the statements made by those around him in the totalitarian society of Oceania. Since, as we have seen, Rorty rejects the notion of justification sub specie aeternitatis, arguing instead that genuine justification is always justification in relation to those around one, whose agreement is what furnishes a belief with warrant, he is unable to see how Winston could be rationally warranted in asserting, e.g., that two plus two is four, or that he had seen a photograph of Rutherford.43 However, as James Conant notes in a penetrating article comparing Rorty and Orwell, Rorty’s notion of justification is fundamentally at odds with the moral of Orwell’s novel as expressed in passages like the following: Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad … [Winston] fell asleep murmuring “Sanity is not statistical,” with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom.44 Because Rorty regards warrant as a “sociological matter,” his account denies precisely what Orwell seems to regard as crucial to resisting totalitarianism – namely, the possibility of “clinging to the truth against the whole world.” Rorty’s account also raises concerns about the nature of moral obligation and the limits of our responsibility toward others. If “moral obligation does not have a nature, or a source, different from tradition, habit and custom,” then it is hard to see how one’s own traditions, habits and customs could themselves be subjected to moral scrutiny. Moreover, if, as Rorty argues, “people are morally responsible for whatever their peers tend to hold them morally responsible for,” and if their peers tend to hold them morally responsible mainly for their peers, then it is hard to see how Rorty can allow for the possibility of responsibility toward strangers and enemies – the kind of responsibility Coetzee’s magistrate feels toward the barbarians. Rorty proposes to

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treat “justice” as “the name for loyalty to a certain very large group, the name for our largest current loyalty, rather than the name of something distinct from loyalty.”45 On this account, solidarity motivates responsibility, rather than the other way around. Consequently, it is difficult to see how it could be argued that solidarity – understood as loyalty – is the kind of arrangement one ought to pursue, even in cases involving people one is not already predisposed to regard as “peers.” Of course, that there is a tension here between Rorty’s analysis and the concerns of the would-be critic does not in itself entail that Rorty’s analysis is incorrect. After all, perhaps Winston is mistaken in thinking that his remark contains a profound wisdom, and perhaps the magistrate is wrong to suppose that the claims of justice exceed the limits of the Empire. Perhaps these thoughts merely express the sort of resentment – deeply ingrained in their psyches and perhaps also in ours – that Nietzsche saw as characteristic of the weak. This, in any case, is Rorty’s diagnosis. He writes: The residual popularity of Kantian ideas of “unconditional moral obligation” – obligation imposed by deep ahistorical noncontingent forces – seems to me almost entirely due to our abhorrence of the idea that the people on top hold the future in their hands, that everything depends on them, that there is nothing more powerful to which we can appeal against them.46 Rorty confesses that he too would prefer “a bottom-up way of achieving utopia, a quick reversal of fortune that will make the last first.” However, he denies that “our preference for this way lends any support to the idea that the Enlightenment project lies in the depths of every human soul.”47 For Rorty, our inclination to balk at the consequences of pragmatism is simply one more example of the platonistic “urge to escape the vocabulary and practices of one’s own time and find something ahistorical and necessary to cling to”48 – the same “urge which drove Plato to say that Socrates’ words and deeds, failing as they did to cohere with current theory and practice, nonetheless corresponded to something which the Athenians could barely glimpse.”49 Let us return, then, to the two remarks by Rorty with which I began the chapter. It is clear, I hope, that Rorty’s denial that there is anything “beyond” the practice of torture that condemns what the torturer’s peers are willing to let him get away with is of a piece with his denial that there is a procedure called “turning to the facts” that can be invoked in circumstances like those in which Orwell places Winston.

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In each case, the supposed resources to which the critic is at first inclined to appeal – the “facts” or the requirements of morality – turn out to presuppose the kind of vantage point on the practices of a society that Rorty maintains is fundamentally inconsistent with the basic insight of pragmatism. Rorty admits that these conclusions are “hard to live with,”50 but he finds them inescapable because, as he puts it, “I cannot see how you break out of the social practices around you into a realm that transcends those practices.”51

Rorty on progress Although Rorty rejects the thought that there is anything apart from practice to which the critic might appeal, he contends that it is nevertheless possible to compare one set of practices unfavorably with another. Of course, such a comparison can be carried out only from within the vocabulary characteristic of some such set of practices. Progress is thus said to be possible in relation not to some neutral criterion, but to a new vocabulary from within which an old one can be seen as inferior. As Rorty puts it, “in the process of playing vocabularies and cultures off against each other, we produce new and better ways of talking and acting – not better by reference to a previously known standard, but just better in the sense that they come to seem clearly better than their predecessors.”52 The crucial contrast, in other words, is not between the way things are and the way they ought to be, but between one way things are and another way they could be.53 Whereas the platonist supposes that an assertion can be warranted only if the speaker stands in the appropriate sort of relation to reality – and, conversely, that where this relation goes missing, assertions are unwarranted – Rorty maintains that “any fool thing can be made to seem rational by being set in an appropriate context, surrounded by a set of beliefs and desires with which it coheres.”54 Consequently, he denies that there is “much occasion to use the distinctions between logic and rhetoric … or between rational and nonrational methods of changing other people’s minds.”55 Unlike the platonist, who regards it as an “overriding intellectual duty to present arguments for one’s controversial views,” the pragmatist recognizes that such arguments are ultimately “not much more than ways of getting people to change their practices without admitting they have done so.”56 The pragmatist accordingly “takes the unit of persuasion to be a vocabulary rather than a proposition. Her method is redescription rather than inference.”57

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In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, as we have seen, Rorty tends to assimilate talk of “truth” to talk of “justification.” In more recent writings, however, he acknowledges a difference in the respective grammars of these two terms – a difference suggested by “the use of ‘true’ in the phrase ‘unjustifiable to all of you but maybe true anyway.’”58 For Rorty, however, the relevant contrast here is not between shared beliefs and truth in some more robust sense, but between the shared beliefs of “this age of the world” and those of “a possible future, better, age of the world.”59 Neither set of beliefs, however, can be said to correspond more closely to the way things really are. Moreover, the anticipated future beliefs are not ones for which any rational justification can be furnished in the present. Rorty’s acknowledgment of this “cautionary use” of the word “true” allows room for the possibility of the kind of prophetic discourse that may serve as a catalyst for the emergence of something new, but it remains the case that a prophet is without warrant in her own country. Thus, Rorty emphasizes – using both italics and bold font – that “the only point in contrasting the true with the merely justified is to contrast a possible future with the actual present.”60 To paraphrase Kant, Rorty gets rid of knowledge to make room for hope. According to Rorty, it is this “romantic hope”61 – not the kind of knowledge sought by the platonist – that sustains efforts to effect social change. Consider, for example, the advice Rorty offers feminists: The import of … pragmatism for movements such as feminism can be seen if we paraphrase Dewey as follows: do not charge a current social practice or a currently spoken language with being unfaithful to reality, with getting things wrong. Do not criticize it as a result of ideology or prejudice, where these are tacitly contrasted with your own employment of a truth-tracking faculty called “reason” or a neutral method called “disinterested observation.” Do not criticize it as “unjust” if “unjust” is supposed to mean more than “sometimes incoherent even on its own terms.” Instead of appealing from transitory current appearances to the permanent reality, appeal to a still only dimly imagined future practice. Drop the appeal to neutral criteria, and the claim that something large like Nature or Reason or History or the Moral Law is on the side of the oppressed. Instead, just make invidious comparisons between the actual present and a possible, if inchoate future …62 Instead of appealing to “the facts” or to the requirements of morality – strategies favored by the platonist – the pragmatically savvy femi-

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nist ought simply to attempt to elucidate the appeal of alternative, non-patriarchal forms of life in an effort to induce those around her to come to see themselves as answerable to a wider audience – one roughly twice as large – and to exchange one vocabulary for another. Rorty makes a similar point about efforts to promote universal human rights around the world. In his Amnesty International lectures he advocates the rejection of what he terms “human rights foundationalism” – i.e., the search for transcultural moral demands to which everyone is answerable. Instead, he praises efforts aimed at the promotion of a “human rights culture”63 – a culture of which the “rich North Atlantic constitutional democracies” provide the paradigm.64 Those of us who are fortunate enough to inhabit these democracies but who care about the plight of the oppressed in other parts of the world should “see our task as a matter of making our own culture – the human rights culture – more self-conscious and more powerful, rather than of demonstrating its superiority to other cultures by an appeal to something transcultural.”65 How is this task to be accomplished? As we have seen, Rorty denies that those who violate the innocent are behaving irrationally: there is nothing “beyond” their behavior to which we can appeal to denounce it. Indeed, he suggests that it is a “mark of intellectual immaturity” to insist on speaking of “moral obligation” in this context. 66 Rorty’s solution is to emphasize the importance of manipulating people’s feelings rather than of increasing their knowledge.67 “To rely on the suggestions of sentiment rather than on the commands of reason is to think of powerful people gradually ceasing to oppress others, or to countenance the oppression of others, out of mere niceness rather than out of obedience to the moral law.” 68 Moral progress is thus to be achieved by means of what Rorty calls “sentimental education.” 69 Such education proceeds by appeal to “long, sad, sentimental” stories, and its aim is to produce “generations of nice, tolerant, well-off, secure, other respecting students … in all parts of the world.”70 Rorty suggests that the repetition of such stories can induce powerful people “to tolerate and even to cherish powerless people,” 71 and he predicts that if we were to engage in an experiment in which “a large sample of the rising generation” were educated into a sentimental, rather than a platonistic moral tradition, “these experimental subjects would be just as decent people as the control group – the ones who were brought up to understand the term ‘universal validity.’”72

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Is “realism” a word well lost? Rorty’s principle achievement, as I see it, is to have shown that appeals to “reality in itself” cannot support the weight that philosophers frequently suppose. Rorty can thus be credited with having freed us from certain philosophical illusions that result from thinking that we can make sense of the notion of stepping outside our practices and assessing them in relation to the world. At his best, Rorty recognizes the vacuity of these illusions. At other times, however, he seems to see pragmatism not as dismissing but as negating the claims of platonism. Thus, he frequently denies the possibility rather than the intelligibility of achieving the kind of perspective on our practices to which the platonist aspires. It is telling in this connection that Rorty speaks of the “consequences of pragmatism” – as if substantive doctrines could be derived from the negation of the platonist’s position. But if, as Rorty intermittently recognizes, platonism is not actually an intelligible doctrine, then its repudiation should have consequences primarily for how we do philosophy, not for the practices on which it is merely a gloss. Here it is instructive to recall Kierkegaard’s observation that speculative thought “has not a false presupposition but a comic presupposition, occasioned by its having forgotten in a kind of world-historical absentmindedness what it means to be a human being.”73 Because he tends confusedly to treat platonism as false, Rorty frequently throws out the baby with the bathwater: in the process of rejecting the illusions of a world well lost, he often loses his grip on distinctions internal to our practices – distinctions we would do well to retain. Rorty’s rejection of the idea of “answerability” is a case in point. The central question here is whether losing the “world well lost” entails losing the notion of the world as something independent of our beliefs about it – something to which those beliefs must “answer.” As we have seen, the consequences of Rorty’s rejection of answerability are troubling. His anti-authoritarianism – while ostensibly liberating – ironically renders Rorty incapable of seeing how it could be possible to dissent from the vast majority of one’s peers without ceasing to be rational. It also requires him to deny that there is anything to which the weak can appeal over against the strong. And although Rorty’s emphasis on hope goes some distance toward filling the vacuum created by his denial of knowledge, it plainly leaves much to be desired. Since, on his view, what is hoped for in the future cannot be warranted in the present, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that “hope” is here simply another word for wishful thinking. Thus, he

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admits that although it is possible to contrast one set of conventions with another, it is impossible to “appeal from the oppressive conventions of our community to something nonconventional, and thus hard to see how we could ever engage in anything like ‘radical critique.’”74 The problem with Rorty’s suggestion that we can replace objectivity with solidarity is that he focuses his attention almost exclusively on the question of whether agreement is achieved, ignoring what is arguably the more important question of how it is achieved. But there is little reason to suppose that the sheer fact of agreement in itself has any direct bearing on warrant. After all, agreement can be achieved by means of threats of punishment or promises of material reward. Under torture, Winston is induced to say – indeed, apparently to believe – that two plus two equals five. But surely the fact that his peers let him get away with saying this – that they do not let him get away with saying otherwise – is in no way a sufficient justification for thinking that it is true, or that his claim is warranted. Although this is obviously an extravagant example, the problem to which it points is not incidental to Rorty’s project. Because he conceives of warrant in purely sociological terms, Rorty’s account of justification harbors a built-in bias in favor of the strong and those in the majority. While Rorty’s notion of justification is indeed majoritarian, it is thus far from democratic. Rorty seeks to free us from the putative illusion that we are answerable to something larger than ourselves – whether it be God, the world, or the moral law. As we have seen, he views the latter as representations of “power.” But he fails to appreciate that it is possible to conceive of authority otherwise than in terms of power, and that authority – if understood in normative terms – can be potentially liberating.75 As a result, much of what Rorty says about his own social hopes and the hopes of those whom he admires is plagued with internal inconsistency. Consider, for instance, his discussion of human rights. As we have seen, Rorty suggests that it is a mark of intellectual immaturity to concern oneself with what he takes to be the inherently platonistic notion of moral obligation (where obligation implies more than merely the responsibility to conform to the expectations of one’s peers). But although philosophers and legal theorists dispute the appropriate way of conceiving of rights (human or otherwise), they all – as far as I know – agree that rights entail obligations.76 In other words, insofar as those against whom one makes a claim are under no obligation to satisfy it – insofar as one must rely entirely on what Rorty calls “mere niceness” – one cannot yet be said to have a “right” to what one claims. Thus, it is difficult to see how Rorty can hope to

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continue to talk of a “human rights culture” while abandoning talk of obligations that obtain irrespective of whether or not one’s peers happen to hold one accountable to them. A culture that followed Rorty in dispensing with talk of such obligations might be a sentimental culture or even a charitable culture – though my suspicion is that it would be something quite a bit more sinister – but it would not be a human rights culture. Furthermore, it is widely agreed that what makes a right a human right is precisely that possessing it does not depend on one’s membership in any particular community. As we have seen, however, Rorty is unable to account for obligations toward every human being qua human being – obligations that extend to one’s relations with those outside one’s immediate community – for much the same reason he is unable to account for obligations to which every human being is answerable. He suggests, for instance, that those who rescued Jews during the Holocaust did so not because they regarded Jews as fellow human beings to whom something was thereby owed, but because some particular Jew happened to be, say, a “fellow Milanese, or a fellow Jutlander, or a fellow member of the same union or profession, or a fellow bocce player, or a fellow parent of small children.”77 In reply, Jean Bethke Elshtain writes, “I have read many accounts of rescue and I have never once encountered ‘fellow bocce player’ as a reason proffered by someone for why he came to put his life and that of his family at risk.”78 Instead, she argues, “rescuers during the Nazi years talk the sort of talk Rorty aims to supplant.”79 Elshtain goes on to quote from a variety of first-hand accounts in which rescuers explain their actions in relation to their religious convictions and the kind of moral distinctions Rorty regards as platonistic. “To be sure,” she notes, “many who endorsed this final vocabulary remained quiescent during the Nazi era; others, to their shame, offered support. But that isn’t what’s at stake here; what’s at stake is the basis for resistance.”80 In his extraordinarily moving book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, Philip Hallie gives an account of the courageous rescue operation carried out by the villagers of the Protestant commune of Le Chambon during the German occupation of France. He writes: Their actions did not serve the self-interest of the little commune of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in the department of Haute-Loire, southern France. On the contrary, those actions flew in the face of that self interest: by resisting a power far greater than their own they put their village in grave danger of massacre, especially in the last two

Solidarity and Dissent: Rorty and the “Consequences of Pragmatism” 17

years of the Occupation, when the Germans were growing desperate. Under the guidance of a spiritual leader they were trying to act in accord with their consciences in the middle of a bloody, hate-filled war.81 As Elshtain notes, Hallie’s account serves to falsify Rorty’s claim that rescuers understood their efforts in terms simply of loyalty to their peers. “The Chambonnais did not rescue neighbors. They rescued strangers, and their determination not to be cruel rested for them on imperatives that were obligatory, not contingent; necessary, not incidental.”82 Because he understands justice as derivative from solidarity, Rorty attributes an unearned normative significance to our largest current loyalty, while sidestepping the questions of who ought to be included in this loyalty and how this ought to be determined.83 Given my own Wittgensteinian, pragmatic approach, I am sympathetic to much of what Rorty says about the illusions of platonism. Unlike Rorty, however, I think it is possible to reject these illusions without pulling the rug out from under such familiar distinctions as the distinction between appearance and reality and the distinction between what in fact one’s peers will let one get away with and what one’s peers ought to let one get away with. To show how the notion of objectivity can be preserved in the absence of an imagined method of determining warrant sub specie aeternitatis will be a central aim of Chapter 7. Here, however, I wish to conclude with some remarks of a more general nature about the significance of what Rorty calls “intuitions” and the viability of realism. In his writings, Rorty uses the terms “platonism” and “realism” more or less interchangeably. He suggests that it is the ease with which they can apparently account for our ordinary, non-philosophical intuitions that makes these forms of thought so difficult to eradicate, and that gives them an initial leg up on the pragmatic competition. After all, the distinctions of which the Rortian pragmatist is suspicious – e.g., distinctions between appearance and reality, justification and truth, custom and morality – are central not merely to platonism, but to the broader intellectual tradition that gave it birth. As Rorty sees it, however, it begs the question to assume that philosophy must preserve these intuitions. Of course we have such intuitions. How could we escape having them? We have been educated within an intellectual tradition built around such claims… The pragmatist is urging that we do our best

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to stop having such intuitions, that we develop a new intellectual tradition.84 Thus, as we saw earlier, if the intuitions Orwell has Winston express are irreconcilable with the pragmatic emphasis on practice, so much the worse for these intuitions. Now certainly our intuitions are not infallible, and referring to one’s prejudices and predilections as “intuitions” does not somehow magically render them immune from criticism. But it nevertheless seems to me that a style of philosophizing that purports to concern itself with practice, and that ostensibly rejects the “urge to escape the vocabulary … of one’s own time,” should hesitate to so quickly dismiss as platonistic features of those practices and that vocabulary as ubiquitous as the distinctions Rorty calls “dualisms” – distinctions that in fact pre-date the epistemological tradition with which they are associated. Rorty’s revisionism suggests a positivistic, as opposed to pragmatic, willingness to allow theory to dictate practice. It is at least a prima facie objection to Rorty’s approach that it seems itself to express a philosophical urge to escape our present vocabulary. I will argue in future chapters that what Rorty disparagingly refers to as “intuition” is not some sort of self-authenticating insight into what lies behind the veil of “appearances,” but simply our inclination to employ practical distinctions grounded in everyday usage. Rorty claims that “the vocabulary which centers around these traditional distinctions has become an obstacle to our social hopes.”85 By contrast, I will argue that in rejecting this vocabulary, we forego the ability to coherently articulate and rationally justify our objections to the present and our hopes for the future. Insofar as Rorty rejects talk of “answerability to the world,” his position might be characterized as a form of anti-realism. The view for which I shall argue will attempt to rehabilitate the vocabulary of objectivity without succumbing to the platonistic urge to transcend our practices. If one identifies realism with the intuitions Rorty advises us to try to stop having, then this position might – in contrast to Rorty’s position – be described as realist. On the other hand, if, like Rorty, one equates realism with platonism, then the position for which I will argue defies categorization under either rubric: it rejects both realism and anti-realism as opposite sides of the same coin.86 As a kind of shorthand I will occasionally refer to my view as “ordinary realism,” to distinguish it from philosophical doctrines that seek to secure the same intuitions by positing a “world” specifiable independently of practice.87 What ultimately matters, however, is the substance of the account, rather than its label.

Solidarity and Dissent: Rorty and the “Consequences of Pragmatism” 19

Conclusion: realism without platonism Wittgenstein once remarked, “Not empiricism and yet realism in philosophy, that is the hardest thing.”88 By “empiricism” he seems to have had in mind the broader philosophical tradition Rorty subsumes under the rubric of “platonism.” However, the implication of Wittgenstein’s remark is that – pace Rorty – it is nevertheless possible to retain something recognizable as a form of realism without the latter philosophical gloss on it. The central question of this book is how we can reject the allure of the platonist’s putative point of view and yet preserve the distinctions (moral but also theoretical) that such a perspective is invoked to elucidate. The challenge will thus be to remain faithful to our “intuitions” without allowing ourselves recourse to the problematic philosophical moves of which Rorty is rightly critical. As we will find, the key will be to see these intuitions as themselves belonging to our practices, rather than as gesturing at something platonistic thought to be visible only from somewhere “outside” them. Thus, I will argue in favor of a conception of realism that is “ordinary” rather than platonistic, but which is nevertheless robust enough to accommodate the kind of moral and theoretical distinctions – crucial to the possibility of radical social criticism – that Rorty feels obliged to forfeit. In the next two chapters we will turn our attention to two rival projects, each of which is anxious to ensure that our practices remain open to reform. The first – that of Jürgen Habermas – aims to overcome the threat of parochialism by instituting a procedure for extricating universally valid moral norms from the idiosyncratic artifacts of the particular cultures, traditions, religions, and historical epochs with which they have hitherto been bound up. The second – that of Jacques Derrida – attempts to keep the institutions and beliefs of the majority open to contestation and critique by emphasizing the very contingency Habermas seeks to overcome.

2 The Force of Reasons: Habermas on Norms and Justification

We should not then think so much of what the majority will say about us, but what he will say who understands justice and injustice … Plato1 Richard Rorty’s approach to moral discourse, like his approach to theoretical discourse, is radically deflationary. It involves what Jürgen Habermas has aptly described as a “liquidation of unconditional claims”: talk of obligation is replaced by talk of solidarity, just as talk of truth is replaced by talk of justification.2 As Rorty sees it, there is no such thing as an “unconditional claim.” “This is a notion,” he writes, “for which I can find no use.”3 All claims are conditioned by the contexts of practice within which they are made and defended. From these contexts there is no escape into a rarified realm of transcendent truth or duty. But in rejecting a platonistic perspective on our practices, Rorty seems to forfeit the critical capacities required for reforming them. Without a notion of “unconditional validity,” we would appear to lack the resources for contesting the prevailing moral and theoretical consensuses of our respective times and places. In the absence of any further authority, the majority becomes – in effect – a law unto itself. In this chapter we will examine Habermas’s criticisms of Rorty, and – in particular – his attempt to preserve our moral intuitions by means of discourse ethics. Habermas argues that it is possible to distinguish between genuinely valid moral norms and merely conventional cultural values by appealing to what he terms the “principle of universalization.” This principle, he contends, is not simply another culturally-conditioned validity claim about which people might disagree, but is derived from inescapable 20

The Force of Reasons: Habermas on Norms and Justification 21

presuppositions of argumentation, and, as such, can be rejected only on pain of contradiction by anyone engaged in a serious dispute. Although I am deeply sympathetic to Habermas’s central concerns and concur with many of his conclusions, I will argue that he ultimately misconceives the nature of the norms whose validity he seeks to establish, and that when their nature is properly understood, his appeal to the principle of universalization can be recognized as misguided.

Strategic and non-strategic uses of language As we saw in the previous chapter, Rorty argues that warrant is a “sociological matter,” to be ascertained by observing the reception of a person’s claims by her peers. On his account, “there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones – no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow inquirers.”4 Toward the end of the chapter I argued that Rorty’s efforts to replace objectivity with an ostensibly democratic “solidarity” harbor a built-in bias in favor of the powerful and those in the majority. The problem is that Rorty’s account of the nature of the “retail constraints” provided by our peers fails to distinguish between rational and nonrational constraints. Or rather, it explicitly rejects any such distinction. As we have seen, Rorty denies that there is “much occasion to use the distinctions between logic and rhetoric … or between rational and nonrational methods of changing other people’s minds.”5 To suppose otherwise, he suggests, is symptomatic of platonism. Among contemporary philosophers, Jürgen Habermas is one of the best known and most thoughtful advocates of rational methods of changing people’s minds. His self-described aim is to show how it is possible to “stop settling elementary normative questions of collective life through direct or concealed violence, through coercion, through the exertion of influence, or through the power of the stronger interest, and instead convince others without violence through a rationally motivated understanding.”6 Habermas argues – in effect – that the remarks of one’s fellow “inquirers” are not all cut from the same cloth. Words can be employed in an effort to achieve understanding, but they also can be deployed instrumentally, in ways intended to coerce others. Habermas refers to the latter as “strategic” uses of language. When agreement is achieved by means of strategic uses of language – as, for instance, when Winston is coerced into agreeing with O’Brien – the relationship between agreement and warrant is severed.

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The problem with Rorty’s pragmatism, according to Habermas, is that it misconceives the nature of this relationship. Instead of recognizing that people will agree on conclusions when they come to appreciate that those conclusions are warranted, Rorty regards the agreement as what constitutes the warrant. This is why, on Rorty’s view, the critic is left with no rational resources for contesting dominant patterns of belief and must ultimately fall back on the consolations of “romantic hope.” Habermas writes: A corresponding de-differentiation between the strategic and the nonstrategic uses of language, between action oriented toward success and action oriented toward reaching understanding, robs Rorty of the conceptual means for doing justice to the intuitive distinctions between convincing and persuading, between motivation through reasons and causal exertion of influence, between learning and indoctrination. The counterintuitive mingling of the one with the other has the unpleasant consequence that we lose the critical standards operating in everyday life.7 Notice that Habermas refers here to what he calls “intuitive distinctions.” These distinctions are, of course, precisely the sort of distinctions Rorty terms “dualisms.” As we have seen, Rorty acknowledges that we have such intuitions, but he counsels us to do our best to stop having them. After all, such intuitions are, on Rorty’s view, flatly inconsistent with the pragmatic rejection of a point of view on our practices from somewhere outside them. As we will see, Habermas, by contrast, suggests that the distinctions Rorty terms “dualisms” can be naturalized without being done away with altogether. Habermas begins by arguing that strategic uses of language are in fact parasitic on non-strategic uses. It is possible to manipulate others only if those others are disposed to assume that one’s speech acts are intended to achieve understanding. In other words, it is possible to fool some of the people some of the time, only if not being fooled is the norm. Habermas argues that every speech act can thus be analyzed in terms of three “world-relations”: (1) the interpersonal relations that are the domain of morality and law; (2) the representational relations that fall under the rubric of “truth”; and (3) the expressive relations that constitute sincerity or truthfulness. It belongs to the communicative intent of the speaker (a) that he perform a speech act that is right in respect to the given normative

The Force of Reasons: Habermas on Norms and Justification 23

context, so that between him and the hearer an intersubjective relation will come about which is recognized as legitimate; (b) that he make a true statement (or correct existential presuppositions), so that the hearer will accept and share the knowledge of the speaker; and (c) that he express truthfully his beliefs, intentions, feelings, desires, and the like, so that the hearer will give credence to what is said.8 Habermas argues that, by producing a speech act, a speaker issues an implicit guarantee to redeem her claim if it is challenged along one or another of these three dimensions of validity. It is this promise to back up a claim by producing reasons on its behalf that makes it possible to distinguish between rational and strategic uses of language. “In all cases in which the illocutionary role expresses not a power claim but a validity claim, the place of the empirically motivating force of sanctions (contingently linked with speech acts) is taken by the rationally motivating force of accepting a speaker’s guarantee for securing claims to validity.”9 On this account, speakers can be said to be behaving rationally when they can “provide reasons for their expressions.”10 Habermas’s analysis of language and his corresponding account of rationality thus give pride of place to the role of argumentation. Argumentation, or “discourse,” is a particular form of communicative action in which “proponents and opponents, having assumed a hypothetical attitude and being relieved of the pressures of action and experience, can test validity claims that have become problematic.”11 In an argument, participants seek to achieve agreement about the truth or validity of criticizable claims, whatever they might be, through rational, discursive means, i.e., by criticizing and/or defending these claims in light of reasons. Given the nature of argumentation as such, Habermas argues, no participant can fail to adopt certain presuppositions. These include the conditions that participation in the argument be open to all who are competent, that communication be free and uncoerced, and that every proposition be held open to questioning.12 Habermas argues that these conditions do not belong merely to the definition of a particular form of communication he himself happens to be recommending. He writes, “These rules of discourse are not mere conventions; rather, they are inescapable presuppositions.”13 This is revealed, he believes, by the fact that anyone who contests them can be shown invariably to be assuming them, and is therefore entangled in performative contradiction. In other words, since they are presupposed in all argumentation, to argue against them is self-referentially incoherent.

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Habermas contends that these principles of discourse govern the form of argumentation, but not its content, which can vary.14 He uses the term “theoretical discourse” to denote argumentation about the truth of assertoric statements. A “practical discourse,” by contrast, is one in which the validity of norms of action is scrutinized.

Moral norms and justification Habermas tells us that such norms can be expressed in terms of “universal ‘ought’ sentences or commandments,” such as the following: (a) One ought not to kill anybody. (a1) It is commanded not to kill anybody.15 On Habermas’s view, norms such as these – to which, he believes, we make reference in regulative speech acts – are best conceived as analogous to truth claims in theoretical contexts.16 He assimilates both claims to truth and claims to rightness (along with claims to sincerity) under the general rubric of “validity claims.” By placing moral norms into the same category as claims to truth, Habermas is in effect raising the question of what it is in virtue of which their validity could be established – although as we will see, his answer to this question differs in each case. The problem with which Habermas is concerned is that although the principles recognized as norms of action are generally universal in scope, these principles frequently vary among – and even within – communities. We are confronted not merely with competing speech acts, but with a “pluralism of ultimate value orientations.”17 Habermas attributes disagreements concerning the appropriate “conclusions” of moral disputes to disagreements in people’s fundamental “premises.” “Conflicts in the domain of norm-guided interactions can be traced directly to some disruption of a normative consensus.”18 If morality is to be made as “rational” as science – if, that is, agreement is to be arrived at in moral discussions, just as it is in theoretical ones – a “normative consensus” must be achieved. Given the competition among mutually incompatible moral norms, the question arises as to which ones are really valid. As Habermas puts it, “[w]e must distinguish between the social fact that a norm is intersubjectively recognized and its worthiness to be recognized. There may be good reasons to consider the validity claim raised in a socially accepted norm to be unjustified.”19 The mere fact that a norm is taken

The Force of Reasons: Habermas on Norms and Justification 25

to be valid in a certain context does not guarantee that it actually is. To decide this latter question, Habermas argues, we must attempt to locate conditions for evaluating and justifying norms. It is, at least initially, far from clear how it might be possible to justify a norm. Perhaps the most obvious solution would be to appeal to some “higher” norm. But then, of course, the problem recurs at the level of the norm to which the appeal is made: can it be justified? Habermas argues that instead of seeking to ground our moral convictions in further substantive moral principles, we ought to ground moral norms indirectly, by establishing procedural requirements that must be met by any valid norm, whatever its content might be.20 These requirements must, in turn, be universally acceptable, since their role is precisely to supply neutral standards that would indirectly make agreement possible in moral disputes. Such conditions can be derived, Habermas believes, from the “universal presuppositions of argumentation.”21 Habermas argues that everyone who participates in a practical discourse, i.e., who “seriously tries to discursively redeem normative claims to validity,”22 intuitively accepts that every valid norm must satisfy the following “principle of universalization”: (U) All affected can accept the consequences and the side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone’s interests (and these consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities for regulation).23 Habermas believes that he has succeeded in locating in (U) “a principle that makes agreement in moral argumentation possible in principle.”24 This principle is not itself a moral norm; rather, it is a statement of the conditions that, according to Habermas, any norm must satisfy in order to be valid, conditions rooted in the presuppositions of argumentation itself.

Unconditional validity and solidarity with strangers Alluding to William James’s famous dictum that, for the pragmatist, every genuine difference must make a difference, Habermas argues that Rorty’s efforts to “sociologize” normative notions like “truth” and “moral rightness” render him insensitive to “differences that do make a difference in everyday practice.”25 As Thomas McCarthy has noted, “our culture is everywhere structured around transcultural notions of validity. We are heirs to centuries of distinguishing between appearance and

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reality, truth and opinion, prejudice and reason, custom and morality, convention and justice, and the like.”26 To the extent that it is possible to find a significant use for such distinctions within our ordinary discourse, Habermas argues, “Rorty himself must shoulder the burden of proof for his unwillingness to leave the language of common sense as it is.”27 But is such a use really available once one has renounced the overweening ambitions of platonism? Habermas argues that one central feature of the language of common sense is the “unconditional validity” to which (at least much of) it aspires. To say of a belief that it is true, or of an action that it is right, is to claim for it a status that transcends the parochial justificatory context within which such claims might be defended. Insofar as what is said purports to be valid, not merely within the context of one’s own community, but in all places and at all times, the claim “transcends spaces and times, ‘blots out’ space and time.”28 Herein, though, lies an apparent dilemma: how ought we to conceive of the relationship between justification and unconditional validity? Let us begin by considering truth-claims. Michael Williams poses the problem by inviting us to ponder the implications of the following two equally reasonable ideas: “First, that if we are to have knowledge of an objective world, the truth of what we believe about the world must be independent of our believing it; and second, that justification is inevitably a matter of supporting beliefs by other beliefs …”29 By effectively reducing truth-talk to justification-talk, Rorty champions the latter of these two ideas. But insofar as it fails adequately to address the former idea, such a move comes at a price. As McCarthy puts it, on Rorty’s account we are left without any “foothold in our accepted beliefs and practices for the critical shocks to consensus that force us to expand our horizons and learn to see things in different ways.”30 As we have seen, Rorty rejects the correspondence theory of truth as dependent on a platonistic view of the world. But in recoiling into a merely epistemic notion of truth, Habermas fears, we may be overlooking something important: Certainly, within the linguistic paradigm, the truth of a proposition can no longer be conceived as correspondence with something in the world, for otherwise we would have to be able to “get outside of language” while using language… . None the less, the correspondence idea of truth was able to take account of a fundamental aspect of the meaning of the truth predicate. This aspect – the notion of unconditional validity – is swept under the carpet if the truth of a

The Force of Reasons: Habermas on Norms and Justification 27

proposition is conceived as coherence with other propositions or as justified assertibility within an interconnected system of assertions. Whereas well-justified assertions can turn out to be false, we understand truth as a property of propositions “that cannot be lost.”31 By abandoning the conception of a reality independent of our beliefs, Rorty forfeits what Habermas terms the regulative aspect of the notion of truth. As a result, he is unable to account for the ordinary distinction between “what is true” and “what is held to be true.”32 Habermas seeks to account for this distinction by driving a wedge between justification and truth. Justification is, as Rorty claims, always internal to some particular spatio-temporal context, whereas truth, on Habermas’s view, cannot be relativized.33 But justification and truth are internally related, in the sense that “justificatory practices are guided by an idea of truth that transcends the justificatory context in question.”34 Indeed, this is what makes them justificatory practices, as opposed merely to arbitrary social conventions. For Habermas, realism about truth is a kind of pragmatic presupposition of our ordinary empirical discourse. As he puts it, “Because acting subjects have to cope with ‘the’ world, they cannot avoid being realists in the context of their lifeworld.”35 This supposition of an objective world that is independent of our descriptions fulfills a functional requirement of our processes of cooperation and communication. Without this supposition, everyday practices, which rest on the (in a certain sense) Platonic distinction between believing and knowing unreservedly, would come apart at the seams.36 The objectivity of the world is, on Habermas’s account, ultimately merely a “formal supposition, not one that prejudges specific content nor one that suggests the goal of the ‘correct picture of the nature of things’ that Rorty always connects with a realist intuition.”37 The practical import of this supposition is to “decenter” the immediate justificatory context provided by one’s peers. It directs our attention “beyond the given context of justification” and toward “the supposition of ideal justificatory conditions.”38 As a result, our actual practices of justification, indispensable as they are, can nevertheless be kept always in question, thus preventing the prevailing local consensus from effectively closing in on itself. As McCarthy puts it, “it is precisely this context-transcendent, ‘regulative’ surplus of meaning in our

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notion of truth that keeps us from being locked into what we happen to agree on at any particular time and place, that opens us up to the alternative possibilities lodged in otherness and difference …”39 When it comes to morality, a similar problem arises. As we have seen, Rorty argues that to the extent that it makes sense to speak of “moral obligation,” its source is to be located in “tradition, habit and custom.” As a result, it is difficult to see how Rorty’s account could accommodate the fact that the customs of one’s own community are not generally regarded as exempt from moral scrutiny. As Terry Eagleton has noted, “Moral judgements, for Rorty and his ilk, really say ‘We don’t do that kind of thing around here’; whereas for a woman to say ‘sexual discrimination is wrong’ usually means that we do do that kind of thing around here but we shouldn’t.”40 Habermas seeks to account for this normativity by arguing that every moral norm, like every empirical proposition, makes an implicit claim to universality, thereby transcending its parochial context of origin. While Rorty is correct to note that different communities may profess different ethical ideals, the relevant question is which of these principles are valid. “The issue is … whether or not the norm deserves to be recognized, and that issue will be decided by a contest between proponents and opponents of the norm.”41 Habermas uses the terms “cultural values” and “ethics” to denote the various standards implicit in the pre-reflective interpersonal relations of a given community, and he contrasts these with genuinely valid moral norms.42 It is, as we have seen, by means of (U) that the latter are to be distinguished as a privileged subset of the former. Although Habermas rejects Rorty’s views as unable to do justice to a number of important moral distinctions, these views in fact provide a fairly accurate picture of what, following Lawrence Kohlberg, Habermas calls the “conventional level of moral judgment.”43 In language strongly reminiscent of Rorty’s contention that “people are morally responsible for whatever their peers tend to hold them morally responsible for,” Kohlberg argues that, during the conventional stage of a child’s development, “what is right is living up to what is expected by people close to one.”44 The conventional level of moral judgment is followed, on Kohlberg’s account, by a “postconventional and principled level,” in which “moral decisions are generated from rights, values, or principles that are (or could be) agreeable to all individuals composing or creating a society designed to have fair and beneficial practices.”45 This stage, on Kohlberg’s account, anticipates the final “stage of universal ethical principles,” in which “[t]he reason for doing

The Force of Reasons: Habermas on Norms and Justification 29

right is that, as a rational person, one has seen the validity of principles and has become committed to them.”46 Whereas Kohlberg conceives of his “levels” of moral judgment as stages in the moral development of an individual, Habermas extrapolates from Kohlberg’s developmental psychology a general theory of social evolution, according to which views like Rorty’s constitute merely a step on the way to moral maturity. During the conventional stage of social development, according to Habermas, cultural values are “intimately tied up with the implicit background certainties of a particular form of life” and “form an unquestioned prereflexively given background against which subjects act.”47 Although these values “may imply a claim to intersubjective acceptance, they are so inextricably intertwined with the totality of a particular form of life that they cannot be said to claim normative validity in the strict sense. By their very nature, cultural values are at best candidates for embodiment in norms that are designed to express a general interest.”48 During the postconventional stage, however, “moral judgment becomes dissociated from the local conventions and historical coloration of a particular form of life. It can no longer appeal to the naïve validity of the context of the lifeworld.”49 At this level, “the encompassing social ethos shrinks to mere convention”:50 cultural values come to be treated as “hypotheses,”51 and their validity is put to the test prescribed by (U). In other words, “the ethnocentric perspective of a particular collectivity expands into the comprehensive perspective of an unlimited communication community, all of whose members put themselves in each individual’s situation, worldview, and self-understanding, and together practice an ideal role taking.”52 To engage in such imaginative roletaking is to adopt what Habermas calls the “moral perspective.” Whereas in theoretical contexts Habermas attempts to relieve the stifling insularity of Rorty’s account by distinguishing between justification and truth, in moral contexts his proposal is to distinguish local justification from universal justification under ideal conditions. Thus, although Habermas insists that truth claims and moral claims both require discursive redemption, the relation between validity and redeemability is different in each case: in theoretical cases, the relation is external, whereas in moral cases it is internal.53 As he puts it, “Whereas rational acceptability merely points to the truth of assertoric propositions, it makes a constructive contribution to the validity of moral norms.”54 It might seem strange that Habermas defends a realist conception of truth but an epistemic conception of moral validity. It is worth noting,

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however, that in his earlier writings, Habermas also defended an epistemic view of theoretical truth that identified truth with what could be justified in an “ideal speech situation.” My suspicion is that while he has progressively modified his view of truth in response to the sort of criticisms he outlines in his recent essay “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” his view of moral validity has not kept pace. Habermas himself characterizes his earlier epistemic conception of truth as distorted by his understanding of morality. In retrospect, I see that the discursive conception of truth is due to an overgeneralization of the special case of the validity of moral judgments and norms. A constructivist conception of the moral “ought” does require an epistemic understanding of normative rightness. But if we want to do justice to realist intuitions, the concept of propositional truth must not be assimilated to this sense of rational acceptability under approximately idea conditions.55 Because Habermas wishes to preserve his epistemic conception of moral validity, he is obliged to differentiate sharply between moral and theoretical discourse. We will return to this issue in Chapters 4 and 7, where I will argue that it would be preferable to conceive of moral cases as more closely analogous to theoretical ones. Following Robert Brandom, I will argue that the way to do this is not by conceiving of truth in epistemic terms, but by conceiving of moral validity nonepistemically. As we will see, however, bringing both notions of validity under the same roof in this way would have serious implications for Habermas’s claim that practical discourse is characterized by distinctive presuppositions such as (U). Insofar as Habermas offers an epistemic account of moral validity, he shares with Rorty the view that a reference to the community must “make up for the missing reference to the world.”56 Habermas’s point, however, is that Rorty fails to see that the “community” to which we are morally answerable is a universal community, rather than the ethnos or the polis. Eagleton makes a similar point, though with more wit, when he challenges Rorty to provide some non-arbitrary criterion for membership among one’s “peers”: Would it not be preferable for an authentic critic of universality to base his fellow-feeling on some genuine localism, say the city block? On second thoughts, however, this is still a little on the homogenizing side, since your average city block does of course contain a fair

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sprinkling of different sorts of people … One might demonstrate compassion to those in the next apartment, for example, while withholding it from those down the street. Personally, I only ever display sympathy to fellow graduates of the University of Cambridge… . Once one begins extending compassion to graduates of Oxford too, there seems no reason not to go on to Sheffield, Warwick and the Lower Bumpstead College of Agricultural Science, and before one knows where one is one is on the slippery slope to universalism, foundationalism, Jürgen Habermas and the rest.57 We might sum up the crucial difference between Rorty and Habermas by saying that, whereas both philosophers stress the importance of solidarity, Habermas is critical of the “false solidarity” that “permits individuals to be subsumed into the collectivity.”58 According to Habermas, an adequate moral theory – one that does justice to our deepest intuitions – “should explain why, in cases of conflict between benevolent feelings and an abstract requirement of justice, it is rational for members of a group to subordinate their loyalty toward those they know personally to a solidarity with strangers.”59 Rorty’s theory, which identifies the requirements of justice with the expectations of one’s peers, fails to offer any such explanation.

Morality without religious underpinnings Before proceeding to a more critical examination of Habermas’s discourse ethics, I would like to turn to the implications of his account of moral justification for the possibility of what might be called a “religious morality.” That these implications will be essentially negative might be inferred from Habermas’s comment in 1971 that “[p]ostmetaphysical thought does not dispute determinate theological affirmations; instead it asserts their meaninglessness. It means to prove that in the system of basic terms in which the Judeo-Christian tradition has been dogmatized (and hence rationalized) theologically meaningful affirmations cannot be set forth at all.”60 If religious beliefs are not merely false, but meaningless, then clearly they cannot be accorded a place in a system of moral justification that aspires to rationality. In more recent writings, however, Habermas appears to have softened his position somewhat with respect to the semantic content of religious utterances. Habermas now acknowledges the possibility of “religious discourse conducted within the communities of the faithful,” which “takes place in the context of a specific tradition with substantive

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norms and an elaborated dogmatics” and which derives its sense from both “a common ritual praxis” and “the specifically religious experiences of the individual.”61 Habermas suggests, moreover, that such discourse harbors a “semantic potential” for morality which “must be mastered anew by every generation.”62 In striking contrast to his earlier, apparently more positivistic pronouncements, he now writes, “I do not believe that we, as Europeans, can seriously understand concepts like morality and ethical life, person and individuality, or freedom and emancipation, without appropriating the substance of the Judeo-Christian understanding of history in terms of salvation.”63 Nevertheless, he argues, no distinctively religious justification can be offered for any moral insight. This is because the validity of such insights, as we have seen, depends not on what Habermas would call the behavioral certainties of the religious lifeworld, but on their ability to command universal assent. In our modern, pluralistic world, “moral commands can no longer be publicly justified from a transcendent God’s eye point of view.”64 With the transition to a pluralism of worldviews in modern society, religion and the ethos rooted in it disintegrate as a public basis of a morality shared by all. At any rate, the validity of universally binding moral rules can no longer be accounted for in terms of reasons and interpretations that presuppose the existence and the agency of a transcendent Creator and Redeemer.65 Like all claims to moral validity, the ethical notions first articulated in the context of religious practice must ultimately be redeemed discursively, if they are to earn respect as valid moral norms.66 “Moral judgements must be capable of being approved by all those who might possibly be affected – and not, like ethical judgements, only from the perspective of my particular or our particular understanding of the world.”67 Even if we grant the possibility of a distinctly religious form of discourse, the validity conferred within it must, according to Habermas, be distinguished from the validity appropriate to moral norms. As Maeve Cooke notes, “under conditions of modernity, moral (and other) insights originally articulated in a religious framework must be subjected to a process of critical appropriation and transformation if they are to be recuperated within the universe of justificatory modes of speech.”68 Cooke argues that Habermas’s claim that religious beliefs depend in part on personal experiences suggests that

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their validity may be only “partially discursive,” and that the “language of religion” may carry with it “indispensable semantic contents that cannot – perhaps – be fully captured by philosophical language.”69 On Habermas’s view, however, only those insights that can be appropriated in a wider discourse characterized by a “methodological atheism” can be accorded a place among our valid moral norms. This wider discourse aims, in effect, to reconstruct within our intersubjectively shared world the perspective on it traditionally assigned to a transcendent God.70 While ethics can be religious, morality, on Habermas’s account, cannot be qualified by any adjective that would limit its universal appeal.71

Validity and application Habermas’s ultimate aim in introducing (U) is to ensure the possibility of bringing about agreement through non-strategic means. It is intended to provide “an answer to the predicament in which the members of any moral community find themselves when … they find themselves faced with the dilemma that although they still argue with reasons about moral judgments and beliefs, their substantive background consensus on the underlying moral norms has been shattered.”72 As we have seen, moral conflicts can be traced, on Habermas’s account, “directly to some disruption of a normative consensus,” and thus they can be resolved rationally only by “repairing a disrupted consensus.”73 Deciding on “the right thing to do in the given circumstances” requires, on Habermas’s account, “a two-stage process of argument consisting of justification followed by application of norms.”74 In other words, agreement in judgments is to be secured indirectly, by first securing agreement on “the norms that underlie a general practice.”75 In Chapter 6 I will challenge the assumption that moral disagreement can be eliminated by securing what Habermas calls “normative consensus.” Here, however, I want to focus on Habermas’s view of the relation between norms and their application. As we have seen, Habermas suggests that moral norms take the following form: (a) One ought not to kill anybody.76 The difficulty, however, is to know precisely what this norm means, what “consequences and side effects” its general observance might reasonably be anticipated to have, and thus whether or not one would

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be prepared to accept it as “valid.” If it means that killing can never be regarded as morally justifiable, then it would seem to express a particular moral position – namely pacifism – rather than a general moral principle by means of which such positions could be arrived at or assessed. If, on the other hand, Habermas were to give as an example of a norm a principle like, “One generally ought not to kill anyone,” then it would be unclear whether we could all agree as to what the relevant exceptions were. But if we did not agree about these, then our agreement to the “norm” would do little to eliminate moral conflict. Aquinas made this point in relation to the principle that “goods held in trust are to be restored to their owners.” This is true in the majority of cases, yet a case can crop up when to return the deposit would be injurious, and consequently unreasonable, as for instance were it to be required in order to attack one’s country. The more you descend into the detail the more it appears how the general rule admits of exceptions, so that you have to hedge it with cautions and qualifications. The greater the number of conditions accumulated, the greater the number of ways in which the principle is seen to fall short, so that all by itself it cannot tell you whether it be right to return a deposit or not.77 Now perhaps it could be argued that what is always wrong is not killing per se, but murder (or, to use Aquinas’s example, not failing to return a deposit per se, but stealing). The norm could then be rephrased in the following form: One ought not to murder anybody. The problem, however, is that people might accept that murder is wrong while disagreeing over which acts constitute murder.78 In moral disputes, as Socrates observes in Plato’s Euthyphro, people “do not dispute that the wrongdoer must be punished, but they may disagree as to who the wrongdoer is, what he did and when.”79 Disagreements about “what he did” might include disagreements about the empirical “facts of the case,” but they might also include disagreements about how the “case” ought to be described – e.g., as murder, as self-defense, as abortion, as war, etc. It would seem that the candidate “norms” we have considered so far are either too specific or too general to do the work Habermas expects them to – the work of ensuring agreement at the level of moral positions and judgments. Furthermore, it is worth noting that it is difficult to imagine the circumstances in which any of these “norms” might actually be invoked. Habermas suggests that “[w]e make reference to norms of action of the above kind” when “giving orders, making con-

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tracts, opening meetings, issuing warnings, granting exceptions, giving advice, etc.”80 I presume that Habermas does not mean that reference is made to the principle “One ought not to kill anybody” in each of these contexts, but that some such principles are invoked in every such case. However, I have difficulty imagining any practical circumstances in which reference might be made to the principle about killing. I suppose the best I can do in attempting to reconstruct the context of such an utterance is to imagine, e.g., a police captain instructing his officers to use non-lethal force when dispersing an unruly crowd. But in this case, “One ought not to kill anybody” is an order meant to apply to a particular situation, not the “universal ‘ought’ sentence” Habermas has in mind.81 Furthermore, insofar as its justification could be sought in the specific circumstances that prompted it, such a directive represents a particular judgment that could, in principle, be disputed. Habermas attempts to solve these problems by following Kant in distinguishing “the problem of justification from the application and implementation of moral insights.”82 For Habermas, the fact that the validity of moral norms depends upon their being grounded “in terms of what all could will”83 means that these norms must necessarily have an abstract quality. But as he notes, “moral justifications are pointless unless the decontextualization of the general norms used in justification is compensated for in the process of application.”84 In other words, Habermas concedes that norms themselves – as formulated for purposes of justification – are inadequate to tell us how they are properly to be obeyed. As he puts it, “No norm contains within itself the rules for its application.”85 Consequently, he argues, moral reasoning requires an additional step. Here, however, a difficulty arises: if the process of application is tied in some way to culturally (or even individually) specific patterns of judgment, then this would appear to militate against the universality that, he has been arguing, is an essential feature of valid norms. Like any moral theory, discourse ethics cannot evade the difficult problem of whether the application of rules to particular cases necessitates a separate and distinct faculty of prudence or judgment that would tend to undercut the universalistic claim of justificatory reason because it is tied to the parochial context of some hermeneutical starting point.86 Since Habermas’s whole project is occasioned by the perceived need to secure agreement in judgments, the universal norms to which he

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appeals must not be susceptible to variant interpretations: they must retain their meaning, irrespective of the contexts in which they are applied. He is thus at pains to show that there is “just one correct solution for every situation of application.”87 Habermas argues that while it must be conceded that “any universalistic morality is dependent upon a form of life that meets it halfway,”88 the threat such recognition seems to pose to the ambitions of his program can be avoided by showing that “even in the prudent application of norms, principles of practical reason take effect,”89 and that these principles are not restricted “to the parameters of a specific culture or historical period.”90 The interpretative principles in question include, for instance, “the principles that all relevant aspects of a case must be considered and that means should be proportionate to ends”91 – principles that can themselves be shown to command universal respect. Thus, Habermas believes that discourse ethics can be defended against the charge of an empty formalism by emphasizing practical reason’s complementary tasks of justification and application: “In the process of grounding norms practical reason expresses itself in the principle of universalization, whereas in the application of norms it appears in the form of the principle of appropriateness.”92 But such an appeal, I suggest, fails to solve the problem. In the first place, in order to avoid the criticism that discourse ethics ultimately falls back on “the parochial context of some hermeneutical starting point” it is not enough for Habermas to argue that universalizable principles of practical reason are involved in the application of norms; what he would need to show is that only such principles are involved. But more importantly, the appeal to further rules to explain the application of norms raises the question of how these rules are to be applied. For example, the principle that “all relevant aspects of a case must be considered,” while admittedly unlikely to be disputed, is still too formal to be useful, since the problem, as Socrates observed, is precisely that people disagree as to which aspects of a “case” are most significant. Georgia Warnke brings this out by considering some of the issues that might be involved in discussions about the morality of abortion: We might think of this question either as a question of the way we think justified principles of life, liberty, and equality are to be applied in a concrete instance or as a question of which justified principles, those of life or those of liberty, are to be applied. Still, in the first case, it remains unclear what standards determine the

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proper mode of application. While we might be able to assent to the principle that all relevant aspects of a case must be considered in its adjudication, this principle seems itself to require some sort of “offsetting compensation.” In other words, if we are to apply this principle, we must be able to give some content to the notion of relevance. But the content we give would seem both to depend upon and to differ with our [cultural] values.93 As Warnke notes, the same problems arise in relation to Habermas’s other candidate principle – that means should be proportionate to ends; for even if this is granted, the question remains as to what the proper “ends” are. These criticisms can be shown not merely to render the application of “universal” norms to particular circumstances more problematic than Habermas wants to admit, but ultimately to threaten his original distinction between questions concerning the validity of moral norms and questions concerning their application. On Habermas’s view, as we have seen, the validity of a moral norm depends upon everyone’s being able to “accept the consequences and the side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have” for everyone’s interests.94 But if, as Habermas claims, the question of validity is distinct from, and logically prior to, the question of application, then it is difficult to see how one is supposed to predict what form the “consequences and side effects” in question would take, let alone whether they would be acceptable. For, as Habermas himself acknowledges, all the details of the situations to which norms are to be applied “could not have been anticipated in the justification process.”95 Indeed, it is not altogether clear how a norm could even intelligibly be articulated without some reference to its mode of application. Robert Piercey argues that “[t]o articulate a norm just is to know how it works in practice. But if this is the case, then we cannot accept Habermas’s claim that application is not essential to the moral. Rather, application enters into the content of moral norms and procedures.”96 On Habermas’s account, norms must be conceived as independent of the applications made of them in order to preserve their universality. However, Frank I. Michelman has suggested that such a view is inconsistent with a pragmatic emphasis on the priority of practice: In what I think we may fairly call a pragmatist view, social norms … are always under (re)construction. Participants in a public normative practice … interminably reshape and reconfigure the schemes of

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norms they work with. Moreover, they do so precisely in and by their daily courses of decisions about what is here and now to be done, rendered in the specific, action-demanding settings of what we call norm-application. Pragmatism thus attacks our grip on the idea of the priority of norms to decisions… Pragmatism leaves it unclear what the nominal norms – the nominal “principles of justice,” for example – can possibly ever be or have been but traces of their applications to date and reflections, as such, of an infracognitive, historically-contingent fund of cultural experience.97 Whereas it may be tempting to think of norms as – in Wittgenstein’s phrase – “rails invisibly laid to infinity,”98 Michelman is suggesting that, in the ongoing and ungrounded activity of application, track is perpetually being put down, thus contributing to the meaning of the norms in question. In the following chapter we will turn our attention to an account of the relation between norms and their respective applications that views this relation in much the way Michelman here suggests it ought to be viewed. There I will raise certain concerns about whether such an account can accommodate ordinary notions of normativity, and in Chapter 4 I will argue for a middle path – itself pragmatic – that avoids what I take to be the excesses of these rival positions. But even without endorsing all of the implications of the view Michelman offers, it is possible to join him in affirming the significance of the practical settings in which applications are made. In so doing, however, it becomes necessary to part ways with Habermas.

Norms, laws, and interests Habermas argues that moral norms must be distinguished not only from cultural and religious values but also from laws. According to a longstanding philosophical tradition to which we will return in the following chapter, moral norms and laws have been regarded as standing in a hierarchical relation, such that the justice of a law could be determined by reference to a “higher” moral principle. Habermas rejects this view, arguing that the “notion of a higher law (i.e., a hierarchy of legal orders) belongs to the premodern world,”99 and gives rise to a “duplication of the concept of law that is sociologically implausible.”100 As we will see in Chapter 3, this is a view on which Habermas and Derrida concur, but which they develop in quite different directions. According to Habermas’s account, “legal and moral rules are simultaneously differenti-

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ated from traditional ethical life [the sphere of “cultural values”] and appear side by side as two different but mutually complementary kinds of action norms.”101 Action norms are defined by Habermas as “temporally, socially, and substantively generalized behavioral expectations” which “regulate” social interaction.102 It is primarily in terms of the interactions they regulate that laws and moral norms differ: Moral norms regulate interpersonal relationships and conflicts between natural persons who are supposed to recognize one another both as members of a concrete community and as irreplaceable individuals… . By contrast, legal norms regulate interpersonal relationships and conflicts between actors who recognize one another as consociates in an abstract community first produced by legal norms themselves.103 Consequently, moral norms and laws also differ in terms of the kind of justification they require: whereas the former must be shown to be acceptable to “humanity or a presupposed republic of world citizens,” the latter need only be acceptable to those within the bounds of a given political community.104 These differences, however, should not, on Habermas’s view, prevent us from recognizing the structural similarity of moral and legal questions. “To be sure, moral and legal questions refer to the same problems: how interpersonal relationships can be legitimately ordered and actions coordinated with one another through justified norms, how action conflicts can be consensually resolved against the background of intersubjectively recognized normative principles and rules.”105 I would like to suggest, however, that the “intersubjectively recognized normative principles” characteristic of a shared ethical or moral practice differ, in important ways, from laws, and that these differences are such as to render (U) problematic as a criterion of their “validity,” however useful an analogous procedure might prove as a democratic way of measuring the fairness of laws. Let us begin by noting that the choice with which (U) confronts us is posed in terms of “interests.” Since the universality inherent in a norm means that the norm will apply to everyone, Habermas argues that everyone should have a say in which norms are adopted. The function of (U) is to make “agreement in practical discourses possible whenever matters of concern to all are open to regulation in the equal interest of everyone.”106 It does this by providing a “standpoint from which one can generalize precisely those norms that can count on universal

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assent because they perceptibly embody an interest common to all affected.”107 According to this account, a norm that benefits the many at the expense of the few is not a valid moral norm. In this way, Habermas aims to avoid the tyranny of the majority by ensuring that everyone’s interests are given equal regard when choosing the norms by which our relationships will be regulated. Habermas’s principle of universalization can be understood as an intersubjective alternative to Kant’s categorical imperative. On this account, valid moral norms require dialogical – as opposed to merely monological – redemption. This, in turn, demands an actual – as opposed to a merely hypothetical – practical discourse. Thus, Habermas recognizes that discourse ethics “stands or falls” with the assumption that “the justification of norms and commands requires that a real discourse be carried out and thus cannot occur in a strictly monological form, i.e., in the form of a hypothetical process of argumentation occurring in the individual mind.”108 Now, from a purely operational standpoint, such a procedure is – to put it mildly – unwieldy. Indeed, given that with each new birth an additional (potential) conversation partner arrives on the scene, it is difficult to see how justification could ever, even in principle, be achieved. Insofar as the interests to which morality must respond are themselves constantly in a state of flux, moral validity would seem to represent an elusive ideal rather than a practical reality. But on the face of it, this appears not to accord well with the intuitions to which Habermas is seeking to do justice. For it seems to belong to these intuitions that some of our convictions are – as it were – beyond dispute, in the sense that anyone who called them into question would ipso facto call into question her own moral competence. “If that isn’t a valid moral norm” – one wants to say – “I don’t know what is.” Habermas contends that participation in a discourse must necessarily remain open to all who are competent; but in everyday life, “competence” seems to be defined largely in terms of what one does not question. At the moment, I raise these concerns only in passing. We will return to them, however, in Chapter 5. Since it is in light of their interests that participants in a practical discourse are invited to weigh the relative merits of “alternative possibilities for regulation,” the interests at issue must be conceived as independent of the rival norms on offer. As J.M. Bernstein points out, however, such a view presents us with a classic free-rider problem. Take, for example, Habermas’s example norm, “One ought not to kill anybody.” Let us say that because each of us has an interest in not being killed – an interest that each of us recognizes that each of the

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others also possesses – we agree to adopt this norm. Later, however, I may come to believe that I can avoid being killed without scrupulously observing the norm we have adopted. Perhaps the ring of Gyges has come into my possession. Bernstein writes: If the pressure to cooperate is not itself moral, then a free-rider dilemma must ensue since the very reasons that lead to the search for some cooperative arrangement will always be available for freeriding on those arrangements. The reason why the free-rider problem is insoluble is because free-riders really are being rationally self-consistent.109 Habermas maintains that immoral behavior should be “viewed as irrational.”110 But although the free rider is violating a norm to which all have given their assent, it is not clear that he is behaving entirely irrationally. To be sure, his behavior may not be capable of subsumption under any alternative discursively redeemable principle, and to that extent it cannot be justified morally (i.e., by appealing to a valid norm). Bernstein’s point, however, is that insofar as the original incentive to be moral – indeed, to have morality at all – is placed outside the sphere of morality, “valid” norms – norms generated in accordance with (U) – may fail to give actors the rational motive they require in order not to act contrary to them in certain circumstances. Habermas’s argument seems to presuppose not only that people have common interests – e.g., an interest in not being killed – but also that they necessarily share an interest in satisfying these interests morally. But the source of this latter interest – which must of course be intelligible apart from morality – remains unclear. As long as the interests by which actors are motivated to adopt norms can be specified independently of the norms they adopt, it is difficult to see how the latter can be conceived as categorically binding in the way Habermas requires. Thus, Bernstein concludes that “whatever norms Habermasian selves come to accept as legitimate, and however fair those norms are in virtue of their mode of generation, they are not moral norms since the pressure to come to some cooperative arrangement is already non-moral in character.”111 The reason, I suggest, that (U) might seem to provide a plausible test of moral validity is because moral norms have been conceived on the model of laws. Here it may be helpful to introduce a distinction between what might be termed regulative and constitutive rules. A regulative rule is one which regulates “antecedently or independently

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existing forms of behavior,” whereas a constitutive rule defines a new or distinctive form of behavior.112 An example of the latter is afforded by the grammatical (or conceptual) norms of a linguistic practice. Robert Brandom writes: Linguistic practice is not for something. It does not, as a whole, have an aim or a goal. It may and does, of course, fulfill many functions, but none of them is its raison d’être… . For discursive practice is a mighty engine for the envisaging and engendering of new ends – thereby transforming the very concept of an end or goal, giving it for the first time its proper, practice-rational, sense. If one had to say it was for anything, it would have to be for this: so that we can be rational, and so much as have rational ends or goals.113 Of course, such ends or goals would not be intelligible independently of the linguistic practice. By contrast, laws – like the law that motorists in the United States must drive on the right-hand side of the street – are generally regulative rules. The activity they regulate can be described and assessed altogether independently of any law proposed for its regulation. According to Habermas, moral norms perform a function similar to that of laws, insofar as they “regulate interpersonal relationships and conflicts between natural persons who are supposed to recognize one another both as members of a concrete community and as irreplaceable individuals.” But does this analogy hold? We can decide whether we approve of a law based on whether the consequences of its general observance would satisfy our interests, and we can imagine alternative ways of satisfying the same interests (e.g., driving on the left-hand side of the street). This is possible because the “interests” (e.g., our interest in avoiding automobile collisions) can be articulated quite independently of the law. But it is not clear that we can “decide” whether we approve of our moral norms on this basis. The problem is that our ethical/moral commitments are themselves partly constitutive of our interests. In this respect, I would like to suggest, they are more like – indeed, I will go on to argue, they are a species of – conceptual norms. What makes illegal behavior undesirable is not simply the fact that it is illegal, though certainly legal sanctions provide an added incentive to avoid such behavior. Laws can be justified on the basis of independent interests. Immoral behavior, by contrast, may be undesirable for no other reason than that it is immoral. This means not that reasons cannot be given for regarding a particular act as immoral, but

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that the reasons that are given will be moral reasons. To be sure, I have an interest – specifiable independently of my moral outlook – in not being killed. But my instinctive aversion to having my own life taken is not itself my reason for regarding with deep moral reservation the taking of life generally. I have an interest in not killing others – and in not allowing others to be killed – because I regard such behavior as presumptively wrong.114 This interest is intelligible in light of what I take the norm to be, rather than the other way around, and thus it is not available for free-riding. One can, of course, act contrary to what morality requires in order to satisfy a private interest; however, one cannot satisfy one’s moral interests otherwise than in accordance with the dictates of morality. Persuasive reasons can indeed be given, from the midst of a moral practice, for pursuing one course of action rather than another, but no persuasive reason, intelligible independently of the moral commitments that characterize the practice, can be given for regarding these as persuasive reasons.115 John McDowell writes, The question “Why should I conform to the dictates of morality?” is most naturally understood as asking for an extra-moral motivation that will be gratified by virtuous behaviour. So understood, the question has no answer. What may happen is that someone is brought to see things as a virtuous person does, and so stops feeling the need to ask it. Situation by situation, he knows why he should behave in the relevant ways; but what he now has is a set of answers to a different interpretation of the question.116 The logical correlate of Habermas’s assumption that moral norms can be articulated and justified without reference to their mode of application is his assumption that the problems to which these norms are supposed to provide the “solution” can be identified and described independently of an outlook informed by these same moral commitments.117 On Habermas’s account, morality is for something. It is “a safety device compensating for a vulnerability built into the sociocultural form of life,”118 the function of which is to “instruct us on how best to behave in situations where it is in our power to counteract the extreme vulnerability of others by being thoughtful and considerate.”119 According to Habermas, the task of “discourses of application” is to determine “which principle best suites the situation, described as fully as possible with all relevant details.”120 If, however, the “relevant details” of a given “situation” can be identified only from within the

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sphere of morality, then morality cannot be conceived as a solution of some kind. Morality “is a strange sort of guide, which first puts obstacles in our path and then shows us the way round them,” Peter Winch once remarked facetiously. “Would it not be far simpler and more rational to be shot of the thing altogether? Then we could get on with the matter in hand, whatever it is.”121 To the extent that morality is treated as a guide to behavior, the problems to which it is said to provide the solution cannot be adequately articulated; conversely, to the extent that these problems possess any moral urgency, no further reason for virtue is required. Habermas is right to stress that our moral commitments are subject to rational reflection. The point, however, is that our capacity for rational reflection is not something entirely independent of our moral commitments: rather, the latter are partly constitutive of the form that reflection takes. In Chapter 5 I will argue that one’s moral commitments show themselves in the way in which they inform one’s judgments, including one’s judgments about what is and is not a moral problem and about what is and is not in one’s interests.

Conclusion: norms and practices In this chapter I have argued that Habermas’s conception of moral validity creates a gap between norms and their application, and that his appeal to interpretative principles merely defers the question of how this gap is to be bridged. I also questioned Habermas’s assumption that the problems to which these norms are intended to provide the solution can adequately be characterized in essentially non-moral terms. At the root of both of these problems lies a picture of our norms as analogous to laws. Their function, according to this account, is to regulate behavior in accordance with independently specifiable interests. But, I suggested – anticipating a fuller argument to this effect in Chapter 5 – these norms might more accurately be characterized as constitutive of interests, rather than as contributing to their satisfaction. I therefore concluded that the validity of the norms of a moral practice cannot properly be evaluated in accordance with the requirements of Habermas’s principle of universalization (U). In Chapter 4 I will offer an alternative account of the relation between norms and practices. First, however, we will shift our attention from Habermas to Derrida, and from discourse ethics to deconstruction. These projects may appear in many respects to be polar opposites – the one carrying forward the as yet “unfinished project of

The Force of Reasons: Habermas on Norms and Justification 45

modernity” and the other heralding the coming of its postmodern “other.” Nevertheless, as we will see in the following chapter, both philosophers are wrestling with the same basic problem: how to prevent the conventions of a society from closing in on themselves in such a way as to make radical criticism and reform impossible. Whereas discourse ethics sought to resist Rorty’s identification of moral obligation with tradition and custom by establishing a procedure for distinguishing valid moral norms from merely ethical ones, deconstruction, while rejecting this procedure, will attempt to achieve much the same end by distinguishing all norms from justice.

3 Norms, Interpretation, and Decision-Making: Derrida on Justice

You know the rules, now turn them into justice. Aeschylus1 All is lost when empirical and therefore contingent conditions of the application of law are made conditions of the law itself. Immanuel Kant2 In the previous chapter we examined Habermas’s attempt to overcome ethical parochialism and ensure agreement in judgments by grounding the validity of moral norms in terms of “what all could will.” I argued that moral norms should be conceived as constitutive of interests, rather than as contributing to their satisfaction. However, by rejecting Habermas’s principle of universalization (U), I may appear to be reinstating the thesis that we are “locked into what we happen to agree on” at a particular time and place.3 In this chapter we will examine an attempt to avoid these alternatives by distinguishing the inherent “deconstructibility” of laws from the “indeconstructibility” of justice. Like Habermas, Jacques Derrida conceives of moral norms on the model of laws. However, unlike Habermas, he does not see any way of “justifying” a privileged subset of these moral principles. In this respect, Derrida’s philosophical position might be said to resemble Rorty’s. But unlike Rorty, Derrida shares with Habermas an abiding suspicion of “settled convictions” and established practices. His problem is thus how to keep the customs of the majority open to criticism and contestation without appealing to something like (U). As we will see, his solution is to argue that justice resides in the application of the norms he calls “laws,” and that, by their very nature, these rules can be applied in more than one way. In other words, Derrida celebrates the 46

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very feature of these rules that Habermas had attempted to overcome through his appeal to universal principles of application – namely, their susceptibility to the vagaries of interpretation. As we will see, however, for Habermas, it is the generality required for justification that creates a gap between norms and their application, whereas for Derrida, who rejects (U), the gap is opened on account of a general philosophical thesis about rules. However, I will argue that this thesis, if valid, would ultimately undermine Derrida’s own distinction between obeying laws and doing justice. Since, however, I do not actually think that the thesis is valid, I finally reject Derrida’s alternative to discourse ethics. In the process of working through these issues, I hope to further clarify the concept of a moral norm and the relation between moral norms and moral judgments.

Deconstruction and justice According to a well-known classical account, versions of which abound throughout a variety of philosophical traditions, the justice of actions can be determined by reference to laws. Now it is a truism, recognized by defenders of such an account, that not everything that passes for – or is passed into – law is necessarily just. Thus, a distinction typically is drawn between (at least) two kinds of law, one positive and the other moral, only the latter of which is said to be the true measure of justice. In De Legibus, for example, we find Cicero arguing that the origin of Justice is to be found in Law, for Law is a natural force; it is the mind and reason of the intelligent man, the standard by which Justice and Injustice are measured. But since our whole discussion has to do with the reasoning of the populace, it will sometimes be necessary to speak in the popular manner, and give the name of law to that which in written form decrees whatever it wishes, either by command or prohibition. For such is the crowd’s definition of law. But in determining what Justice is, let us begin with that supreme Law which had its origin ages before any written law existed or any State had been established.4 While Cicero may have been right in supposing that in popular usage the term “law” is generally reserved for “that which in written form decrees whatever it wishes,” his distinction between the “written” law of a state and the “supreme” law that transcends it nevertheless seems roughly compatible with the untutored intuitions that not every legal

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decree is ipso facto a just one, and that there is something “higher” than such decrees in relation to which their justice can be assessed, whether or not one chooses to call it a further “law.”5 These same intuitions may appear to be implicit in Derrida’s recent claim that “law is essentially deconstructible,” whereas “justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible.”6 As we will see, however, Derrida’s notion of justice as the indeconstructible “other” of law differs radically from the notion of a “moral law” in that it is a purely formal category and must therefore be contrasted not merely with positive law (loi) but also with any of the substantive moral considerations in terms of which positive law might be criticized (droit). Toward the beginning of his essay “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’,” Derrida introduces a distinction between justice “as law” (droit) and justice “in itself,”7 the implication being that not everything that “we call, in determined contexts, ‘justice’”8 is worthy of the name, since law sometimes falsely “claims to exercise itself in the name of justice.”9 That Derrida should find it necessary to depart from the classical distinction between at least two kinds of law in favor of a distinction between two kinds of justice is, as we will see, significant. For Derrida, one of the defining characteristics of law is its generality; as he puts it, “justice, as law (droit) seems always to suppose the generality of a rule, a norm or a universal imperative.”10 Justice sensu stricto, by contrast, is, on Derrida’s view, “idiomatic,” concerned with the particularities of singular groups and individuals.11 Thus, in distinguishing “justice” from “law,” Derrida is distinguishing not between actions “corresponding to objective law”12 and actions failing to do so, nor between just laws and unjust ones, nor between “higher” law and positive law, nor even between ethical principles and legal statutes, but between all of these, on the one hand, and something neither reducible to, nor determinable strictly in accordance with, any rule, on the other.13 In what, then, does justice consist? How, if not by acting in accordance with principles of justice, can one act justly? And what, then, is the relation between such principles and just action? How are we to reconcile the act of justice that must always concern singularity, individuals, irreplaceable groups and lives, the other or myself as other, in a unique situation, with rule, norm, value or the imperative of justice [as law] which necessarily have a general form, even if this generality prescribes a singular application in each case?14

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The answer for Derrida is that justice resides neither in the law, nor in what it prescribes per se, but in the instant in which a “free decision” is made with respect to its application, an application that is itself an active “interpretation” of it. To be just, the decision of a judge, for example, must not only follow a rule of law or a general law but must also assume it, approve it, confirm its value, by a reinstituting act of interpretation, as if ultimately nothing previously existed of the law, as if the judge himself invented the law in every case. No exercise of justice as law can be just unless there is a “fresh judgment.”15 Such a judgment or “decision” is, seemingly paradoxically, said to be “undecidable,” meaning not that it cannot occur, but that it must take place – be made – in the absence of “any certitude or any supposed criteriology that would assure us of [its] justice.”16 Before attempting to assess these somewhat gnomic claims, let us try to understand what is riding on them. “Force of Law,” it is perhaps worth noting, is an expanded version of Derrida’s keynote address to a 1989 colloquium at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law on the assigned topic “Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice.” This title, as Derrida himself notes in the opening lines of the essay, “suggests a question that itself takes the form of a suspicion; does deconstruction insure, permit, authorize the possibility of justice? Does it make justice possible, or a discourse of consequence on justice and the conditions of its possibility?” Or rather does it constitute “a threat to droit, to law or right”?17 Why might such suspicion arise concerning deconstruction’s ethical credentials?18 In earlier works such as Of Grammatology and Margins of Philosophy, Derrida famously argued against the logical possibility of locating an Archimedean vantage point outside our various ways of speaking, thinking and writing from which it would be possible to assess their appropriateness in relation to a “reality” independent of them. While such anti-representationalism might seem to cast light on the contingent nature of our current concepts, it also – as we noted in Chapter 1 – ironically seems to strip us of any philosophical means of evaluating and reforming them. For although within various contexts we have conceptual resources in terms of which criticism can be carried out, there would appear to be no wider context within which these resources themselves could be evaluated. Derrida notes that “within interpretive contexts that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be

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possible to invoke rules of … criticism.”19 But what account is to be given of the relative merits of these rules themselves? Are not some rules superior to others? These concerns, which, as we saw in Chapter 1, arise in relation to Rorty’s pragmatism, also arise in connection with deconstruction. According to the view advocated by Cicero, rules are to be evaluated in terms of other rules. We can thus imagine a hierarchy of rules deriving support from increasingly more fundamental rules. The problem, according to Derrida, is that the chain must end somewhere, and the same questions can be asked of the final rules as of the rules for which they provide the justification. The justice of positive law can be evaluated in terms of moral norms, but what account can be given of the justice of the moral norms that comprise the foundations of our capacity for critical evaluation? Whereas Habermas seeks to provide us with a procedure for distinguishing universalizable moral norms from merely localized ethical commandments, Derrida here approvingly cites Montaigne’s remark that “laws keep up their good standing, not because they are just, but because they are laws: that is the mystical foundation of their authority.”20 Pascal, developing Montaigne’s theme, wrote, “Custom is the sole basis for equity, for the simple reason that it is received; it is the mystical foundation of its authority. Whoever traces it to its source annihilates it.”21 The subtitle of Derrida’s essay – “The Mystical Foundation of Authority” – is thus an allusion to this apparent paradox, which Derrida proposes to develop in what he says he would “venture to call a rather Wittgensteinian direction.”22 For here, Derrida suggests, “the discourse comes up against its limit” and “a silence is walled up in the violent structure of the founding act.”23 This “founding act” – the originary act of “interpretative force” by means of which our fundamental moral rules were instituted – seems to occupy a blind-spot in our capacity for critical evaluation.24 Of course, when they spoke of the mystical foundation of legal authority, Montaigne and Pascal were referring to the constructed nature of positive law as it is usually understood – i.e., the legal codes of a state. Their claim was that the law cannot authorize its own instituting moment, which, because it precedes what it institutes, is neither legal nor illegal (insofar as the instituted law is concerned). Like Cicero, however, they did not deny the existence of moral demands to which the institution and enforcement of law are answerable. Thus, as Derrida notes, Pascal contrasts “our justice” (determined in relation to positive law) with “divine justice” (determined in relation to God’s

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law).25 By collapsing both under the rubric of “law,” Derrida extends Pascal’s point about positive law to address the very moral (and religious) considerations to which, according to Pascal, positive law is accountable. His interest is not merely in the justice of law, but in the justice of the norms by means of which the former is evaluated. Derrida ultimately denies the possibility of solving this problem by appealing to any prior standard, because the question of the rightness of this standard – a question which, he points out, can never be answered by appealing to the standard itself – will always reemerge. Even if the success of performatives that found law or right … presupposes earlier conditions and conventions …, the same “mystical” limit will reappear at the supposed origin of said conditions, rules or conventions, and at the origin of their dominant interpretation.26 If, as Derrida argues, the “repression at the origin of meaning is an irreducible violence,” then, as he acknowledges, it is difficult to see how to “call it ‘bad’ or to condemn it from a moral or political point of view.”27 This is because, on Derrida’s analysis, any determinate moral or political point of view would itself represent a violent stabilization of meaning. As he puts it, “you cannot suspect [a norm], much less denounce it except on the basis of another contextual determination every bit as political.”28 It would seem, in other words, that in order to criticize our most fundamental evaluative criteria, we would have to be able to adopt a point of view from somewhere outside all such contexts. But Derrida, as we have seen, denies that there is any such overarching, extra-linguistic vantage point. In his earlier works, Derrida suggests that the fact that there is nothing “outside the text”29 entails that there is nothing that cannot be deconstructed – a view that has looked to many critics like a form of nihilism or, at least, relativism. Since “Force of Law,” however, Derrida has argued that justice is the “indeconstructible” condition of deconstruction.30 Thus, Simon Critchley argues that, “[a]t the basis of deconstruction is a non-pragmatist (or at least non-Rortian) foundational commitment to justice as something that cannot be relativized.”31 The problem for Derrida is where to locate this notion of justice. For it cannot lie outside all the contexts whose conceptual resources it is intended to criticize, since there is no such place. But neither can it be situated within the horizons of any given practice, for then it would become simply another contingent, context-specific concept, not something neutral and necessary in terms of which these practices

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and their conceptual resources could be measured. Derrida’s proposal is to locate it in what might be called the permeability of contextual boundaries, which allows him to say that justice is “independent of every determinate context … It announces itself as such only in the opening of context.”32 Justice in this “quasi-transcendental” register must be distinguished from the various “inherited” moral concepts that are internal to the contingent and historically determined practices that the former seeks to transcend. Thus, when Derrida speaks of “justice in itself,” he is referring not to any positive moral principle, but to the continual reinterpretation of such principles. Justice “in itself” is, in Derrida’s words, an “always unsatisfied appeal, beyond the given determinations of what we call, in determined contexts, ‘justice.’”33 Far from constituting a threat to morality or advocating a self-satisfied conservatism, he argues, deconstruction strives to “be juste with justice.”34 [N]ever to yield on this point, constantly to maintain an interrogation of the origin, grounds and limits of our conceptual, theoretical or normative apparatus surrounding justice is on deconstruction’s part anything but a neutralization of interest in justice, an insensitivity toward injustice. On the contrary, it hyperbolically raises the stakes of an exacting justice; it is sensitive to a sort of essential disproportion that must inscribe excess and inadequation in itself and that strives to denounce not only theoretical limits but also concrete injustices, with the most palpable effects, in the good conscience that dogmatically stops before any inherited determination of justice.35 Derrida’s conception of justice is not itself deconstructible simply because, insofar as it involves a “reinterpretation of the whole apparatus of boundaries within which a history and a culture have been able to confine their criteriology,” 36 it is identical with deconstruction. “Justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible,” he writes. “No more than deconstruction itself … Deconstruction is justice.” 37 Derrida’s deconstructive approach to criticism thus defies classification in terms of the simple distinction between “prescriptive” and “descriptive” moral theories. It is not prescriptive in that Derrida is not attempting to advance any particular conception of the right or the good. But it is not descriptive either, because any such conception could be contested.

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Justice and the messianic Relatively early in his career, Derrida made the rather provocative claim that deconstruction “blocks every relation to theology.”38 If God is understood metaphysically – as commanding a “God’s-eye view” of the text from somewhere outside it – then deconstruction is a fundamentally atheistic system of thought. As in the case of Habermas, however, the bluff, positivistic pronouncements characteristic of Derrida’s early years have given way to a more sympathetic attitude toward at least certain dimensions of religion, prompting some commentators to speak of a “turn to religion” in his writing.39 Indeed, Derrida himself argues that a deconstructive conception of justice has an inherently “messianic” structure. This critique belongs to the movement of an experience open to the absolute future of what is coming, that is to say, a necessarily indeterminate, abstract, desert-like experience that is confided, exposed, given up to its waiting for the other and for the event. In its pure formality, in the indetermination that it requires, one may find yet another essential affinity between it and a certain messianic spirit.40 As we will see, however, deconstruction’s relationship to religion, and consequently to those moral traditions within which appeal is made to religious considerations, remains an uneasy one. Far from being allowed to contribute distinctive conceptual resources to the cause of moral criticism, the determinate religious faiths are ultimately themselves treated solely as appropriate subjects for deconstructive critique. Derrida’s conception of the “messianic” is developed in a series of recent works in which it is possible to detect important developments, as well as a certain equivocation, in his views. In “Force of Law,” Derrida is anxious to avoid any direct parallel between his conception of justice, which, as we have seen, can never be fully present, and the religious understanding of a messiah, whose arrival seems continually to be deferred. I would hesitate to assimilate too quickly this “idea of justice” to a regulative idea (in the Kantian sense), to a messianic promise or to other horizons of the same type. I am only speaking of a type, of this type of horizon that would have numerous competing versions. By competing I mean similar enough in appearance and always pretending to absolute privilege and irreducible singularity.41

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It is clear that at this point in the development of his thought, Derrida regarded messianic expectation as belonging to particular historical and cultural contexts, rather than as a general feature of language or experience as such. Thus, he speaks of the “singularity of the historical place” in which messianic hope can be located.42 Here Derrida is critical of messianic hope for the same reason he is critical of other “competing versions” of what he takes to be “eschato-teleology,” namely their claims to “absolute privilege.” All tokens of this “same type” (e.g., “messianism of the Jewish, Christian or Islamic type, idea in the Kantian sense, eschato-teleology of the neo-Hegelian, Marxist or postMarxist type, etc.”43) depend, according to Derrida, upon interpretative acts of violence that privilege particular contingent ethical (or ethicoreligious) concepts and repress others: hence the “competition.” By the time he wrote “Faith and Knowledge; The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” however, Derrida had evidently reconsidered the connection between his idea of justice and the experience of messianic promise. Here he speaks of “a messianicity older than all religion, more originary than all messianism.”44 Derrida understands this “messianicity without messianism” as “the opening to the future or to the coming of the other as the advent of justice, but without horizon of expectation and without prophetic prefiguration.”45 But although his most recent writings exhibit a newfound willingness to describe justice, understood deconstructively, in messianic terms, Derrida is always careful to distinguish the “messianic” as a “quasi-transcendental” condition of language and experience – what he has called a “messianic apriori”46 – from the various historical messianisms thereby said to be made possible. This is because he continues to regard the latter as advancing mutually exclusive, and hence repressive, conceptions of the “messiah” for which they are waiting. In “Faith and Knowledge” Derrida argues that messianic expectation is a general, a priori feature of all experience, which therefore underlies and precedes the various historical messianisms. However, in Specters of Marx he complicates this view by suggesting that it is unclear which came first – the messianic or the concrete messianisms – and that we seem to be faced with a kind of chicken-and-egg paradox. The problem, as James K.A. Smith points out in a perceptive article, is that neither alternative fits comfortably with Derrida’s own views. “He would either end up siding with a particular determinate religion (and here it is precisely his Enlightenment penchant for universality which prevents him from doing so), or for a purely transcendental structure – also a deconstructive heresy.”47 In either case, however, it is clear that

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Derrida’s messianic must be distinguished from every historical hope for a messiah. As he puts it, “It is not a question of a messianism that one could easily translate in Judaeo-Christian or Islamic terms, but rather of a messianic structure that belongs to all language.”48 This is ultimately because the historical messianisms have their sense within the horizons of particular cultural and historical contexts, whereas Derrida’s notion of the messianic is meant precisely to transcend and interrupt these contexts – contexts which, according to John Caputo, can become “uncommonly dangerous to everybody’s health”49 – and to keep them responsive to the “other.” Well, what remains irreducible to any deconstruction, what remains as undeconstructible as the possibility itself of deconstruction is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; it is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism, an idea of justice – which we distinguish from law or right and even from human rights – and an idea of democracy – which we distinguish from its current concept and from its determined predicates today.50 In a sense, then, Derrida’s notion of the messianic enacts the very interruption of context it is meant to enable, since it is itself a philosophical reinterpretation of a religious concept. Something similar is true of the moral and political terms with which Derrida rather strategically chooses to associate it here – e.g., “justice” and “democracy.” As we will see, however, this is precisely the difficulty: in the absence of a context of application, and thus without any “determined predicates,” these terms become abstract and vacuous, unable to do the positive work Derrida assigns them.

How shall we then decide? Derrida’s earlier writings are frequently directed against a traditional philosophical account of the relation between words and the world according to which written words represent spoken words, which refer to things via the mediation of mental imagery. This account, with its hierarchical distinctions between speech and writing and between “signifieds” and “signifiers,” ultimately rests, according to Derrida, on the problematic assumption that there is such a thing as a “transcendental signified,” a sign that somehow magically tells us how it is to be applied, thereby serving as a terminus of regress in the search

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for determinate meaning. Without this assumption, the distinction between signifiers and signifieds cannot be maintained in any absolute sense. As Derrida puts it, “The semiological or, more specifically, linguistic ‘science’ cannot … hold on to the difference between signifier and signified – the very idea of the sign – without … the reference to a signified able to ‘take place’ in its intelligibility, before its ‘fall,’ before any expulsion into the exteriority of the sensible here below.”51 If, as Derrida contends, the notion of a transcendental signified is incoherent – if, that is, “there is not a single signified that escapes … the play of signifying references that constitute language”52 – then, “in the last instance, the difference between signified and signifier is nothing.”53 Furthermore, the traditional philosophical distinction between spoken words and written ones collapses, for if there is no “presence” of meaning to which the spoken word is closer than its written representation, the classical philosophical definition of writing as “signifier of the signifier” applies equally well to all signs. It has been noted that Derrida’s objections to the notion of a transcendental signified have much in common with Wittgenstein’s arguments against the assumption, running through much of British empiricism from Locke to Russell, that an idea is a psychical counterpart to a material sign, a sort of mental picture that accompanies a sign and makes it meaningful. Wittgenstein’s rejection of this assumption had important, though widely debated, implications for the question of how it is possible to follow a rule, since, if the application is not somehow contained within the rule-formulation itself, it would seem that any application could plausibly be construed so as to accord with the rule. Simon Glendinning claims that Wittgenstein’s conclusion was that “in the use of language something like ‘a new decision’ is always called for on each occasion of the employment of a concept-word,” a view which, as Glendinning notes, is “also central to Derrida’s approach to the structure and functioning of language.”54 As will become clear in the next chapter, I happen to disagree with Glendinning on the question of whether this view can rightly be attributed to Wittgenstein, since such a conception of a rule as essentially determinable only in retrospect is not normative enough to allow us to make sense of our ordinary distinction – a distinction Wittgenstein himself was concerned to preserve – between decisions that accord with a rule and those that do not; however, Glendinning is quite right to say that something very much like this understanding of how rules are applied can be found in Derrida’s earlier writings. In Limited Inc, for example, Derrida notes that the structural “iterability” of signs – their

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essential repeatability in new contexts – has “consequences for the concepts of ‘application’ [and] of ‘rules,’”55 one of which is the “disruption” of the latter’s “authority.”56 According to Derrida, “‘iterability’ does not signify simply … repeatability of the same, but rather alterability of this same idealized in the singularity of the event … It entails the necessity of thinking at once both the rule and the event, concept and singularity.”57 As Martin Stone notes, this means that, on Derrida’s account, “the singular, datable behavioral ‘event’ of judging according to a rule is to be thought of as essential to the meaning of the rule – as somehow determining and not merely following from the rule’s meaning what it does.”58 Given this account, it is thus curious to find Derrida himself, in “Force of Law,” claiming that “no exercise of justice as law can be just unless there is a ‘fresh judgment,’” where such an exercise is contrasted with one that “the rule guarantees … in no uncertain terms.”59 What, one might wonder, is Derrida rejecting when he says that justice cannot “just consist in conformity, in the conservative and reproductive activity of judgment,”60 given that, according to Derrida’s own view, even a reproductive judgment requires a fresh decision of sorts, namely, the decision to reproduce? Put slightly differently, the plausibility of Derrida’s seemingly paradoxical claim that decisions are “undecidable” depends on the view that rules cannot effect their own application; but if this is true, then how can “decisions” be contrasted with cases in which the application “simply consists of applying a rule, of enacting a program or effecting a calculation”?61 Given Derrida’s own account, it is difficult to see how the philosophical distinction he aims to introduce between “law” and “justice” is compatible with his rejection of the notion of a transcendental signified. For unless there were such a thing, per impossibile, it is hard to see how, given Derrida’s own construal of the options, moments in which “we placidly apply a good rule to a particular case” could be contrasted with “moments in which the decision between just and unjust is never insured by a rule.”62 That Derrida seems to recognize this dilemma, however obliquely, is suggested by passages like the following: [E]ach decision is different and requires an absolutely unique interpretation, which no existing, coded rule can or ought to guarantee absolutely.63 Who will ever be able to assure us that a decision as such has taken place? That it has not, through such and such a detour, followed a cause, a calculation, a rule, without even that imperceptible

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suspense that marks any free decision, at the moment that a rule is, or is not, applied?64 In these passages Derrida seems paradoxically to be suggesting, on the one hand, that every application of a rule involves a decision, while expressing concern, on the other, that such a decision may have failed to take place. His assertion that no decision ought to be guaranteed by a rule seems to be in obvious tension with his claim that no decision can be so guaranteed: if the latter is true, the former point seems superfluous. Now perhaps Derrida would reply that his point is really just that there is no way of evading responsibility for one’s “decisions,” since conservative decisions are still decisions. Drucilla Cornell makes this claim when she argues that judicial activism is an inescapable aspect of legal interpretation, and that a judge cannot avoid engaging in legal construction by taking refuge in conservative appeals to, e.g., the “intent of the founding fathers” or the “plain meaning of the words.”65 But if Derrida’s point is really that there are no decisions that “the rule guarantees … in no uncertain terms,” then it is hard to see how his distinction between law and justice, according to which “law is the element of calculation … but justice is incalculable,”66 can be maintained, except perhaps on rather dubious psychological grounds, where, for instance, only those decisions to which one had devoted a sufficient amount of conscious attention could be said to be “just.” Furthermore, if every application of a rule is said to be an “interpretation” or “reinvention,” then it is difficult to see how it would even be possible to distinguish between “conservative” and “radical” interpretations. After all, the notion of conservatism seems to imply fidelity to a rule, and it is precisely the question of what, if anything, such “fidelity” would amount to that is at issue. Be all that as it may, the question that remains is this: how is one to decide? Thus, Critchley, who is otherwise quite sympathetic to Derrida’s approach, is right to wonder how exactly his deconstructive conception of justice “translate(s) into political judgment and action.” Derrida insists that judgments have to be made and decisions have to be taken, provided it is understood that they must pass through an experience of the undecidable. But my question to Derrida would be: what decisions are taken, which judgments are made?67 What we need, it would seem, are some criteria not for distinguishing between the alleged “justice” of aporetic decisions, on the one hand,

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and the “programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process,”68 on the other – indeed, it is not even clear on Derrida’s own account how such a distinction could be sustained – but for distinguishing between just decisions and judgments, on the one hand, and unjust ones, on the other. Such criteria would seem to be essential to guarding against the arbitrary, unjust exercise of will that the “rule of law” is presumably intended to constrain.69 The problem, however, is that Derrida cannot furnish such criteria, since these criteria, it will be recalled, are precisely the kind of thing over against which the “pure formality” of his “messianic” conception of justice was invoked in the first place. For any such criterion, by virtue of being a rule, would itself fall under the rubric of “law.”

At the limits of criticism Derrida’s position can be regarded as an attempt to negotiate a via media between Habermas and Rorty. He agrees with Rorty that all of our norms (or “laws”) are contingent, historical constructions, ultimately grounded in nothing more than “implicit ‘conventions’ or ‘contracts’” rather than in “semantic structures that are absolutely anchored, ahistorical or transtextual.”70 Cornell writes that “this insistence that there can be no metalanguage in which to establish the ‘external’ norms by which to legitimate the legal system separates Derrida from Habermas.”71 But Derrida also shares Habermas’s concern to locate a foothold from which it would be possible to criticize the settled convictions and established practices of the majority. His solution is to criticize the status quo in terms of the very thing that, on Rorty’s view, makes radical criticism impossible – namely, the inability of the status quo to provide itself with any philosophical justification. For Rorty, the rejection of standards external to our practices in terms of which the latter could be assessed leads to a “cheerful ethnocentrism,”72 which serves as the occasion for the political judgment that “the instruments of perfectibility are already, in the rich North Atlantic constitutional democracies, in place,”73 whereas for Derrida, it is precisely what makes every practice subject to deconstruction, opening it up to the “incoming of the other.”74 The obvious objection, of course, is that if the very idea of a philosophical foundation is confused, then it is unclear why the lack of such foundations should count against any given practice. Furthermore, this deconstructive line of criticism is, if valid, a two-edged sword, which would seem to do as much damage to one’s own position as a critic as

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it would to that of one’s opponent. Some deconstructionists have attempted to answer this objection by introducing broadly utilitarian considerations as a means of giving bite to Derrida’s otherwise formal conception of justice. For example, Samuel C. Wheeler III argues that “the tu quoque accusation that, say, a deconstructive feminist critique is itself subject to deconstruction and can itself be exposed as ultimately incoherent does not discredit the critique or the position from which it is made. All such questions are decided by the considerations that we have always taken to be relevant – considerations of good and harm.”75 I would argue that Wheeler’s way of formulating the problem, according to which feminism is said to be just as “incoherent” as the patriarchal structures of which it is critical, only incoherent in a benign and apparently even “credible” way, begs the very question at issue – the question of the sense in which either is “ultimately incoherent.” But this is not the only problem, for who are the “we” to whom Wheeler refers, and where are “we” situated? If it is admitted that different perspectives harbor different interests and, hence, different ways of distinguishing between “good” and “harm,” then such considerations cannot, without circularity, be used to legitimate or criticize the perspectives in question. The evaluative criteria Wheeler here invokes are no more neutral than the positions he invokes them to evaluate. The problem, as we have seen already, is that while such criticisms can be lodged within the horizons of particular contexts of thought, it is difficult to see how these contexts could themselves be evaluated in any neutral way, without falling back on the kind of platonistic criteria of adequacy Derrida explicitly rejects. In “Force of Law,” Derrida identifies “justice in itself” as a condition for the possibility of “all historical progress,”76 since it is what is supposed to make possible change not merely in relation to “conventional” criteria of criticism – criteria that include, Derrida tells us, “concepts of [what is ordinarily called] justice, the law and right, … values, norms, prescriptions”77 – but in the criteria themselves. “Justice,” as Derrida conceives it, “has to be thought of as what overflows law [droit], which is always an ensemble of determinable norms, positively incarnated and positive.”78 However, unlike a Kantian “regulative ideal” or “infinite idea,” which, though perhaps unattainable, might nevertheless function as a beacon in relation to which action could asymptotically be oriented, Derrida’s conception of justice is necessarily irreducible to any positive account of the good or the right.79 As Cornell puts it, “justice understood as an aporia is the limit to the established good of the community,”80 because any positive account of

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the “established good” would itself be a prime candidate for deconstruction. Thus, Derrida writes, “wherever one can replace, translate, determine the x of justice, one should say: deconstruction is possible.”81 The problem, then, with Derrida’s approach, whether it is applied to legal codes, political institutions, religious traditions, or other features of the social landscape, is that his conception of justice is purely formal and thus cannot allow us to distinguish historical progress from change for the worse. Justice, on Derrida’s messianic account, is not so much that for which one must wait, as the waiting itself – a waiting which, as Derrida notes, is necessarily interminable. In this respect Derrida’s notion of justice is like Rorty’s appeal to “romantic hope.”82 Thomas McCarthy has not unjustly dubbed deconstruction the “politics of the ineffable.”83 By locating justice outside the contexts not only of law, but also of morality, it can offer no account of what it seeks, or of what is wrong with our present situation. To be sure, it is something of a truism that there is much about the present that is worthy of criticism; what these features are, however, can be determined only in relation to the concrete, contextualized commitments deconstruction eschews. In its desire to be radically critical, deconstruction ironically forfeits the very capacity for rational judgment. Thus, it ends up denouncing the status quo not because it is unjust, but because it is the status quo. The vacuity of deconstruction’s conception of justice may initially be difficult to recognize, given Derrida’s predilection for what he calls “paleonomy” – i.e., the use of old words in reference to new ways of thinking.84 Because Derrida appropriates and trades under the language of Abrahamic religion – by speaking of the “messianic” – and of liberal politics – by speaking of an “idea of democracy” – his conception of justice appears more substantive than it really is. Indeed, Derrida himself seems at points to be taken in by his own misleading language. For example, as Smith points out: Derrida seems to think that this notion of “democracy” is somehow a pure transcendental structure which is completely undetermined, such that he will speak of the “messianic” as a “democracy to come.” If I were to ask Derrida whether this call for a “democracy to come” was assuming anything determinate, he would say, “No.” Well, then, can I speak of “the theocracy to come?” Certainly not, he would reply. Then it must be the case that he has some idea of what this “democracy to come” must look like; in other words, the

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notion of democracy entails some content, in which case it is not a pure or merely formal idea but, in fact, another messianism.85 What we have here is a classic illustration of the impossibility of having one’s cake and eating it too. To borrow a favorite phrase of Derrida’s, the formality of his notion of justice is the condition of both its possibility and its impossibility: if it were not formal, it could not transcend the practices whose conceptual resources Derrida wants to assess, but precisely because it is formal, it cannot be used to assess them. To the extent that assessment does seem to be taking place, this can only be because some content has been smuggled in; but of course, this is content to which deconstruction is not entitled. Nancy Fraser calls attention to this problem by arguing that deconstructionists are “engaged in a sort of balancing act”: Either they will try to maintain the rigorous exclusion of politics, and especially of empirical and normative considerations – in which case the political import of their philosophical work will diminish. Or they will cross the line and enter upon concrete political reflection – in which case their work will become increasingly empirical and normative and therefore increasingly contested.86 “Progress” in short, is determinable only in relation to normative, and therefore substantive, objectives. But such objectives, as Derrida himself has done so much to show, are always relative to particular points of view.

Conclusion: moral norms and moral decisions Now perhaps it will be objected that the demand for criteria for distinguishing between just and unjust applications of norms is ultimately incoherent, on the ground that if, as certain of Derrida’s writings would lead us to believe, no such criterion would be capable of “guaranteeing” its own correct application, this application would require yet another decision, which would itself stand in need of assessment, and so on, ad infinitum. In the absence of a transcendental signified, a criterion capable of ensuring its own correct application, the problem may appear inescapable, resulting, perhaps, in an infinite regress of criteria for ensuring the correct application of criteria. It is worth noting, by way of comparison, that Habermas attempts to bridge the gap that, on his view, is opened between valid moral norms, which are necessar-

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ily general, and the specific circumstances to which they are to be applied by appealing to universal rules of interpretation. Derrida rejects this latter move on the ground that no rule could ever stipulate the conditions for its own appropriate application. On his view, every rule is subject to – nay, requires – interpretation. In order, then, to avoid an infinite regress, this interpretation must take the form of a “decision,” as opposed to another rule. But although they disagree as to the form the interpretation should take, Derrida and Habermas share the view that our moral norms stand in need of interpretation. But is this true? In the following chapter I will argue in favor of a conception of the normativity of a rule that does not depend on the alleged “presence” of a transcendental signified. Such a conception, I will contend, can be found in Wittgenstein’s discussion of rulefollowing. I also will argue in favor of an alternative understanding of what a “moral norm” is. Derrida’s difficulties are due to the fact that, like Habermas, he treats moral norms as if they were explicit rules, whereas – I will suggest – they are better conceived as implicit in practice. Although I disagree with Derrida’s account of the relation between norms and moral decisions, I believe that he is correct to emphasize the particularity of the contexts in which these decisions must be made. Since, as Derrida says, justice “must always concern singularity, individuals, irreplaceable groups and lives,” we must resist the philosophical temptation to suppose that, in moral matters, “one size fits all.” It is not by unwaveringly adhering to an inherited code that one enters into a relation of genuine care toward the “other.”87 At the same time, I believe that it is important to appreciate what Habermas calls the “unconditional validity” claimed by much of our moral discourse. If the contingency of the conditions in which decisions are required is allowed to undermine this validity, then, as Kant warns in the epigraph to this chapter, we risk losing all. Derrida is right to think that moral criticism is not a mechanical process of applying general principles to specific cases, but he is wrong to suppose that it is a non-mechanical process of applying such principles. Because he misconceives the nature of moral criticism in this way, he makes it seem as if the application of moral norms to specific cases were altogether arbitrary, and as if moral judgment were the process or faculty by means of which a person spontaneously “decided” how to apply norms. But such a view robs norms of their normativity. On Habermas’s account, problems arise because norms are abstracted from the contingent conditions of their application, whereas, on

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Derrida’s account, problems arise precisely because such conditions – to borrow Kant’s phrase – are made “conditions of the law itself.” As I will argue, however, the locutions Habermas and Derrida treat as moral norms are better conceived not as “laws” that might be “applied” to particular circumstances, but as endorsements of patterns of material inference in accordance with which moral considerations might be brought to bear in moral discourse. I will argue in Chapter 6 that, if there is a gap to be crossed, it is a gap not between moral norms and their application to particular cases, but between the normatively structured application of moral considerations to particular cases and moral judgments as to which of these considerations is decisive in a given situation. In other words, moral judgments are not decisions about how to apply norms, but about what ought to be done, and it is only in light of the considerations whose relevance is determined in relation to the norms taken to be implicit in the moral practice that such decisions can be made in a non-arbitrary way. However, I also will argue that moral judgments, while not arbitrary, can nonetheless be “underdetermined” by the moral considerations taken to be relevant, and that, consequently, agreement at the level of what is a reason for what does not translate automatically into agreements about what ought to be done.

4 Norms and Normativity: Between Regulism and Regularism

If [general logic] sought to give general instructions how we are to subsume under these rules, that is, to distinguish whether something does or does not come under them, that could only be by means of another rule. This in turn, for the very reason that it is a rule, again demands guidance from judgment. Immanuel Kant1 In the two preceding chapters we examined two rival accounts of moral criticism – those of Habermas and Derrida, respectively. Each was predicated on a particular conception of what a moral norm is, and of how such norms are related to behavior. I suggested that both accounts can be understood as motivated by the kinds of concerns about the rationality of dissent and criticism that we raised in relation to Rorty’s views in Chapter 1. However, I also argued that both accounts suffer from logical difficulties. In each case, the central problem concerns the relation between norms and practices. As we saw in Chapter 2, Habermas argues that the customs of a culture can be held open to criticism by means of the principle of universalization (U). The function of (U) is to enable us to distinguish truly universal moral norms from merely local cultural customs. Only those rules whose side-effects and consequences all can accept can be said to enjoy moral validity. As Habermas acknowledges, it is an unavoidable consequence of this justificatory process that moral norms are general and abstract. Consequently, a gap is created between the rule and the practices it is intended to regulate. For Habermas, this gap is to be bridged by means of interpretative principles. However, in order to avoid compromising the universality of the norm by 65

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rendering its application dependent on “the parochial context of some hermeneutical starting point,” these interpretative principles must themselves be rules that could command universal assent. Thus, I argued, the problem to which interpretative principles are proposed as the solution recurs at the level of the interpretative principles themselves: these, no less than the original moral norms, seem to stand in need of interpretation. If the logical implications of this problem are pursued, we seem to be faced with the prospect of an infinite regress of rules for the application of rules. Derrida’s account of social criticism also emphasizes the importance of interpretation, but it understands that interpretation differently. For Derrida, the application of a norm is the product not of a rule-guided “discourse of application,” but of a decision. Such a decision must be made precisely in the absence of any universally accepted criteria that would guarantee its correctness. This means that it is not merely a decision about how to apply a norm, but a decision that itself contributes to the very meaning of the norm in question. By emphasizing the event of making a decision, Derrida’s view puts an end to the regress of interpretations that, on Habermas’s view, threatens to paralyze the critic. However, since the “leap” from norm to application is not itself normatively structured, we seem on Derrida’s view to lack the resources for distinguishing between better and worse applications. Derrida’s solution to the regress problem thus comes at a very high price, since it effectively drains norms of their normativity. In this chapter I will argue that the application of explicit rules requires the existence of proprieties embedded in practice. As we will see, “pragmatic theories of norms are distinguished from Platonist theories, in treating as fundamental norms implicit in practices rather than norms explicit in principles.”2 I will then take up the question, posed by Habermas, of whether such an appeal to practices undercuts the universality claimed for some moral locutions. I will here distinguish between two kinds of universality and argue that the kind of universality required to resist relativism is not compromised by the acknowledgment of a “hermeneutical starting point.” Finally, I will question the role that both Habermas and Derrida assign to general rules and suggest an alternative understanding of the moral principles whose application seems to require interpretation.

Regulism A central feature of my argument throughout the chapter will have to do with the relation between norms and practices. To begin, it will be

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helpful to consider some of Wittgenstein’s remarks on this topic in his Philosophical Investigations. In these remarks Wittgenstein is attempting to steer a course between what John McDowell describes as a Scylla and a Charybdis. Scylla is “the idea that understanding is always interpretation” and the Charybdis is “the picture of a basic level at which there are no norms.”3 As we will see, these two perils correspond to the problems which, I have argued, confront Habermas and Derrida, respectively. How do they arise? The Scylla emerges from a particular way of thinking about how human behavior is to be evaluated. According to this way of thinking – which Robert Brandom terms regulism – performance (of whatever variety) is always to be assessed in relation to explicit rules. Rules, on this account, can be understood on the model of laws. But such laws mean what they do only if we have some way of determining how they are to be applied. And this raises the question of how these applications – which, of course, are themselves performances – are to be assessed. On the regulist view that performance is always to be assessed in relation to explicit rules, we would seem to require an additional set of rules to ensure the correct application of the laws in question. But if this is conceded, we find ourselves on a kind of slippery slope. Wittgenstein writes, “But what does a game look like that is everywhere bounded by rules? Whose rules never let a doubt creep in, but stop up all the cracks where it might? – Can’t we imagine a rule determining the application of a rule, and a doubt which it removes – and so on?”4 One way of imagining what such a “game” might look like is suggested by Lewis Carroll in his essay “What the Tortoise said to Achilles.” Here Carroll – a professional logician better known as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass – invites us to imagine a conversation between Achilles and the proverbial Tortoise. The Tortoise begins by asking Achilles to write down in a notebook three statements – A, B, and Z – that are related such that Z follows from A and B.5 Next, the Tortoise asks Achilles to pretend that he (the Tortoise) does not yet accept that Z follows from A and B, and to try to convince him of this. Achilles responds to the challenge by asking the Tortoise to accept a fourth statement – let us call it C – namely, “If A and B are true, Z must be true.” The Tortoise agrees to accept this statement, and Achilles writes it down in his notebook: A B C (If A and B are true, Z must be true.) Z

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Achilles now says to the Tortoise: “If you accept A and B and C, you must accept Z.” When the Tortoise asks why he must, Achilles replies: “Because it follows logically from them. If A and B and C are true, Z must be true. You don’t dispute that, I imagine?”6 The Tortoise agrees to accept this last point on the condition that Achilles writes it down. So Achilles writes: A B C D (If A and B and C are true, Z must be true.) Z The following dialogue then ensues: Achilles says: “Now that you accept A and B and C and D, of course you accept Z.” “Do I?” said the Tortoise innocently. “Let’s make that quite clear. I accept A and B and C and D. Suppose I still refused to accept Z?” “Then Logic would take you by the throat, and force you to do it!” Achilles triumphantly replied. “Logic would tell you ‘You can’t help yourself. Now that you’ve accepted A and B and C and D, you must accept Z!’ So you’ve no choice, you see.” “Whatever Logic is good enough to tell me is worth writing down,” said the Tortoise. “So enter it in your book, please. We will call it (E) If A and B and C and D are true, Z must be true. Until I’ve granted that, of course, I needn’t grant Z. So it’s quite a necessary step, you see?” “I see,” said Achilles; and there was a touch of sadness in his tone.7 Of course, the moral of the story is that it is impossible, even in principle, to demonstrate the validity of an inference – to show that it has been performed correctly – by appealing solely to explicit conditionals. Each rule seems to stand in need of another, resulting in an apparently unbridgeable gap between premises and conclusion. Another way of imagining what it might look like for an activity to be “everywhere bounded by rules” is suggested by roadsigns I recall seeing while driving in Mexico. The signs bore the message, “Obedezca las señales” – “Obey the signs.” If the road is long and one has nothing else to do while driving, one can begin to wonder whether it might not also be necessary to have yet other signs encouraging motorists to obey

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these signs, and so on. Moreover, one might wonder – with an uncomfortable sense of vertigo – how many separate rules would be violated by, say, failing to obey the speed limit. The challenge posed by such examples is to figure out how to put an end to the regress of rules that seems to be required by the regulist account of normativity without appealing to what Derrida calls a “transcendental signified” – i.e., a rule formulation that somehow reflexively ensures its own correct application. As we have seen, Derrida himself responds to this challenge by suggesting that the application that is made of a rule should be regarded as contributing to the very meaning of the rule, rather than as following from an understanding of the rule that precedes and is independent of its application. It is at this turn, however, that we find ourselves confronted by the Charybdis.

Regularism Although they agree that he rejected regulism, Wittgenstein’s interpreters disagree over how he thought we ought to think about normativity and rules instead. As we noted earlier, some commentators, like Simon Glendinning, read Wittgenstein as suggesting that the applications made of a rule require a series of “new decisions” or “leaps.”8 Glendinning writes: “what ‘conforming to the rule’ is is itself constituted on the basis of repetitions which are ungrounded or structurally abyssal. In every case the ‘moment of decision’ is ineliminable.”9 Such a reading of Wittgenstein places his thought in close proximity to that of Derrida. However, I will argue that Glendinning’s account of rulefollowing – and by extension Derrida’s – is neither adequate nor one with which Wittgenstein would have agreed. The regulist account of normativity examined in the previous section of this chapter can be seen as an attempt to rule out – in a rather literal sense – the possibility of doubt. Rules are invoked to ensure the correct application of rules, ad infinitum – or until, per impossibile, one encounters a rule capable of ensuring its own correct application. Wittgenstein’s regress argument is intended to show that our performances are “not everywhere bounded by rules.”10 But in that case, how can we maintain the distinction between correct and incorrect applications of our words and our rules – including our explicitly formulated laws? On what basis can we preserve normativity? One answer – that of Saul Kripke11 and Crispin Wright,12 for instance – is to appeal to the community as the standard for distinguishing

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between correct and incorrect performances, including ways of applying a rule. According to this account, an individual can make a mistake, but the community as a whole cannot, because what it is to be “mistaken” is simply to fail to conform to the expectations of one’s community. McDowell – who does not himself endorse such a view – explains it as follows: This does make room for my going wrong. But all that my going wrong can amount to is this: my action does not secure the approval of my fellows, or is not what they would do in attempted fulfillment of such an order. When the community does approve, that is not a matter of its collectively recognizing the conformity of my action to an antecedent communal understanding of the order… We cannot hold, then, that the community ‘goes right or wrong,’ by the light of its understanding, when it awards my action the title ‘execution of the order’; ‘rather, it just goes.’13 The problem with such an approach is the same problem that arose in relation to Rorty in Chapter 1 – namely, that if the community is said to be the final arbiter of what is correct, we lose the ability to criticize the community itself. Accordingly, Glendinning – who, like Derrida, is anxious to preserve some sort of critical foothold in our current patterns of behavior – does not appeal to the community to ensure the distinction between correct and incorrect performances. In response to the question of what assurance we have that we are not misapplying rules, Glendinning’s answer is none. He writes, “nothing can force us to go on in a particular way beyond the initial instruction and explanation. We are left to take the plunge alone.”14 In other words, “I ‘leap’ from instruction to action, from explanation to employment, without the aid of absolutely authoritative reasons or rules which would provide a cast iron guarantee that this continuation is correct.”15 In support of this deconstructive interpretation, Glendinning quotes a remark from Philosophical Investigations, where, in connection with the question of how a rule is to be applied, Wittgenstein writes: “it would almost be more correct to say, not that an intuition was needed at every stage, but that a new decision was needed at every stage.”16 As Glendinning recognizes, Wittgenstein’s apparent hesitancy (“it would almost be more correct …”) seems to suggest the need for caution before attributing to him the view that “in the use of language something like ‘a new decision’ is always called for on each occasion of the employ-

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ment of a concept-word.”17 In this connection Glendinning cites Baker and Hacker, who, he notes, explain Wittgenstein’s hesitancy as “a warning against what they consider to be an obviously jejune temptation: ‘This line of thought leads in the direction of a kind of logical existentialism’ that signifies ‘yawning chasms of irrationality beneath our rule-governed activities.’”18 Glendinning remarks that “their hostility to this line of thought may seem odd given that they accept that the ‘ground of grammar’ has ‘no support.’ In their view, however, the jejune line presumes that the ground of grammar stands in ‘need’ of support from existential decisions. And this they refuse to countenance.”19 In contrast to Baker and Hacker, Glendinning interprets Wittgenstein’s apparent hesitancy as a consequence of the fact that the “leap” from rule to application may not be preceded by any internal experience of uncertainty. Referring to the Baker-Hacker view Glendinning concludes: “I do not find this convincing.”20 On the view Glendinning attributes to Wittgenstein – a view Glendinning himself endorses – norms are effectively determinable only in retrospect. They are descriptive of past performances, rather than prescriptive of future ones. The problem with accounts of this kind – which Brandom has termed regularist (as opposed to regulist) – is that they evacuate norms of their normativity. Glendinning insists that “the argument is not that ‘any amount of “play” is permissible’ but, rather, that it is inconceivable that words in general have a ‘meaning’ which escapes the principle of iterability.”21 However, while it may not be Glendinning’s intention to show that any amount of “play” is permissible, it is not clear why this conclusion is nevertheless not entailed by the conclusion for which he is arguing – that the applications made of a rule in some sense contribute to the rule’s meaning. In other words, it is difficult to see how Glendinning’s account allows room for the possibility of mistakes – on the part either of the individual or the community (which is, after all, simply a collection of individuals). Perhaps Glendinning would argue that even if new applications cannot be said to follow from the rule, they nevertheless can fail to accord with the rule. Whether or not a given application accords with a rule might be said to depend on whether it can be shown to share relevant features with earlier applications. We can thus imagine a pattern emerging into view through a series of extensions of the rule. Glendinning appears to have something along these lines in mind when he writes that “each ‘moment of the leap’ both maintains the stability of linguistic regularities and helps to set the standard of the stability that it maintains.”22

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However, the difficulty with interpreting Wittgenstein in this way is that, as Brandom points out, Wittgenstein “explicitly considers and rejects this approach.”23 The problem is that there will always be more than one way of picking out a pattern among different applications. Consequently, the process of distinguishing between regular and irregular performances will, as Brandom puts it, always be susceptible to “gerrymandering.” He writes: For … the identification of impropriety with irregularity to get a grip, it must be supplemented with some way of picking out, as privileged, some out of all the regularities exhibited. To say this is to say that some regularities must be picked out as the ones that ought to be continued. The simple regularity view offers no suggestions as to how this might be done and therefore does not solve, but merely puts off, the question of how to understand the normative distinction between what is done and what ought to be done.24 Since identifying the “pattern” seems no less subject to decision than making an application of the rule, the pattern cannot serve to distinguish correct applications from incorrect ones. For Glendinning, a rejection of regulism necessarily entails regularism. As he puts it, “the only alternative [to the regularist view he attributes to Wittgenstein] is no alternative at all.”25 But in passing too quickly from the Scylla to the Charybdis, Glendinning overlooks a perfectly viable way of understanding Wittgenstein’s conception of normativity.

Normativity and practice To some readers, the foregoing discussion of rules may seem curiously discontinuous with our everyday experience of them. In what sense, for example, can a given rule be said to accord with just any application? Consider traffic laws. One’s performance behind the wheel can be assessed in relation to laws that set speed limits, regulate parking, and so forth. By focusing our attention on concrete examples such as these, it may be difficult to comprehend what the philosophical difficulty consists in. Are we really in any doubt about the meaning of a traffic law? Admittedly, we may occasionally be in doubt about the meaning of a particular traffic sign – one encountered, for example, when driving in an unfamiliar country. But in general there seems to be no gap here between a rule and its application. A traffic court judge

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would hardly be inclined to look favorably on the argument that the rule setting a speed limit of 65 miles per hour could be construed as compatible with driving 85. One phrase which occurs repeatedly throughout Glendinning’s discussion of rule-following is “the problem of the gulf.” The “gulf” to which he is referring is the gap that is said to divide a rule from its applications. According to Glendinning, it is with this gulf that Wittgenstein is preoccupied. Wittgenstein shares his classical interlocutor’s concern with the apparent gulf between explanations of meaning and subsequent uses “in accordance” with that meaning. However, their responses to it differ. On the classical conception the gulf is interpreted in terms of a necessary shortfall of ordinary explanations of meaning. The gulf is then removed by suggesting that someone who understands the meaning of a concept-word must grasp a definite rule or “instant talisman” which can anticipate an indefinite number of applications. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, rejects the idea that ordinary explanations of meaning are in some way “less than full.” Consequently, in that sense there is no gulf to bridge. However, there is still the problem that the explanation cannot “stop up all the cracks.”26 By contrast, I would like to suggest that Wittgenstein is not attempting to show us the way over or around any gulf or cracks. His point, rather, as David H. Finkelstein has nicely put it, is that “when rules are seen as situated within our lives, such gulfs are exceptional.”27 In a famous passage toward the end of his criticism of the regulist view of rule-following, Wittgenstein writes: This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here. It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of our argument we give one interpretation after another; as if each one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it. What this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call “obeying the rule” and “going against it” in actual cases.28

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The “misunderstanding” to which Wittgenstein is referring here is what gives rise to the worry that a never-ending series of interpretations seems to be required in order to move from a rule to its application. According to Wittgenstein, the misunderstanding consists in the failure to appreciate that there is a way of grasping a rule that is not an interpretation, but which nevertheless enables us to maintain the crucial distinction between obeying the rule and going against it – a distinction which drops out if the move from rule to application is said to consist in an existential “leap.” How might this way of grasping a rule be understood? The key, according to Wittgenstein, is to appreciate that explicit rules acquire their normative force only when situated within wider contexts of practice – contexts which are themselves normatively structured. As we have seen, Glendinning’s deconstructive account of rules emphasizes what Derrida would call their “undecidability” – i.e., their indeterminacy vis-à-vis various possible applications. Consequently, what is called for on his account is not an intuition, but a decision. Such an account may derive a degree of plausibility from our experience of ambiguously formulated rules and directions – rules and directions whose meaning is unclear. But Glendinning, it is important to see, is making the much stronger claim, which he takes to be a logical one, that a “new decision” – a choice about how the rule is to be obeyed – “is always called for on each occasion,” irrespective of how the rule is formulated. As we have seen, however, in most of our ordinary encounters with rules, nothing remotely resembling an interpretative decision takes place. “When I obey a rule,” Wittgenstein writes, “I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly.”29 Of course, Wittgenstein is not denying that a person can choose whether to obey a rule – after all, this is what distinguishes a rule from a causal law: his point is that one does not choose how to obey it, i.e., decide for oneself which acts do and do not count as “following the rule.” Indeed, this is part of the sense of speaking of “obedience.” Glendinning tells us that “Wittgenstein shares his classical interlocutor’s concern with the apparent gulf between explanations of meaning and subsequent uses ‘in accordance’ with that meaning.” But this is mistaken. Wittgenstein’s point is that there is no such gulf: ordinary explanations of meaning, ordinary instructions, are – in ordinary circumstances – completely sufficient. He writes: “But then how does an explanation help me to understand, if after all it is not the final one? In that case the explanation is never com-

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pleted; so I still don’t understand what he means, and never shall!” – As though an explanation as it were hung in the air unless supported by another one. Whereas an explanation may indeed rest on another one that has been given, but none stands in need of another – unless we require it to prevent a misunderstanding. One might say: an explanation serves to remove or to avert a misunderstanding – one, that is, that would occur but for the explanation; not every one that I can imagine. It may look as if every doubt merely revealed an existing gap in the foundations; so that secure understanding is only possible if we first doubt everything that can be doubted, and then remove all these doubts. The sign-post is in order – if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose.30 Wittgenstein’s strategy here is pragmatic rather than Cartesian. Doubt is not the epistemological default position. Rather, without appropriate grounds it too can be irrational. In the absence of such grounds, our rules are “in order”; their meaning requires no further explanation. Curiously, Glendinning appears to acknowledge the confusion involved in the view that “ordinary explanations of meaning are in some way ‘less than full.’” “In that sense,” he notes, “there is no gulf to bridge.” But having made this remark, Glendinning proceeds immediately to retract it, suggesting that “there is still the problem that the explanation cannot ‘stop up all the cracks.’” Here, of course, the “cannot” is meant in a logical sense. Baker and Hacker are right to point out, however, that this is a problem only on the assumption that there are cracks that need stopping up. Thus, contrary to what Glendinning suggests, there is nothing the least bit “odd” about the fact that they reject what they call “logical existentialism” while affirming that the “ground of grammar” has “no support.” This would be odd only on the assumption that grammar needs this sort of support. Rather, what is odd is that Glendinning rejects the view that our ordinary explanations of meaning are “in some way ‘less than full’” while affirming that there is, in fact, some way in which this is true – a view which, curiously enough, turns out to be indistinguishable in its principle features from the one Glendinning rightly attributes to Wittgenstein’s interlocutor. Glendinning is right to say that, on Wittgenstein’s view, “nothing can force us to go on in a particular way beyond the initial instruction and explanation” but wrong to draw the conclusion that, in the absence of what he calls a “cast iron guarantee” in the form of

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“absolutely authoritative reasons or rules” we are “left to take the plunge alone.” In short, Wittgenstein’s originality and his difference from Derrida lie not in his denial of the possibility of a “full account” of meaning, but in his rejection of the demand for such a chimera – a demand which creates the illusion of ineradicable cracks and abysses, doubts and misunderstandings. Such an insight balances the putative indeterminacy of rules vis-à-vis various allegedly “possible” decisions as to their application with the reminder that what is possible is itself relative to particular practical contexts and helps us to see that what we need in order to distinguish appropriate applications of a rule from inappropriate ones are not, contrary to Habermas’s view, additional rules, but an established practice.31 Insofar as it constitutes a form of regularism, Glendinning’s alternative to regulism ceases to function as an account of normativity. But it was the latter with which Wittgenstein was principally concerned. The remarks typically described as his “rule-following considerations” are intended to serve this greater purpose. Moreover, the way in which they do so is by showing that explicit rules cannot be essential to an account of normativity. As Brandom puts it, “the proprieties of performance that are governed by explicit rules do not form an autonomous stratum of normative statuses, one that could exist though no other did. Rather, proprieties governed by explicit rules rest on proprieties governed by practice.”32 Furthermore, the import of Wittgenstein’s “rule-following considerations” extends far beyond the implications of practice for the application of rules. The application of concepts and the making and assessment of claims – no less than the application of explicit rules – are governed by proprieties of practice.33 As we will see in future chapters, this has important implications for the concerns raised in Chapter 1 about the rationality of dissent.

Agreements in practice Brandom’s way of expressing the normative role of practice is to say that “[n]orms that are explicit in the form of rules presuppose norms implicit in practices.”34 According to this way of thinking about normativity, our ability to make judgments about the correctness of applications – and ultimately about the propriety of performance in general – depends upon agreements within the community of discourse. The giving of orders or instructions, for example, is possible only if a speaker can, in general, rely on the reactions of her audience. Thus, Wittgenstein writes, “The word ‘agreement’ and the word ‘rule’

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are related to one another, they are cousins.”35 The authority of a rule – its status as a rule – presupposes such agreements in practice. However, everything hinges on how the words “rule” and “agreement” are understood to be related – or, to put it another way, on what is meant by “agreement.” Kripke and Wright, as we have seen, seek to fund the distinction between correct and incorrect by appealing to the distinction between the customary applications of the community and the idiosyncratic applications of the individual. However, the latter distinction can appropriately be described as a distinction between what the community takes to be correct and what the individual takes to be correct, whereas what is required to distinguish correct from incorrect applications is, as we have seen, a distinction between what is taken to be correct and what is correct. Moreover, the “community” is itself merely a collection of individuals. It is thus unclear how it can be said to possess a kind of emergent normative authority which no individual can possess alone. No amount of taking-to-be-correct will get us the kind of normativity we require – a normativity internal to our practices. If the sociality of norms is explained in merely sociological terms, our norms cease to function normatively vis-à-vis the community. In seeking to navigate the troubled waters adjacent to the Charybdis, then, we must steer between a view that makes the individual a norm unto herself, and a view that makes the individual answerable only to a community of individuals. On the one hand, we do not want to say that each individual gets to decide for herself what counts as “following the rule.” For, as Wittgenstein points out, “it is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately’: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it.”36 At the same time, however, we want to say that the “community” does not function as a privileged source of normative authority. The answer consists in the recognition that agreement in terms of what is taken to be correct, while essential to the possibility of rulefollowing, is not itself what determines the correctness of any given application. The distinction between correct and incorrect would be impossible to maintain apart from a background of shared regularities of response. Were it not for the fact that we agree in treating particular applications as correct, our norms could not get off the ground. In Brandom’s terminology, our normative attitudes of assessment institute a practice of rule-following. From within this practice, however, it can be said that the norms implicit in it transcend even the attitudes of assessment essential to this institution.37 Consequently, to assert that a particular application is correct is not to assert that it is widely taken to

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be correct. As Wittgenstein puts it, agreement “is the pre-condition of our language-game, it is not affirmed in it.”38 Brandom writes: Wittgenstein’s is the somewhat delicate position first, that the usefulness of normative attributions, the viability of this stratum of discourse, presupposes a variety of regularities of performance and disposition; second, that those regularities obtain is not part of what is asserted by such attributions.39 Although we generally agree as to what a rule requires of us in specific situations – and thus do not need to engage in interpretation – the correctness of any given application depends on the meaning of the rule itself, not on the agreement that it has correctly been applied. In other words, part of what we agree on is precisely that agreement does not determine what counts as a correct application. Against this backdrop of shared response it is sometimes possible for an individual to stand apart from others in her community. In other words, each individual is capable of invoking the distinction between what is correct and what is merely taken to be correct. However, it also is possible for others in the community to question the appropriateness of the applications she takes to be correct. On this view, no one enjoys a privileged perspective.40 Each participant recognizes that there is a distinction between what is correct and what is merely taken to be correct, even though they may not agree on the correctness of a particular contested application. Thus, if disputes do arise about what a rule requires, they cannot be settled simply by a show of hands. If disagreement about a rule is sufficiently frequent and severe – if, in other words, the background of shared response erodes – the rule may eventually cease to function normatively. However, less severe disputes can usually be settled in mundane ways. In some cases, for instance, they can be settled by consulting a relevant authority (e.g., the rule-giver) for clarification. When the directions for installing new software are obscure, one can, for example, call the manufacturer. Derrida has argued that no such appeal to “authorial intention” can solve our dilemma, because the meaning of the author’s own words is not “present” even to the author. Moreover, any additional instructions that the author might issue would themselves be subject to the same demand for interpretation. Thus, Derrida speaks of a generalized “death” of the author, which is thought by some to have important implications for literary theory41 (and is claimed by others to render self-referentially incoher-

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ent Derrida’s own texts on the topic). As we have seen, however, this argument rests on the confused assumption that there is an ineradicable “gulf” between a rule and its applications. I have argued, in light of Wittgenstein’s thought, that such gulfs are exceptional. Ours is thus the much more limited problem that arises in relation not to rules in general, but merely to rules whose meaning is unclear. Of course, sometimes the author is dead or otherwise indisposed. When the rule-giver is not available to explain his or her intentions, or when the circumstances in which a rule needs to be applied differ significantly from those in which the rule was originally formulated, rules may require interpretation. An interpretation (e.g., of a nation’s constitution, or of the Torah) is a proposed reading – a way of understanding a rule.42 In some cases, the proposed reading of a rule may come to effectively replace the original rule in a particular context. But to the extent that an interpretation really is an interpretation – rather than an entirely new rule – it is not more authoritative than the rule on which it offers a gloss. On Derrida’s view, interpretation is a condition of rule-following, whereas on Wittgenstein’s view, rule-following is the background against which interpretation may occasionally be deemed necessary. Interpretation is possible, on this view, only because usually it is not required. If, as Drucilla Cornell argues, some degree of “activism” is an inescapable dimension of jurisprudence, that is only because it is hard cases that end up in court. What goes on in a court of law is thus far from a paradigm case of rule-following. By analyzing moral reasoning on the model of legal interpretation, Derrida gets his account off on the wrong foot. Broad legal construction may be required when the “plain meaning” of the law is not plain; however, it does not follow – as Cornell and Derrida seem to think – that the intent is never plain, or that such construction is always required.43 Were this so there would be little point in having laws.

Universality and relativism One of the implications of Wittgenstein’s “rule-following considerations” – i.e., his remarks on the practical nature of normativity – is that, contrary to what Habermas would wish, we cannot avoid appealing to the “context of some hermeneutical starting point” – though perhaps the term “hermeneutical” is misleading, given its implication of the necessity of interpretation.44 Explicit rules – however universal in scope – depend for their respective applications on proprieties of

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practice. Thus, Habermas’s appeal to explicit interpretative principles only defers the need for practical grounding. But Rorty and Derrida are correct in claiming that such contexts of practice are contingent, conditioned by culture and human evolution. Thus, we must return to the question of whether the contingency of such a context undercuts the universality of what can be claimed within it. In seeking to address this question it is important to recognize that moral discourse is not unique in requiring a grounding in practice. If Wittgenstein’s analysis is correct, other forms of discourse often regarded as paradigms of the kind of universality to which morality ought to aspire – e.g., science and mathematics – are no less dependent on proprieties of practice. However, this need not be thought to undermine the universality of the claims made from within these modes of discourse. Here it is important to distinguish two senses in which one might be inclined to speak of universality. In the first sense, a statement might be said to be universal if its scope is sufficiently general – i.e., if it makes a claim that purports to be true or valid universally. In the second sense, a statement might be said to be universal if it is sufficiently widely accepted – i.e., if it makes a claim with which everyone agrees. Most universal scientific and mathematical statements – such as the claim that the shortest distance between two points on a plane can be represented by a straight line – are universal only in the first sense, because not everyone participates in the practices within which such statements have their life. However, their lack of universality in the second sense in no way undermines their universality in the first sense. Much of the current debate over relativism stems from a failure adequately to distinguish these two senses of universality. The moral relativist rightly recognizes that there is a plurality of different views about what is right and wrong, and that these vary from one culture to another, across time and space. The relativist therefore concludes that moral beliefs cannot be true universally. But that conclusion is a mistake, because the situation is even more complicated than the relativist recognizes. The problem is not simply that different cultures have different ideas about what is right and wrong “for them,” but that each of these cultures regards its own ideas – or at any rate an important subset of these ideas – as valid at all times and in all places. The moral relativist is right to argue that we cannot locate some means by which to render, justify, or assess moral judgments that is independent of all cultures. Whenever we make moral judgments we are always speaking and thinking from within some particular cultural

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context, drawing on the moral resources internal to it. But precisely for that reason, the relativist is wrong to think that we could abandon the idea of universality, because this idea is built right into the cultural contexts out of which a person might speak. In other words, if, as the relativist rightly insists, we can never transcend our culture and find some platonistic ideal against which to measure it, then the proper conclusion to be drawn is that we have to operate within the space internal to it. And within this culture – which (as we will see in more detail in Chapter 7) cannot simply be identified with a prevailing consensus of opinion – some of our moral beliefs are held to be universally valid. Habermas rightly recognizes that the validity claimed for norms and propositions often “transcends spaces and times, ‘blots out’ space and time.”45 In theoretical cases, as we have seen, Habermas accounts for this fact by distinguishing truth from justification. Here Habermas would agree that the particularity of a practice does not undercut the universality of what can be claimed within it. In moral cases, however, he defends a purely epistemic conception of validity – one which distinguishes local from universal justification. He writes, “By justifying (U), discourse ethics rejects the basic assumptions of ethical relativism, which holds that the validity of moral judgments is measured solely by the standards of rationality or value proper to a specific culture or form of life.”46 By equating validity with universal acceptability, such an account necessarily collapses the two levels of universality distinguished above. Thus, Habermas responds to the relativist challenge by seeking to achieve universal agreement on a common set of moral norms. In so doing, however, he accepts the challenge on the relativist’s own terms. By conceding that the validity of a norm consists in its satisfying the criterion supplied by (U) – i.e., by insisting that (in moral cases) universality in the first sense requires universality in the second – Habermas inadvertently calls into question all those moral convictions about which, as the relativist rightly recognizes, there is at present no general consensus. If, however, one rejects a purely epistemic account of moral validity, the problem dissolves. On a non-epistemic account of moral validity – such as the account for which I will argue in Chapter 7 – the universality of what is claimed is not compromised by the particularity of the practice in which the claim is made. What distinguishes moral relativism from a merely descriptive account of moral diversity is not its denial of universality in the sense of actual agreement, but its denial of universality in the sense of universal applicability, and this kind of universality need not be threatened by the kind of disagreement Habermas

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aims to overcome. Such disagreement in fact presupposes the relevant kind of universality, since if the moral locutions in question were of merely local relevance, there would be little to disagree about. Thus, the requirement that normativity ultimately be grounded in contexts of practice, together with the recognition that no such context is eternal or necessary in some metaphysical sense, do not undermine the kind of universality required to resist relativism.47

Norms and moral reasoning Although in many respects they are at odds, Habermas and Derrida share a common conception of the general structure of moral reasoning. According to this way of thinking – which might be described as a legalistic account – moral reasoning consists in the application of general rules to particular circumstances. One of the questions over which they differ concerns the process by which this is supposed to take place. Habermas invokes interpretative “principles,” whereas Derrida emphasizes the importance of making an interpretative “decision.” I have argued that the former strategy – which I described as regulist – results in the paradox of an infinite regress of norms, while the latter – which I described as regularist – undermines the normativity of norms. Here, however, I want to question the underlying assumption – common to both accounts – that moral reasoning consists primarily in the application of explicit rules to particular circumstances. Consider the following simple moral arguments: (1) My failure to testify would likely result in an innocent person being convicted and punished; therefore, I should testify. (2) Retaliating against the terrorist attack with a missile strike would likely result in dozens of civilian casualties; therefore, you ought not to retaliate in this way. Rightly or wrongly, each argument draws a moral conclusion – a conclusion about what ought or ought not to be done in particular circumstances – from a premise. In neither case, however, is the premise framed in terms of a general rule. On the contrary, each premise states what purport to be considerations of an essentially factual nature. These are the same considerations that might be brought to bear, after the fact, by a critic who objected to one’s failure to testify, or to one’s decision to proceed with a missile strike.

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In neither of these cases does any question of interpretation appear to arise. Perhaps, however, it will be said that as it stands, neither argument is valid. Each is an enthymeme – an argument from which a crucial premise is missing. In order to be formally valid, it might be argued, these inferences would respectively require the addition of something like the following: (a) It is wrong to allow the innocent to be punished. (b) One ought not to kill or injure civilians. But, it will be noted, each of these premises takes the form of a general rule. Thus, each major premise is precisely the sort of “universal ‘ought’ sentence” that Habermas takes to be crucial to argumentation and criticism. However, as Brandom notes, not all valid inferences are valid by virtue of their form: some are valid by virtue of their content. Inferences that are valid by virtue of their content can be said to be materially good. Consider, for instance, the following simple non-moral examples: (3) The ball is completely red; therefore, the ball is not blue. (4) Sacramento is north of San Francisco; therefore San Francisco is south of Sacramento. Here, too, one might be tempted to suppose that something is missing in each case. The suppressed premises could be formulated in terms of conditional statements like the following: (c) If something is completely red, then it cannot also be blue. (d) If Sacramento is north of San Francisco, then San Francisco is south of Sacramento. If, however, we reject what Brandom calls the “dogma of formalism” – if, that is, we recognize that formal validity is not the only, or even the most primitive,48 kind of validity – it becomes possible to recognize that inferences (3) and (4) are already in logical order. The conditional statements (c) and (d) are not additional premises required to ensure validity, but articulations of the inferential relations to which our use of color terms and directions is taken to commit us. Like formally good deductive inferences, material inferences such as (3) and (4) are commitment-preserving: to commit oneself to what is stated by their

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premises is necessarily to commit oneself to what is stated by their conclusions.49 It is important here to appreciate that material relations are not simply the poor cousin of formal relations but a characteristic and natural way in which propositions can be understood to be logically inter-connected. Indeed, we can go further and note that even in the case of a formally valid syllogism, the movement from premises to conclusion itself depends upon proprieties of inference implicit in practice. As the story of Achilles and the Tortoise illustrates, logical vocabulary does not in itself “take us by the throat.” Or rather, it takes us by the throat only insofar as we appreciate the significance of the relevant non-logical vocabulary. On Brandom’s account, the relations of material inference that link a statement with other statements are essential to that statement’s meaning. The semantic content of a claim consists precisely in what Brandom calls its “inferential articulation: what else it commits the asserter to, what commitments it entitles its audience to, what would count as a justification of it, and so on.”50 On his view, “assertions are fundamentally fodder for inferences.”51 Assertions play the dual role of being reasons as well as “performances for which reasons can be asked.”52 Thus, they can serve both “as justifiers and as justifieds, premises and conclusions.”53 Playing this dual role is precisely what makes a locution propositional – i.e., what makes it a suitable candidate for assertion and belief.54 Brandom proposes to treat statements like (a) and (b) as analogous to statements like (c) and (d) – i.e., not as suppressed premises, but as explicit articulations of otherwise implicit relations of material inference taken to obtain between premises and conclusions. In other words, they attempt to make explicit the moral implications within a concrete practice of certain claims of a factual nature. Notice that in practical inferences such as (1) and (2), normative or evaluative terms like “obliged,” “ought,” and “wrong” can play roughly the same role that conditional terms play in relation to inferences of a more theoretical nature, such as (3) and (4).55 Their function is “to make explicit … the endorsement of a pattern of material practical inferences.”56 As we will see in the following chapter, these patterns of inference provide the background against which the making of arguments is possible.

Conclusion: moral norms as implicit As we have seen, Habermas and Derrida both treat statements like (a) and (b) as explicit rules of behavior that must in some way be applied

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to particular circumstances – whether by means of additional explicit rules (on Habermas’s view) or by means of an interpretative “decision” (on Derrida’s view). In the first half of this chapter I argued that what both views fail to appreciate is that the application of explicit rules depends upon proprieties of practice. What Brandom’s work shows, however, is that agreements within a practice can themselves be expressed in the form of normative principles. On Brandom’s view, statements like (a) and (b) should be viewed not as explicit rules of behavior that depend for their respective applications on norms implicit in practice, but as themselves attempting to articulate norms implicit in practice – i.e., as statements of relations of moral inference. Such articulations are not required for the making of valid moral judgments, although they can be used to say why a given judgment is invalid. Thus, although Wittgenstein’s “rule-following considerations” show us that there is nothing inherently mysterious about the application of explicit rules to particular circumstances, that is not primarily why they are relevant to our discussion of moral reasoning. They are relevant because they emphasize that explicit rules cannot be essential to the possibility of normativity. According to the alternative account offered here, our moral norms are better conceived as implicit in practice. In seeking to “apply” or “interpret” the principles they treat as norms, Habermas and Derrida both misconceive the level at which norms function in our moral discourse. Such norms are not ordinarily themselves moral considerations; rather, they specify the kind of considerations that could relevantly be brought to bear. As we have seen, however, the latter considerations are generally facts, rather than rules.57 In this chapter I have argued that – contrary to what Habermas and Derrida suppose – there need be nothing inherently problematic about the application of moral considerations. But I have not yet addressed what Habermas would call the question of justification. In the following chapter I will seek to build on the practice-based conception of normativity offered here by developing a contextualized account of moral deliberation. I will argue that the possibility of rational criticism depends upon there being certain commitments not ordinarily subjected to the demand for justification.

5 “In the Beginning was the Deed”: The Ungrounded Grounds of Rational Criticism

Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit. Immanuel Kant1 To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. Simone Weil2 In his book A Common Humanity, Raimond Gaita writes: Many people are afflicted by an anxiety – some by a sense of desperation – that the concepts which are fundamental to sober political judgment have come under attack. These are the concepts of commonsense and common knowledge. Concerning many public issues – education, the raising of children, censorship, unions, the courts – anecdotes abound which are intended to illustrate a radical loss of commonsense or a denial of something which is common knowledge. In itself that might occasion no more than amused condescension amongst people who have different ideas about which beliefs express commonsense. But whichever beliefs one takes to be expressive of it, everyone has reason to fear the destruction of the concept of commonsense, for the concept of sober judgment will be destroyed along with it. Far from being radically critical, we will then be prepared to believe anything. The political dangers of that are illustrated in hairraising detail by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago and by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism.3 86

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Gaita’s remarks serve to highlight two concerns, which might at first seem to be in tension. On the one hand, there is much in our world of which the morally serious person ought surely to be critical. On the other hand – as we have seen in previous chapters – there seems to be a danger that criticism can go too far, spilling over into skepticism, disillusionment, cynicism, and detachment. Once this happens, we relinquish our grip on the very resources that are required for rational evaluation. In this chapter I will argue that our capacity for raising moral questions depends upon there being certain matters about which questions do not ordinarily arise. I also will argue that this claim must carefully be distinguished from the claim that there are certain things that one should not – or cannot – question.

Moral reasoning and moral reasons In The Right and the Good, W.D. Ross famously argued that moral reasoning involves “general principles of prima facie duty,”4 and that each of these principles is self-evident “in the sense that when we have reached sufficient mental maturity and have given sufficient attention to the proposition it is evident without any need of proof, or of evidence beyond itself. It is self-evident just as a mathematical axiom, or the validity of a form of inference, is evident.”5 Among the moral propositions Ross enumerates are principles enjoining the fulfillment of promises, the just distribution of goods, the returning of services rendered, and the promotion of the wellbeing of others. He writes: The moral order expressed in these propositions is just as much part of the fundamental nature of the universe (and, we may add, of any possible universe in which there were moral agents at all) as is the spatial or numerical structure expressed in the axioms of geometry or arithmetic. In our confidence that these propositions are true there is involved the same trust in our reason that is involved in our confidence in mathematics; and we should have no justification for trusting it in the latter sphere and distrusting it in the former. In both cases we are dealing with propositions that cannot be proved, but that just as certainly need no proof.6 In his moral theory, just as in his philosophy of mathematics, Ross was, of course, firmly committed to a foundationalist epistemology. He writes, “A statement is certain, i.e., is an expression of knowledge, only in one or other of two cases: when it is either self-evident, or a valid

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conclusion from self-evident premisses.”7 Yet, Ross held that, whereas general principles of duty are self-evident – capable of being “intuited” – how one ought to apply these principles to particular circumstances is not. The problem, as Ross saw it, is that our prima facie duties can come into conflict with one another. We may come “in the long run, after consideration, to think one duty more pressing than the other, but we do not feel certain that it is so.”8 Consequently, Ross held, “[o]ur judgements about our actual duty in concrete situations have none of the certainty that attaches to our recognition of the general principles of duty.”9 Ross’s point was not that moral judgments are somehow inherently dubious or that they ought necessarily to arouse our suspicion, but that they are not self-evident in the way that the general principles of duty are: unlike the latter, the former require justification. In light of the devastating and well known critiques of foundationalism that have emerged since the publication of Ross’s work, his views may no longer seem to promise much insight into the nature of moral justification and judgment. Nevertheless, Ross’s work does, I believe, contain at least three insights worth taking seriously: (1) that certain normative principles (like the ones Ross enumerates) ordinarily “need no proof,” (2) that helpful analogies can be drawn between the norms implicit in moral reasoning and the norms implicit in, e.g., the practice of mathematics or a “form of inference,” and (3) that in moral contexts, unlike in mathematical or theoretical ones, agreement in practice about which considerations count as reasons need not necessarily issue in agreement at the level of judgments. The present chapter addresses insights (1) and (2); the third insight will be developed at greater length in the next chapter, which explores the phenomenon of intracultural moral disagreement. Recently, Mark Timmons has suggested that we might be able to “rework some of Ross’s views by stripping away the foundationalist epistemology and non-naturalist metaphysics” in which they are packaged.10 Timmons proposes a contextualist view of moral justification involving the following four theses: T1 There are a number of irreducible moral generalizations that are defeasible and that we acquire as a result of moral education. In the ordinary context of justification in ethics, these are often epistemically basic. T2 However, they are contextually basic: they do not represent selfevident moral truths knowable a priori, nor do they result from the deliverance of some faculty of moral intuition. Rather, their status as basic is relative to the context …

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T3 The contextually basic beliefs provide (along with relevant nonmoral factual beliefs) the justificatory basis for justified belief in other, non-basic moral propositions. Thus, (ceteris paribus) other, non-basic moral beliefs are justified if they are appropriately based on some of the contextually basic ones. T4 In many cases, two or more morally relevant considerations expressed by the basic moral generalizations will be present in a single case, and for these cases we need have no algorithm or ordering system to which we can appeal to adjudicate the conflict.11 I believe that Timmons is right to emphasize the contextualized nature of moral reasoning. It was for failing fully to appreciate the role played by practice that I criticized both Habermasian discourse ethics and Derridean deconstruction. However, I will question the role all three philosophers assign to “rules” or “principles” in moral reasoning. Whereas Timmons follows Ross in treating these rules as reasons for action, I contend, following Brandom, that they can more appropriately be understood as explicit articulations of relations of material inference implicit in our practices, and that the reasons brought to bear in accordance with these norms do not themselves generally take the form of rules. Timmons prefaces his chapter on “Moral Justification in Context” with the following quote from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty: “At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded.”12 He does not discuss Wittgenstein’s views further, opting to “run with the spirit, if not the letter, of Wittgenstein’s remark.”13 However, I will argue that Wittgenstein’s later work repays close attention, and that clarity can be achieved, and some common confusions avoided, by using this work to aid in the development of analogies between the beliefs basic within theoretical forms of reasoning and the normative principles basic within moral reasoning. My contention is that once we have come to appreciate the nature and status of these principles and beliefs, we can recognize that, while “basic,” they are ultimately not what is foundational in our thought and action.

On Certainty and the peculiar logical role of certain propositions In On Certainty, his last work, Wittgenstein argues that there is a class of assertions – or at any rate a loose agglomeration of assertion-like locutions – which are not ordinarily treated as requiring rational justification. Of such a locution it may be said that “the grounds that

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[one] can give are no surer than [the] assertion” itself.14 Although Wittgenstein was particularly concerned with empirical contexts, I will go on to argue that much of what he says about these contexts is also relevant to moral contexts. A central theme of Wittgenstein’s remarks in what came to be On Certainty is that doubt presupposes something that is not doubted. He writes, “the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn.”15 The title given posthumously to Wittgenstein’s work is perhaps misleading, since it seems to suggest that the “propositions” that Wittgenstein says are “exempt from doubt” are ones of whose truth we can be absolutely sure. G.E. Moore, whose essays “A Defence of Common Sense” and “Proof of an External World” Wittgenstein alludes to here, held this view. He wanted to refute skepticism by insisting that there were particular things he knew with absolute certainty, such as that he had two hands.16 But this is not a view with which Wittgenstein himself was comfortable. “Moore’s mistake,” he says, “lies in this – countering the assertion that one cannot know that, by saying ‘I do know it.’”17 Returning to themes he had articulated in the final pages of what became the Philosophical Investigations,18 Wittgenstein argues that there are certain verbal locutions that resemble empirical propositions but that we do not typically treat like ordinary empirical propositions. Such propositions, which when articulated sometimes sound quite bizarre, are so central to our whole way of thinking that nothing is usually allowed to count against them. The point is not that we necessarily have incredibly convincing evidence to support them, but rather that any evidence that could be furnished would be no more convincing – and perhaps intrinsically less convincing – than what is stated by the propositions themselves. Let us distinguish two closely related strands of thought in On Certainty. The first is that doubting presupposes something that is not doubted: “as a rule,” Wittgenstein says, in any given case of doubt about the physical world “some empirical judgment or other must be beyond doubt.”19 This means that Cartesian “doubt about everything” is an incoherent notion. “If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything.”20 A second strand of thought in On Certainty is that there are some matters about which doubt does not ordinarily arise. This point is obviously closely related to the first, though it is distinct, since not every proposition the truth of which is, so to speak, “presupposed”21 in a

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given case is the kind of proposition about which doubt does not arise in general. For instance, a scientist might come to doubt an hypothesis in light of the results of certain experiments. However, she may later come to doubt the reliability of the apparatus used in the experiments. While the reliability of the apparatus might not be doubted in general, it is something about which doubt is nonetheless perfectly intelligible in certain familiar circumstances. Indeed, one reason for doubting the reliability of the apparatus is precisely the firmness of the hypothesis that seems to have been disconfirmed using it: if, for example, a thermometer placed in a kettle of boiling water registers a temperature of only 50 degrees Celsius, it is reasonable to conclude that this thermometer is defective. On the other hand, the scientist is not likely to doubt the reliability of induction itself. That, in general, unexamined cases can be expected to resemble examined ones belongs to the background of her hypothesis formation and testing. What is it about certain propositions that seems to relegate them to the periphery of what Brandom, following Sellars, calls “the game of giving and asking for reasons”? This question is particularly perplexing given the wide variety of examples of such propositions that Wittgenstein provides: “The earth has existed for more than five minutes”; “I have two hands”; “12 × 12 = 144”; “My name is Ludwig Wittgenstein.” It seems clear that these propositions have little in common besides their being, in certain contexts, set apart from doubt. Some of them, such as “12 × 12 = 144” are of the sort that no one who understood arithmetic could reasonably doubt. Others, such as “My name is Ludwig Wittgenstein,” seem to be certain only within much more limited contexts, such as the context constituted by being Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein himself emphasizes these differences. The mathematical proposition has, as it were officially, been given the stamp of incontestability. I.e.: “Dispute about other things; this is immovable – it is a hinge on which your dispute can turn.” And one can not say that of the proposition that I am called L.W. Nor of the proposition that such-and-such people have calculated such-and-such a problem correctly. The propositions of mathematics might be said to be fossilized. – The proposition “I am called …” is not. But it too is regarded as incontrovertible by those who, like myself, have overwhelming evidence for it. And this not out of thoughtlessness. For the evidence’s being overwhelming consists precisely in the fact that we do not need to give way before any contrary evidence.22

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Wittgenstein argues that what makes all of these propositions “certain” is not their incorrigibility or self-evidence when regarded in the abstract, but the central place they occupy in particular contexts of life – contexts which one may or may not happen to occupy. “What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.”23 Wittgenstein sometimes speaks of “what stands fast” as belonging to the foundations of a context.24 However, this can be misleading if it is taken to imply the kind of picture envisioned by the type of foundationalism to which thinkers like Moore and Ross were committed, according to which certain propositions might be said to be “properly basic.” One difficulty with this view, to which much attention has been given in recent years, is the lack of any criterion of proper basicality – whether couched in terms of self-evidence, incorrigibility, etc. – that can itself be shown to be properly basic. When Wittgenstein says that some propositions are foundational, he means that they are fundamental within a given context, not that they provide foundations for the context. These propositions are not “certain” in the abstract: it is only within particular practical contexts that doubt about certain propositions does not arise, and for that very reason, these are contexts in which those propositions usually remain unsaid. Wittgenstein asks: “Then why don’t I simply say with Moore ‘I know that I am in England’?” He replies: “Saying this is meaningful in particular circumstances, which I can imagine. But when I utter the sentence outside these circumstances, as an example to shew that I can know truths of this kind with certainty, then it at once strikes me as fishy.”25 Although, as Wittgenstein emphasizes, the contexts of thought within which doubts about certain propositions do not ordinarily arise are not themselves grounded in anything, this should not be regarded as a shortcoming – as if they were lacking some property they could reasonably be expected to possess. Indeed, the point is not so much that these practical contexts and the propositions central to them are ungrounded, as that they indicate what are taken to count as grounds. “Is it wrong,” Wittgenstein asks, “for me to be guided in my actions by the propositions of physics?” “Am I to say I have no good ground for doing so?” He answers, “Isn’t precisely this what we call a ‘good ground’?”26 The trick is to recognize the real “foundations” of our thought when we see them, instead of seeking something even deeper. Consider, for example, the principle that “the future will be conformable to the past.”27 As Hume noted, this principle is basic within inductive inference and consequently cannot, without circularity, be

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justified or criticized on the basis of past experience. “[E]xperience,” as Wittgenstein observed, “does not direct us to derive anything from experience. If it is the ground of our judging like this, and not just the cause, still we do not have a ground for seeing this in turn as a ground.”28 In the Investigations Wittgenstein had written: We are misled by this way of putting it: ‘This is a good ground, for it makes the occurrence of the event probable.’ That is as if we had asserted something further about the ground, which justified it as a ground; whereas to say that this ground makes the occurrence probable is to say nothing except that this ground comes up to a particular standard of good grounds – but the standard has no grounds!29 What Wittgenstein here calls “the standard” is not itself a reason – a “ground” – but a description of what we are prepared, within the context of inductive inference, to count as a reason. The recognition that our grounds are ungrounded – that justifications eventually come to an end – might lead in one of at least two directions: on the one hand, it might incline a person toward skepticism, albeit skepticism of an altogether unlivable form; on the other hand, it might lead toward a rejection of the foundationalist assumption that justification is required “all the way down.”30 Wittgenstein says that a language game “is not reasonable (or unreasonable).”31 The parenthetical qualification is important: although these propositions about which doubt does not usually arise are not themselves based on reasons, this does not mean that they are “unreasonable” in the sense of “irrational.” The point is rather that the distinction between reasonable and unreasonable does not apply at this level.32 There are no “reasons” for these propositions; these propositions delimit the periphery of the game of giving and asking for reasons. In many cases, they mark off what we count as our reasons. Together they constitute what Wittgenstein calls our Weltbild (“world-picture”). This worldpicture is not an hypothesis;33 rather, it is the element within which “all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place,”34 the “inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.”35

Axial propositions As we have seen, Wittgenstein sometimes uses the image of a hinge to illustrate the logical role such propositions play in our thinking. They

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are what “stay put” for us. But this image, like the image of foundations, can also be misleading, since it might seem to invite the question of what holds the hinge fast.36 A better image, which Wittgenstein provides relatively early in the book but does not develop, is of the axis around which an astronomical body, such as a planet, rotates. “I do not explicitly learn the propositions that stand fast for me. I can discover them subsequently like the axis around which a body rotates. This axis is not fixed in the sense that anything holds it fast, but the movement around it determines its immobility.”37 This image has two advantages. First, it does not invite the question of what holds it fast. And second, since an axis is not itself a body, it reminds us that these “propositions” – which we might, given this analogy, call “axial propositions” – are not the sort of thing anyone usually articulates.38 Consider, for instance, the proposition “physical objects exist.” Noting the curiousness of such an expression, Wittgenstein writes, “Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist, etc. etc., – they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs, etc. etc.”39 Axial propositions are not the kind of thing one is taught; rather, Wittgenstein says, one “swallows them down” in the course of learning the things one is taught.40 He goes on to ask, “Are we to say that the knowledge that there are physical objects comes very early or very late?”41 Wittgenstein’s point is that, to the extent that it makes sense at all to speak of one’s “knowledge” that there are physical objects, this knowledge shows itself in one’s commerce with actual books and armchairs and the like. That there are physical objects is not a further piece of information to be mastered. Does this mean that one simply assumes the truth of axial propositions? Wittgenstein writes, “If I say ‘we assume that the earth has existed for many years past’ (or something similar), then of course it sounds strange that we should assume such a thing.”42 To say that we “assume” the truth of these propositions runs the risk of making it sound as if they were logically prior, and thus only externally related, to our thought, in precisely the way suggested by foundationalism, whereas Wittgenstein’s point, as we have seen, is that they are foundational only within our thought.43 This is a very delicate distinction that is easy to miss. Indeed, although Wittgenstein emphasizes the dangers of speaking of axial propositions as if a logically prior belief in their truth were what made our practices possible, he does not altogether successfully avoid these dangers himself. For instance, after noting that it “sounds strange that we should assume such a thing,” he goes on to say that “[t]he assumption, one might say, forms the basis of action,

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and therefore, naturally, of thought.”44 Wittgenstein notes elsewhere, however, that instead of saying that axial propositions are the basis of our ways of acting and thinking, it would be better to say that these propositions are basic in our action and thought. Thus, he quotes a line from Goethe’s Faust, “Im Anfang war die Tat” (“In the beginning was the deed”), to express his point that it is our acting that lies at the bottom of the language game.45 As Wittgenstein notes, “The end is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting.”46 Similar difficulties attend the suggestion that axial propositions are “taken on trust” or “taken for granted,” or that they are “presuppositions.”47 Part of the problem, in all of these cases, is that the candidate verbs – “assume,” “take on trust,” “take for granted,” “presuppose” – all already have employments within the language games the very possibility of which is said to depend on our relation to the axial propositions.48 Wittgenstein writes: One cannot make experiments if there are not some things that one does not doubt. But that does not mean that one takes certain presuppositions on trust. When I write a letter and post it, I take for granted that it will arrive – I expect this.49 While I may, depending on the reliability of the postal service, take for granted that my letter will arrive, I do not “take for granted” in anything like the same way that the letter will not cease to exist as soon as it is sealed in an envelope, or that the words on the stationery will not rearrange themselves of their own accord. These concerns simply do not arise. Of course, the difficulty is to locate any alternative verbs that would adequately capture our “negative” relationship to axial propositions, since any existing candidate one might consider by definition already has an employment elsewhere. As the examples above suggest, when axial propositions are articulated, they sometimes sound almost comical. Perhaps recalling his discussions with Moore in Cambridge Wittgenstein writes, “I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again ‘I know that’s a tree,’ pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: ‘This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.’”50 The strangeness of these propositions is itself due to their centrality in our thinking. They belong, so to speak, to the framework of thought, rather than to what we actually think about.51 We might also say that such propositions furnish the terms of the debate, and are not what is debated. Of course, we can easily imagine

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circumstances in which such statements would not seem out of place.52 Wittgenstein writes: “I know that that’s a tree” is something a philosopher might say to demonstrate to himself or to someone else that he knows something that is not a mathematical or logical truth. Similarly, someone who was entertaining the idea that he was no use any more might keep repeating to himself “I can still do this and this and this”. If such thoughts often possessed him one would not be surprised if he, apparently out of all context, spoke such a sentence out loud. (But here I have already sketched a background, a surrounding, for this remark, that is to say given it a context.)53 He also writes: It is queer: if I say, without any special occasion, “I know” – for example, “I know that I am now sitting in a chair”, this statement seems to me unjustified and presumptuous. But if I make the same statement where there is some need for it, then, although I am not a jot more certain of its truth, it seems to me to be perfectly justified and everyday.54 Similarly, while the statement “I know that I have two hands” might make sense if the speaker had recently been involved in a terrible accident and were covered in casts and bandages, in abstraction it seems a bizarre piece of “information” about oneself to feel obliged to disclose. 55 As Wittgenstein would say, the “background is lacking for it to be information”; 56 it doesn’t “connect up” with anything.57

Axial propositions and moral reasoning As we have seen, Timmons offers an account of moral justification which “features moral rules as providing a basis for the justification of particular moral beliefs.”58 [W]hen people are asked to articulate their reasons for holding some particular moral belief about a specific case, they by and large reason according to the familiar pattern of bringing forth general considerations bearing on the specific case that they take to be morally significant in that case. Such considerations are usually formulated

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as mid-level moral generalizations like, for example, “Lying is wrong” and “Hurting others is wrong.”59 The pattern Timmons describes is indeed familiar: it is, for example, the pattern on which Ross’s account was modeled. I argued that a similar “legalistic” account is central to the thought of both Habermas and Derrida. According to this account, moral judgments are conceived as judgments regarding how general principles are to be applied to specific cases. Where Timmons differs from Ross is in offering a contextualist, as opposed to a foundationalist, account of these principles. But can this “familiar pattern” also be detected in the ordinary moral discourse that, according to Ross, provides the data of moral philosophy? “One is,” Cavell notes, “perplexed to find, in works purporting to begin from our ordinary moral convictions and conduct, maxims which are not merely ‘stilted,’ but which it is hard, if not impossible, to imagine one moral agent ever using to another (e.g., ‘You ought to keep promises’, something over and over presented by moral philosophers as, indifferently, a moral ‘principle’ or a moral ‘rule’ …)”60 When articulated, Timmons’s candidate principles or rules – “Lying is wrong,” “Hurting others is wrong” – strike me as equally curious locutions, which it is hard to imagine actually uttering in the course of a moral debate.61 In Chapter 4 I argued that just as there are patterns of inference within our empirical claim-making and evaluation – e.g., the pattern endorsed explicitly by the conditional “If an object is monochromatically red, then it is not blue” – so there are certain patterns of inference in our moral practices that allow us to make judgments and adopt moral positions in light of considerations that are taken to count as moral reasons.62 For Timmons, as we have seen, the kind of normative principles Ross articulated serve as reasons to which appeal might be made for moral justification. He suggests that “basic moral beliefs often provide the justificatory basis for other, inferentially justified beliefs.”63 These basic beliefs are the ones which, according to Timmons, people bring forth when they are “asked to articulate their reasons for holding some particular moral belief.” On the view for which I am arguing, by contrast, these principles are not ordinarily themselves reasons; rather, they are explicit endorsements of patterns of inference within which certain kinds of considerations are treated as reasons. According to this account, we do not judge as we do because we have antecedently assented to a certain set of moral principles; rather, our commitment to the patterns of inference these

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principles make explicit shows itself in what we are prepared to regard as valid moral considerations. As we saw in Chapter 2, Habermas suggests that we “make reference” to such principles in regulative speech acts. But this is misleading. Indeed, one of the most salient features of such principles is that we don’t generally make reference to them, at least not explicitly. Like the propositions Wittgenstein discusses, they belong to the framework, rather than to what is discussed within it. One of the errors Habermas shares with Ross and Timmons, I suggest, is to treat these moral principles as if they were termini of regress in the search for reasons, which might be invoked in the process of moral criticism. On his view, “members of a moral community appeal to these norms whenever the coordination of action breaks down and present them as prima facie convincing reasons for claims and critical positions.”64 However, such principles are no more often “invoked” in moral criticism than the principle that unexamined cases will resemble examined ones is invoked in inductive inference; rather, they serve to demarcate the limits of the considerations that might appropriately be brought to bear.

Morality and justification Although I offer a rather different analysis of their status, I wish to take seriously Ross’s contention that our fundamental moral commitments “need no proof” in the same sense that the fundamental propositions of math and logic “need no proof.” As we have seen, Ross argues that both kinds of principles are self-evident to those who “have reached sufficient mental maturity and have given sufficient attention” to them. In light of Wittgenstein’s remarks in On Certainty, however, it would be more appropriate to say that the “acceptance” of such principles – i.e., the fact that about these matters doubts do not ordinarily arise65 – is part of what is meant by “mental maturity” in certain contexts. As Wittgenstein says of the propositions he discusses, “We might also say: ‘the reasonable man believes this.’”66 Of course, it also is important to emphasize that what is correct in the way of the conclusions reached within a moral practice does not depend on what any given individual or community of individuals takes to be correct. As I will emphasize in Chapter 7, one can be wrong about what one takes to be required morally, irrespective of whether or not one is in the majority. The point, however, is that a moral consideration can have a normative status within a practice only when

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certain questions and doubts do not ordinarily arise. But that a logical distinction can be made between what is correct and what is merely taken to be correct is not itself a reason for doubt. Until one has acquired the responsive dispositions characteristic of a Weltbild, one is not yet capable of rationally doubting. Rush Rhees writes: I do not mean that I can never criticize the reasons which a man offers, either for what he believes or for what he does. I may think that what he has given are not reasons at all. But I can do this because I am familiar with ideas or standards of what are good reasons. And if you were to ask me why such things are good reasons, then I think generally your question would be empty. It would not be connected with any “system of discourse” or any possible answer.67 What the distinction between what is correct and what is taken to be correct entails is that if doubts do arise, they cannot be overcome merely by appealing to a majority. However, such doubts themselves require justification, and consequently criticism of a pattern of inference is possible only when one has committed oneself to an alternative pattern. The reason “reasons” cannot be given from within a Weltbild for the most fundamental patterns of inference operative in it is that these patterns are themselves constitutive of what are taken to count as valid reasons in that context. Our most fundamental moral commitments can no more be “justified” in terms of the reasons they make possible than the rationality of induction can be established on the basis of the fact that it has always worked in the past. In other words, contrary to what Habermas supposes, the moral principles he articulates are not all – or even generally – the kind of thing we might agree to, as if we could give reasons for our assent. Rather, to the extent that two people share a common Weltbild, their agreement at the level of basic commitments will manifest itself in their ability to participate together in the game of giving and asking for reasons (irrespective, I will argue in Chapter 6, of whether such discourse converges on conclusions to which all agree). The quasi-empirical propositions articulated by Moore, which Wittgenstein discusses in On Certainty, may superficially resemble hypotheses, but they play a different role. Something similarly is true, I suggest, of the moral principles articulated by Habermas, Ross, Timmons, and others. Just as hypotheses can be evaluated only in relation to an inherited background that is not itself an hypothesis, so

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particular moral positions and actions can be assessed only in relation to shared background commitments that are not themselves ordinarily subjected to demands for justification. These background commitments include understandings about what count as relevant moral considerations, and these understandings make it possible to pass moral judgments and adopt particular moral positions. In Chapter 4 we articulated the following principle of moral inference: “It is wrong to allow the innocent to be punished.” Principles such as this are not entirely foreign to moral discourse; however, they do not usually belong to its subject matter. The role they play in morality can, I have suggested, be understood on analogy to the role played in science by what Hume called the “supposition that the future will be conformable to the past.” In neither case, it is important to note, does the normative principle itself constitute either an opinion or a reason for holding an opinion; rather, the principle, when articulated, specifies what is taken to count as a reason. But precisely for this reason, the normative principles that belong to the framework of moral thought cannot themselves be said to be either rational or irrational. In this respect they differ from genuine moral positions. As we have seen, Habermas argues that every norm, in order to be valid, must be such that everyone “can accept the consequences and the side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone’s interests” and prefers these consequences “to those of known alternative possibilities for regulation.”68 But what would it mean to ask whether a person could “accept the consequences” of everyone’s observing the principle about innocence and punishment? And what reasons might be adduced for preferring these consequences to those of alternative patterns of inference? And what would an “alternative” even look like? To speak of “alternatives” implies a common end, but the only plausible end served here – fairness or justice – is largely constituted by the principle itself. The problem with Habermas’s proposal is that our “interests” are themselves defined in part by the norms we take to be implicit in our practices. In this respect, Habermas remains beholden to a Humean conception of the relation between norms and desires which views the latter as providing an answer to the question “Why be moral?” Brandom notes, “The empiricist tradition seeks to trace back talk of reasons for action and norms governing action to underlying preferences and desires, which are understood both as intrinsically motivating and as the only sorts of things that can be intrinsically motivating.”69 As we have seen, however, such an internalist account

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gives rise to a free-rider problem, since as long as the interests at issue remain logically independent of the norms, their satisfaction can coherently be conceived to take non-moral forms. On the alternative view offered here, however, preferences and desires can be “explained in terms of commitments to certain patterns of practical inference, that is, in terms of what is a reason for what, instead of the other way around.”70 In other words, our moral commitments are better conceived not as satisfying, but as partially constituting, our interests.71 The interests so constituted are the specifically moral interests that motivate moral judgments and criticism, as well as one’s actions. Although they may be formulated in propositions that sometimes resemble moral positions or judgments, the moral commitments that belong to our Weltbild are not treated like positions or judgments. Unlike moral positions or judgments, which can be criticized and defended in light of various reasons, the propositions that express our fundamental commitments are, as Wittgenstein would say, “beyond being justified or unjustified,” given that they demarcate the reasons to which appeals might intelligibly be made for justification in certain contexts.72 Ross, it seems to me, was right: our most basic normative principles need no proof. Referring to the propositions basic in empirical judgments, Wittgenstein writes: [W]e are interested in the fact that about certain empirical propositions no doubt can exist if making judgments is to be possible at all. Or again: I am inclined to believe that not everything that has the form of an empirical proposition is one.73 Similarly, what might be called our “axial” moral principles cannot be called into question without calling into question the very patterns of inference of which they are descriptive. Not all moral locutions are, at any given time, equally subject to rational appraisal. Here it must be emphasized that my aim is not to rule out rational discussion in morality but to elucidate the conditions for its possibility. To Habermas, my contention that the most basic principles implicit in our moral practices require no justification would no doubt seem anathema to the critical spirit characteristic of modernity. On his view, it belongs to the presuppositions of argumentation that everyone is allowed to introduce and question “any assertion whatever.”74 For Habermas, “the presuppositions of an unrestrained competition for better arguments … are irreconcilable with traditional ethical philosophies that have to protect a dogmatic core of fundamental convictions from all criticism.”75

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However, it is important to appreciate that I am not arguing that there are certain moral beliefs that we should not question. In this respect, my views differ significantly from those of Alasdair MacIntyre, which I will discuss more fully in the following chapter. In his Gifford lectures, for example, MacIntyre argued that the premodern university was more rational than the modern, liberal university because it systematically excluded anyone whose moral views diverged from what was considered orthodox.76 A cynic might be tempted to retort that the modern university is no more tolerant of those whose views fail to meet prevailing standards of “political correctness” and thus, given MacIntyre’s logic, no less rational. However, both suggestions confuse the logical limits of rational discourse with limitations on it. As Gaita notes, “self-censorship and the censorious pressures of political correctness occur within the boundaries of what is thinkable in a culture,” whereas “our sense of what is unthinkable is partly constitutive of those boundaries.”77 Official tests of moral orthodoxy in the premodern university, like unofficial tests of political correctness in today’s university, are possible only because, as we will see in the following chapter, although we may disagree with what they say, dissenting voices are not usually unintelligible.

Critical self-scrutiny I have argued that a culture’s most fundamental patterns of moral inference are not ordinarily subjected to demands for rational justification. Justification proceeds by means of an appeal to reasons, and what is taken to count as a reason within a culture is determined in relation to these patterns. Thus, the question arises whether it is possible from within a culture rationally to criticize these fundamental commitments – i.e., to produce reasons that speak against the propriety of an accepted pattern of inference. Sabina Lovibond articulates this concern when she writes, “How, then, could we ever find ourselves in a position to pass a negative verdict on the rationality of the commitments brought to light by philosophical self-scrutiny? How could there be such a thing as a reasoned rejection of those commitments?”78 Lovibond’s answer is to deny that the canon of rationality embedded in a culture is a “monolithic entity, possessing such a high degree of internal coherence that to disengage oneself from it at any point would be to forfeit one’s membership altogether.”79 She writes: [I]n a community where intellectual cohesion exists only in a low degree, there will be nothing to prevent individual members

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from rationalizing their distaste for a particular sub-set of the prevailing values (or institutions) in terms of an alternative or divergent scheme of values, through which they can sustain their identity as rational persons while renouncing the dominant mode of rationality.80 A good example of the scenario Lovibond seems to have in mind is afforded by Peter Winch’s discussion of the conflicting moral viewpoints of Orwell and Gandhi, each of which required the other as a condition of its own intelligibility. “Gandhi’s ascetic morality can hardly be formulated except by specifying a relation in which it stands to a conception of morality like Orwell’s, and vice versa.”81 In such cases, dissent is possible because incompatible patterns of inference are available within a wider cultural milieu.82 Lovibond characterizes a society that can accommodate rational dissent as embodying an “imperfectly coherent form of life.”83 I will argue in the following chapter that even within a relatively coherent form of life – i.e., one in which there is comparatively little disagreement at the level of what is taken to follow from what – advocates of rival points of view can both sustain their identity as rational persons. Lovibond’s point, however, is that dissent can be rational – i.e., grounded in reasons – insofar as the critic does not wholly abandon the larger culture. The critic “will still be represented as recognizing certain intellectual authorities and as regulating his own judgement by reference to these: that is how he will manage to remain rational.”84 At the same time, however he will be able (in virtue of the internal tensions or contradictions of his community’s form of life) to subject certain features of the established Sittlichkeit to an appraisal in terms of evaluative concepts which have their institutional basis elsewhere within the culture: that is how he will manage to be a critic.85 Lovibond’s description of the community here recalls Otto Neurath’s famous metaphor of a boat. While the boat is in the water, it cannot be completely disassembled or it will sink. But it can nevertheless be repaired plank by plank. Lovibond characterizes this kind of piecemeal criticism as “thought which calls its own presuppositions into question.”86 But this strikes me as slightly misleading. On Lovibond’s view, one can criticize values internal to one’s “own” culture while remaining rational. But one

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cannot criticize one’s own commitments without them ceasing to be one’s own commitments. To be sure, one’s own commitments can change, and one reason for abandoning a commitment is that it conflicts with another to which one is more deeply committed. But that a person cannot offer reasons for what she takes the fundamental norms implicit in her practices to require – reasons “all the way down,” as it were – is not in itself a reason to abandon those patterns of inference. My point is not that patterns of inference cannot be criticized; they can. But they can be criticized only from a point of view constituted by another pattern – not from an imagined “neutral” perspective outside the game of giving and asking for reasons. Indeed, to criticize a pattern of inference just is to commit oneself to an alternative pattern of inference that precludes entitlement to the commitments authorized by the former pattern. What On Certainty shows is that within any given Weltbild there is necessarily a point at which the giving of reasons comes to an end. Whether, at this point, an individual chooses to remain committed to a pattern of inference or to abandon it will depend on whether that individual is able to see a point in what she is doing. To refuse to accept a pattern of inference is precisely not to recognize certain reasons as valid – i.e., not to see certain considerations as possessing the force of reasons. In any case it is important to avoid something like the following misleading thought: that we might be dissatisfied with a commitment or value but lack the resources to express our dissatisfaction. As we saw in Chapter 3, this line of thought is implicit in Derrida’s talk of “a silence [that] is walled up in the violent structure of the founding act.”87 The point is rather that our experience of dissatisfaction can be rational only insofar as we have at our disposal an alternative commitment or value. Wittgenstein’s point in On Certainty is not a protective strategy: he is not arguing that there are certain matters of which it is somehow inappropriate to be critical. The point at which one’s “spade is turned” is a not a limitation, but a limit – i.e., a condition. To return to a non-moral analogy: what the principle that the future will be conformable to the past expresses is not a limitation on our scientific thinking, but a condition of its possibility. Perhaps, however, Lovibond’s point is simply that we need not – and indeed must not – step outside the sphere of the ethical in order to scrutinize and criticize various features of our thinking about such matters. If this is what she means by “thought which calls its own presuppositions into question,” then I am happy to concur. As McDowell notes,

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“one can reflect only from the midst of the way of thinking one is reflecting about.”88 For it is only from within the sphere of the ethical that the ethical demands on which one is attempting to reflect come into view.

Shifting riverbeds of thought and great intellectual distances I have suggested that the propositions Wittgenstein discusses in On Certainty belong to our Weltbild rather than to what is regarded as up for discussion within this context. However, as Wittgenstein noted, the distinction between the framework and what is framed is not always a stable one. Propositions which, at one time, were treated as straightforwardly empirical might, at another time, become part of the Weltbild, and vice versa. It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became fluid.89 Wittgenstein notes that, although it is important to distinguish between “the movement of the waters on the river-bed and the shift of the bed itself … there is not a sharp division of the one from the other.”90 Anticipating by some ten years some of Quine’s insights in his famous essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,”91 Wittgenstein continues: “But if someone were to say ‘So logic too is an empirical science’ he would be wrong. Yet this is right: the same propositions may get treated at one time as something to test by experience, at another as a rule of testing.”92 As Wittgenstein goes on to argue, “rule and empirical proposition merge into one another.”93 Interestingly, some of Wittgenstein’s own examples of propositions that are held fast by the role they play in our thinking illustrate, in a rather ironic manner, the way in which the riverbed of our thought can shift over time. For instance, writing in 1950, Wittgenstein says, “Everything that I have seen or heard gives me the conviction that no man has ever been far from the earth. Nothing in my picture of the world speaks in favour of the opposite.”94 But he asks us to imagine a tribe with a different world-picture, “who believe that people sometimes go to the moon (perhaps that is how they interpret their

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dreams), and who indeed grant that there are no ordinary means of climbing up to it or flying there.”95 As Wittgenstein notes, the disagreement between the members of this tribe and those for whom it belongs to the framework of thought that no one has been far from the surface of the earth is of a different kind than the disagreement over an hypothesis that can occur within a given framework. “But is there then no objective truth?” he imagines someone asking. “Isn’t it true, or false, that someone has been on the moon?” He replies: If we are thinking within our system, then it is certain that no one has ever been on the moon. Not merely is nothing of the sort ever seriously reported to us by reasonable people, but our whole system of physics forbids us to believe it. For this demands answers to the questions “How did he overcome the force of gravity?” “How could he live without an atmosphere?” and a thousand others which could not be answered.96 Since he wrote these words, of course, these questions have been answered, and the riverbed of our thought has shifted in such a way as to make Wittgenstein’s example appear dated. Of course, we would still want to insist that no one had been to the moon as of 1950, and we would no doubt still be perplexed by the beliefs of the imagined tribe, but not because we are confident that the questions Wittgenstein articulates could not be answered. Whatever its limitations in hindsight, this example is still useful given the light it casts on the character of the disputes that can arise between members of communities with different Weltbilder, and the question of how such conflicts might be settled. After rehearsing the scientific objections that might have been lodged in 1950 against members of a tribe who claimed to have traveled to the moon, Wittgenstein writes: But suppose that instead of all these answers we met the reply: “We don’t know how one gets to the moon, but those who get there know at once that they are there; and even you can’t explain everything.” We should feel ourselves intellectually very distant from someone who said this.97 The “distance” to which Wittgenstein alludes is not the distance between rival claims within a common Weltbild, but the distance between two different Weltbilder.

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Since, as Wittgenstein shows, the axial propositions that belong to various frameworks are neither reasonable nor unreasonable, being themselves indicative of what is taken within the framework to count as a “reason,” they are not ordinarily subjected to demands for justification in the same way that other propositions are. And yet, since there is no universal set of axial propositions, conflicts can nevertheless arise. What are we to say about such conflicts? Earlier we noted that, in answer to the question of whether we have a “good ground” for being guided in our actions by the propositions of physics, Wittgenstein argued that the propositions of physics just are “what we call a ‘good ground.’”98 Wittgenstein immediately follows this remark up with an example designed to draw out its implications: Suppose we met people who did not regard that as a telling reason. Now, how do we imagine this? Instead of the physicist, they consult an oracle. (And for that we consider them primitive.) Is it wrong for them to consult an oracle and be guided by it? – If we call this “wrong” aren’t we using our language-game as a base from which to combat theirs?99 Commentators on Wittgenstein’s work, some of whom are otherwise quite sympathetic to it, have balked at this remark, taking Wittgenstein to be suggesting that consulting oracles would be “just as rational” as consulting physicists. But this is a misunderstanding. Far from arguing that the two practices are equally reasonable, Wittgenstein is pointing to the incommensurability of two different canons of rationality. To say that they are “equally” reasonable would be to presuppose the very comprehensive standards for making judgments about what is and is not correct that Wittgenstein is imagining we lack. What is at issue is not a dispute that can be settled in terms of reasons that both parties would accept, but a dispute about what the reasons themselves are (or, looked at from a different angle: what follows from what). Thus, Wittgenstein speaks of “combat” rather than of criticism or rational adjudication. He continues: Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and heretic. I said I would ‘combat’ the other man, – but wouldn’t I give him reasons? Certainly; but how far do they go? At the end of reasons comes persuasion. (Think what happens when missionaries convert natives.)100

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Of course, such encounters need not necessarily result in mutual hostility, as Wittgenstein’s remarks here might seem to suggest. They may also occasion mutual respect, as well as condescension, indifference or any number of other attitudes toward what is in this respect “other.” Indeed, recognition of such great intellectual “distances” may sometimes even result in the disinterested attention characteristic of philosophy as Wittgenstein himself practiced it – a theme to which I return in the Postscript. The logical point is simply that, whatever attitude one might take toward such conflicts, they cannot be adjudicated in terms of any epistemically neutral set of criteria – i.e., from a point of view outside the game of giving and asking for reasons. There is no built-in guarantee that such disputes will be resolved, but also no built in guarantee that they will not. If they are resolved, such disputes are resolved through shifts in the riverbed of one or both of the parties’ thought. Wittgenstein writes: However, we can ask: May someone have telling grounds for believing that the earth has only existed for a short time, say since his own birth? – Suppose he had always been told that, – would he have any good reason to doubt it? Men have believed that they could make rain; why should not a king be brought up in the belief that the world began with him? And if Moore and this king were to meet and discuss, could Moore really prove his belief to be the right one? I do not say that Moore could not convert the king to his view, but it would be a conversion of a special kind; the king would be brought to look at the world in a different way.101 Indeed, there is no reason in principle why Moore might not have been converted to the king’s way of thinking. In any event, such conversion would be, as Wittgenstein says, “of a special kind.” It would not be conversion in light of shared reasons so much as conversion with respect to what is taken to count as a reason. In other words, it would require initiation into an altogether different way of thinking and acting. Although it is important to recognize that disputes among individuals with incompatible Weltbilder differ from disputes among individuals who share a common Weltbild, these differences need not be construed in a relativistic way that makes the critical enterprise seem pointless. The relevant contrast here is not between disputes over matters of fact and disputes over Weltbilder, but between disputes over matters of fact among individuals who share a common Weltbild and

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disputes over matters of fact among individuals who do not. To be sure, the latter can be characterized as clashes of worldview, but such disputes need not be contrasted with disputes about the world.102 The hypothetical dispute between Wittgenstein and the moon-tribe really is about what it seems to be about – namely, whether anyone has been to the moon – even though it is not a dispute that can be resolved without a shift in the Weltbild of one or both of the parties.

Moral distances So far I have been emphasizing the importance to moral discourse of practical agreements about what follows from what. However, it also is important to recognize that moral disagreement can run deep, and that there is no single set of moral commitments on which uncoerced reflection can necessarily be expected to converge. Ross suggests that the basic moral principles he enumerates would be self-evident to the citizens of “any possible universe.” Wittgenstein, by contrast, emphasized that “there are various systems of ethics,”103 some of which may seem to us rather distant, without for that reason ceasing to be recognizable as ethical systems.104 He says, “In considering a different system of ethics there may be a strong temptation to think that what seems to us to express the justification of an action must be what really justifies it there, whereas the real reasons are the reasons that are given. These are the reasons for or against the action.”105 Consider the following historical example: in China in 1839, a British sailor committed murder; and when the guilty individual could not be identified, the Chinese, in accordance with their practice of holding the community responsible for infractions of law and order, demanded that an Englishman – any Englishman – be turned over to them for punishment. No apter instance of the conflict between European and Chinese outlooks could have offered itself; for both sides naturally felt themselves completely in the right.106 What we have here is, I suggest, best understood as a clash of Weltbilder, rather than a case of moral incompetence. That a person should not be punished for a crime he or she did not commit is fundamental in one Weltbild, though evidently not in everything we would be prepared to recognize as a system of moral justification.107

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Gaita suggests that “[c]ultures are partly defined and distinguished by what is unthinkable in them – unthinkable not in the sense that no one ever thinks them, but in the sense that they are beyond argument: they are ‘indefensible’ because any serious attempt to defend them would show one to lack the judgment necessary for the proper exercise of reason on the matters in question.”108 Of course, cultures are not discrete, bounded entities: sharing a culture is usually a more-or-less, rather than an all-or-nothing, affair. Two people might be said to share a moral culture or tradition just to the extent that they are able to engage in reasoned moral discourse – i.e., to offer one another reasons the relevance of which is not in dispute. Furthermore, it is important to remember that moral distances can be diachronic as well as synchronic: because cultures develop – as a result of internal as well as external forces – what is unthinkable can vary not merely from one culture to another, but over time within a culture.109 Just as in the quasi-empirical cases Wittgenstein examines in On Certainty, the “riverbed” of our thought can shift. Gaita illustrates this point by noting the seriousness with which many people today are prepared to consider Peter Singer’s claim that we would not wrong a recently born child by killing it for reasons related to the happiness of others.110 “If Singer’s arguments for infanticide are now accepted as deserving of serious consideration it is not just because of their logical power. It is because changes in the culture have disposed us to accept a conclusion that only thirty years ago discredited any argument that led to it, however logically powerful the argument might have appeared.”111 Considerations that, at one time, seem important – including, perhaps notably, religious considerations – may, at another time, be deemed morally irrelevant, and vice versa. The unthinkable may become thinkable, and the thinkable unthinkable.

The logic of persuasion In extreme cases – where the considerations with which the parties to a dispute confront one another are not considerations whose relevance or intelligibility as reasons the other is prepared to acknowledge – the giving of reasons may come to an end. However, it does not follow that the protagonists will necessarily find themselves at an impasse. For as Wittgenstein points out, “at the end of reasons comes persuasion.” Here it is important to appreciate that persuasion – in Wittgenstein’s sense – is not simply a “strategic” use of language. John H. Whittaker

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has noted that Wittgenstein’s use of the term persuasion “conceals an important ambiguity”: According to one sense, persuasion encompasses a variety of techniques, rhetorical and otherwise, that are designed to elicit belief as a form of behaviour. According to another sense, persuasion refers to a certain kind of non-evidential support that strengthens the credibility of the beliefs in question.112 Whereas the former sort of persuasion is merely causally relevant to the beliefs it aims to bring about, the latter kind of persuasion is “logically relevant to the adoption of concepts”113 – concepts that “lie too deep in our thinking to be justified in any other way.”114 To the extent that what is at issue is precisely a way of thinking within which certain considerations possess the force of reasons, the critic cannot rely upon, but rather must exhibit, the force these considerations possess. Unlike in the case of strategic uses of language, persuasion in this second sense depends not on the critic’s ability to compel others to accept her beliefs on the basis of externally related threats or promises, but on her ability to show them off “to good effect by helping others to appreciate their point.”115 By the same token, the relevant kind of persuasion is not simply an appeal to the sentiments – as in the case of Rorty’s notion of “sentimental education.” John McDowell notes that, in seeking to impress upon an audience the moral significance of a situation, one “exploits contrivances similar to those one exploits in other areas where the task is to back up the injunction ‘See it like this’: helpful juxtapositions of cases, descriptions with carefully chosen terms and carefully placed emphasis, and the like.”116 He writes: No such contrivances can be guaranteed success, in the sense that failure would show irrationality on the part of the audience. That, together with the importance of rhetorical skills to their successful deployment, sets them apart from the sorts of thing we typically regard as paradigms of argument. But these seem insufficient grounds for concluding that they are appeals to passion as opposed to reason: for concluding that “see it like this” is really a covert invitation to feel, quite over and above one’s view of the facts, a desire that will combine with one’s belief to recommend acting in the appropriate way.117

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One who is initiated into the new way of seeing will, of course, acquire certain new desires and interests, and in this way it can be said that her sentiments will have been shaped. However, these new sentiments will be intelligible only in light of the new way of seeing, rather than the other way around. Insofar as it aims to alter one’s opponent’s conception of what is a reason for what – of what really follows from what – persuasion requires the critic to address the conditions within which reason-giving gets its purchase. José Medina writes: But Wittgenstein’s view does issue a warning to the social critic; namely, that for her activity to be genuinely transformative, it cannot be limited to words, but it must be directed toward actions. Words can only bring about superficial changes. If we want to change not only the appearance (or wording) of a practice but its normative structure, we need to change the consensus of action of its practitioners.118 As Medina goes on to note, “this would involve instituting new processes of training through which the members of the practice are acculturated and acquire new normative attitudes.” 119 Since, however, this persuasive activity is employed by protagonists who are already operating from within a normative space, it is itself liable to moral scrutiny. For instance, one can reasonably ask whether one strategy for advancing human rights – e.g., building schools – is better than another – e.g., dropping bombs. The question here is not simply which is better as a strategy (i.e., which is more likely to bring about the desired end result), but which is morally superior. Here the content of the morality one is attempting to promote imposes constraints on the persuasive action that is employed to promote it. In this respect the view for which I am arguing differs from Derrida’s. As will be recalled from Chapter 3, Derrida endorses the idea that “the law” – a category into which he places substantive moral considerations – cannot authorize its own instituting moment. Such a view would seem to imply that one’s efforts to effect change in the normative structures of a society fall “outside” – and so are not answerable to – normative demands. But on the view for which I am arguing, we are always already “inside” the space of normativity, even when we are attempting to alter one another’s grasp of these norms.

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Morality and religious convictions As we have seen, neither discourse ethics nor deconstruction is able to do justice to the possibility of Weltbilder in which determinate religious convictions play a role in criticism and justification. In both cases, it is the particularity of such convictions – their embeddedness within distinctive and “contingent” forms of life – that disqualifies them from serious attention. For Habermas, morality and universality (in the sense of universal acceptability) go hand in hand, whereas, for Derrida, justice consists in the continual reappraisal of every contingent commitment that purports to represent an absolute (or universally valid truth). In his more recent writings, to be sure, Derrida couches his argument in terms drawn from religion. Thus, he speaks of deconstruction as involving a kind of “messianic expectation.” As we have seen, however, Derrida’s is a “messianism without content,”120 which must therefore be distinguished from all determinate religious messianisms, whose pretensions to “absolute privilege and irreducible singularity”121 it seeks to undermine. When it comes to morality, religious convictions thus fall foul of discourse ethics for being religious and of deconstruction for being convictions. Although they offer radically different accounts of moral criticism, Habermas and Derrida agree in regarding moral norms as explicit rules that must somehow be applied to specific cases. I have argued in favor of an alternative account, according to which norms are conceived as implicit within a practice. Such an account, I would like to suggest, offers an alternative way of thinking about the role of religious convictions in moral reasoning. On this reading, an element of particularity is an essential feature of all commitments, insofar as normativity is necessarily embedded in determinate practices, and is no more a liability to moral reasoning than the particularity of the scientific method is to modern science. Of course, the considerations deemed relevant within a particular religious community will occasionally complicate conversation between believers and those outside the community. But as we have seen, this is true whenever Weltbilder collide. Rorty has recently argued that “[t]he main reason religion needs to be privatized is that, in political discussion with those outside the relevant religious community, it is a conversation-stopper.”122 However, this argument only begs the question. Indeed, the same logic can be – and has been – used to condemn the “corrosive” effects that secular “free thinking” is said to have on the “moral fabric” of traditionally religious societies and

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institutions. For example, MacIntyre argues that the “increasing disarray” that he takes to be characteristic of the modern university can ultimately be attributed to the repeal of religious tests for the professorate.123 But the use of religious tests and prohibitions, formal and informal, also safeguarded those agreements on the character of moral training and moral experience which underlay the enquiries and teaching of the moral philosophers and the theologians by expelling or excluding naturalistic and skeptical viewpoints, such as that of Hume, on the one hand, and the anti-intellectual enthusiasm of the radical Protestant evangelicals, such as that of the Erskines, on the other.124 If the aim is to ensure the possibility of conversation by enforcing unanimity at the level of fundamental moral commitments, then any set of commitments – whether religious or non-religious – is as good (or as bad) as any other. What is or is not a “conversation-stopper” depends on who is participating in the conversation, and is not given in advance. Moreover, there is no reason to suppose a priori that differences in Weltbilder will necessarily put a stop to conversation. As we have seen, interlocutors can sometimes succeed in “converting” one another to new modes of thought. If the language of “conversion” has a home, it is surely in the context of religion. Even great intellectual distances need not be unbridgeable. The Jeffersonian attempt to “privatize” religion – i.e., to exclude religious considerations from ethico-political discourse – is one response to pluralism, but it is by no means a morally or religiously neutral response. As Stanley Fish has noted recently, it depends upon the assumption that religion is essentially a private transaction between you and your God and therefore is, at least in principle, independent of your actions in the public sphere, where the imperatives you follow might be political, economic, philanthropic, environmental – imperatives that could be affirmed or rejected by persons independently of their religious convictions or their lack of religious convictions.125 Or rather, it depends on the assumption that this is what religion ought to be, since if this were what religion actually was, there would be no

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problem in the first place. However, that this is what religion ought to be is itself an evaluative judgment to which many would object. Stephen L. Carter argues that, “[i]n our sensible zeal to keep religion from dominating our politics, we have created a political and legal culture that presses the religiously faithful to be other than themselves, to act publicly, and sometimes privately as well, as though their faith does not matter to them.”126 A mutually satisfactory “solution” to the dilemma religious differences pose in a liberal democracy is far from obvious, and it is not my aim here to propose one.127 My point is that whether one sides with Carter’s attempt to re-enchant the public square or with Rorty’s claim that “the secularization of public life [is] the Enlightenment’s central achievement”128 will itself depend upon one’s fundamental commitments: the answer cannot be determined on the basis of disinterested philosophical reflection alone. If, however, as I have argued, the character of moral deliberation is always informed by what one does not question, and if, as I also have argued, there is a plurality of Weltbilder, then no hard-and-fast philosophical distinction can be drawn between public and private spheres. The possibility of rational moral argumentation will inevitably depend on commitments that cannot themselves be subjected to the same sort of justification. This does not mean that rationality rests on irrational foundations; rather, it means that it is irrational to seek reasons for our most fundamental reasons.

Conclusion: reasons and “propositions” The central argument of this chapter was intended to show that our moral commitments are not all equally susceptible to “proof,” but that this is nevertheless not a liability for morality. When articulated, our most basic commitments demarcate the boundaries of the game of giving and asking for reasons. Being indicative of what are taken to count as reasons, they are not themselves ordinarily treated either as reasons or as subject to demands for rational justification. If, like Brandom, one holds that to be a proposition is to be a potential reason, as well as a product of the kind of performance “for which reasons can be asked,” then one cannot rightly call the principles that belong to the framework of our moral thinking “propositions.”129 Like the quasi-empirical statements Wittgenstein discusses in On Certainty, these commitments play a peculiar role in our discourse – a role which can perhaps best be described negatively: some questions do not ordinarily arise. That this is so is not a result of intellectual complacency

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or an insufficiently critical acceptance of conventional patterns of thought but is in fact a condition of the kind of normativity that characterizes our practices and that makes rational criticism possible. I have argued that the normative principles that Habermas and Derrida treat as behavioral rules are better understood as endorsements of particular patterns of moral inference. These patterns reflect the fact that within a culture, certain claims are taken to count as reasons for others. As we will see, however, what one is really entitled or committed to cannot simply be equated with what one is taken to be entitled or committed to. In Chapter 7 I will argue in favor of a conception of our moral norms as objective in the sense that it is sometimes possible to make sense of the thought that the vast majority of one’s peers could be wrong about what they take to be morally required of them. Thus, criticism requires both a concrete set of commitments – commitments about which questions of correctness do not ordinarily arise – and an appreciation of the distinction between what is correct and what is merely held to be correct. First, however, I will need to address a challenge to the rationality of moral discourse that can arise when the patterns of inference central to our moral thought are contrasted with those central to theoretical reason. In the following chapter we thus turn our attention to the phenomenon of moral disagreement.

6 Agreeing to Disagree: Toward a More Capacious Conception of Tradition

So then in questions of theory, truth is the same for everybody, both as to principles and to conclusions … In questions of action, however, practical truth and goodwill are not the same for everybody with respect to particular decisions, but only with respect to common principles; and even those who are equally in the right on some particular course of action are not equally aware of how right they are. Thomas Aquinas1 Thus far I have been arguing that social criticism – moral, but also theoretical – requires not that we transcend our practices, but that we remain within them. Contrary to what thinkers like Rorty suggest, the distinctions on which the critic relies are internal to the practices whose “relation to reality” the platonist seeks to get into view. Ironically, it is precisely in attempting to transcend these practices that the platonist risks losing the critical capacity that, it was thought, required the sought-after “external” viewpoint. Thus, in rejecting the platonist’s putative point of view as illusory, we need not relinquish the resources required for rational dissent and critique. In this sense, I have been defending the adequacy of what I called “ordinary” – as opposed to platonistic – realism. However, it might be argued that our “ordinary” moral language cannot so easily be vindicated, and that its shortcomings can be exposed by contrasting it not with something allegedly visible only from “outside” our practices, but with our “ordinary” theoretical language. In this chapter we will thus need to turn our attention to a different kind of challenge to the rationality of moral discourse. This new challenge begins by granting the incoherence of attempting to achieve 117

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a platonistic perspective on our practices, but it alleges that our moral language is in such a state of disorder that the critic is unlikely to find in it the resources she requires. The existence of this disorder – or so the argument goes – is shown principally in the pervasive moral disagreement that characterizes our culture.2 I will argue that although moral disagreement does not pose the challenge to the rationality of moral discourse that some thinkers allege it does, it nevertheless demands that we distinguish the structure of that discourse from the structure of theoretical discourse. In the latter, a relevant objection is typically sufficient to call into question the rationality of the position against which it is directed. In moral contexts, I will argue, the relation between the positions one advocates and the reasons that can be marshaled for and against these positions is mediated by a “personal” element. However, I also will argue that a recognition of this personal dimension does not lend credence to mere emotivism or subjectivism. In other words, I will argue that rational deliberation – deliberation in light of reasons – plays an important role in moral contexts, even though the role it plays here is different from the role it plays in theoretical contexts. In earlier chapters I argued that genuine social criticism – as opposed to skepticism or cynicism – requires recourse to the “thick” concepts to be found only in a determinate moral tradition. Here I will argue for a conception of such traditions as broad enough to accommodate dissent and difference.

The crisis of “interminability” According to an influential account, contemporary moral discourse is in a state of disarray, as evidenced by the lack of any general agreement about how to identify and address the pressing moral issues of the day, and this disarray, which threatens to undermine the very rationality of morality, can be attributed to the fact that we no longer share a common stock of values which might inform the premises from which we argue. In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre claims that “[t]he most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character.”3 In this respect, MacIntyre suggests, our current moral discourse differs sharply from, say, scientific discourse, in which progress is made possible by virtue of agreements in concepts: scientists share a common linguistic practice and consequently are able

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rationally to secure agreement. As MacIntyre’s emphasis on contemporary morality indicates, our inability to make any analogous “progress” in morality is not, on his view, a characteristic feature of moral discourse per se.4 On the contrary, the present state of morality represents a crisis, the gravity and magnitude of which, though perhaps hitherto undetected, can be illustrated by comparing our culture to one in which the “beliefs presupposed” by the use of words like “neutrino,” “mass,” “specific gravity,” and “atomic weight” are “largely lost,” resulting in “an element of arbitrariness and even of choice in their application.”5 According to MacIntyre, “the language – and therefore also to some large degree the practice – of morality today is in a state of grave disorder.”6 In morality, unlike in science as we actually know it, we lack a common vocabulary: our speech has been confounded by a Babel-like “catastrophe.” “[T]he interminable and unsettlable character of so much contemporary moral debate arises from the variety of heterogeneous and incommensurable concepts which inform the major premises from which the protagonists in such debates argue.”7 The effect of this conceptual incommensurability is to render the would-be social critic incapable of addressing those around her in an idiom they might be able to appreciate. Referring to the “modern radical,” MacIntyre writes: Whatever else he denounces in our culture he is certain that it still possesses the moral resources which he requires in order to denounce it. Everything else may be, in his eyes, in disorder; but the language of morality is in order, just as it is. That he too may be being betrayed by the very language he uses is not a thought available to him.8 MacIntyre adds that it is his aim in After Virtue “to make that thought available to radicals, liberals and conservatives alike.”9 MacIntyre’s views are interesting because they suggest that even within a “common” culture, moral agreements may prove elusive, due to a localized breakdown in what Habermas would call the culture’s “normative consensus.” However, whereas the story Habermas tells of the transition to modernity is one of consensus-building and growing rationality, MacIntyre’s meta-narrative tells a tale of increasing fragmentation and incommensurability. Indeed, he argues that the emotivism of philosophers like Stevenson and Ayer, though mistaken if regarded as a global moral theory, is nonetheless a perceptive account of the moral crisis in which these philosophers found themselves in

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the twentieth century. “We ought … to ask whether emotivism as a theory may not have been both a response to, and in the very first instance, an account of not, as its protagonists indeed supposed, moral language as such, but moral language in England in the years after 1903.”10 In the absence of any “unassailable criteria … by means of which we may convince our opponents,” moral judgments, while aspiring to appear rational, have ultimately come to express little more than personal preferences.11 “From our rival conclusions we can argue back to our rival premises; but when we do arrive at our premises argument ceases and the invocation of one premise against another becomes a matter of pure assertion and counter-assertion. Hence perhaps the slightly shrill tone of so much moral debate.”12 To illustrate his thesis that our inability to secure moral agreement can be attributed to the incommensurability of the “premises” on which moral positions are ultimately based, MacIntyre offers three examples of “contemporary moral debate framed in terms of characteristic and well-known rival moral arguments” – one having to do with the justice of wars, another with the acceptability of abortion, and a third with the merits of government regulation of human services such as health care and education.13 What does it mean to say that such debates are “interminable”? MacIntyre writes, “I do not mean by this just that such debates go on and on and on – although they do – but also that they apparently can find no terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture.”14 What sort of “terminus” is MacIntyre seeking? We can perhaps get at what MacIntyre means by comparing a typical contemporary moral debate, such as the debate over abortion, with an argument over an empirical matter. I. A: A fetus is a human being, and abortion should be legally disfavored. B: If by “human being” you mean an inviolable person, then I disagree. Abortion should be legally permissible – at least until the fetus is viable. A: Why not admit that life is a continuum from conception to death? B: Life may begin at conception, but being a person does not. An embryo is initially just a blob of cells. In fact, a significant percent-

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age of fertilized eggs is spontaneously aborted within the first four to five days after conception. No one considers this an enormous tragedy – a loss of human life. A: Yes, but the point is that if it is allowed to mature, that “blob of cells” will eventually emerge as a recognizable member of the human community. Thus, a human embryo isn’t equivalent to, say, a pig embryo, even if at an early stage of development they appear physically indistinguishable. B: But surely in the initial stages of pregnancy the rights of the mother trump any rights the fetus might be said to possess. II. A: This embryo is a human embryo. B: How do you know? All mammalian embryos look pretty much alike at this stage of development. Maybe it is the embryo of a pig. A: No, tests show that it has human DNA. At some point in this latter argument, whether here or later, discussion will reach a point at which further protest would simply be irrational. At this point, one or the other party to the dispute must withdraw her claim and concede. Anyone who failed to recognize this fact would be cut off from the epistemic practice. In the former argument, by contrast, there is no obvious point, determinable in advance, at which debate must end. Of course, I do not mean to rule out the possibility that one protagonist might in fact succeed in convincing the other; however, there is no point at which it would obviously be irrational to continue arguing with one’s opponent, as there is in the case of theoretical disputes about empirical matters. It is in this sense that the moral debate might be said to lack a terminus. Now it might be objected that the plausibility of MacIntyre’s account depends on comparing difficult moral cases with easy theoretical ones. Of course, it might be pointed out, there are also difficult theoretical cases, in which people may disagree about how to interpret the available evidence. Thus, it might be maintained that, while arguments over abortion may have little in common with arguments over taxonomy, they have much more in common with recent disputes over global warming or over the question of whether the universe will continue to expand indefinitely. Nevertheless, it seems to me that

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important disanalogies remain. Even in hard theoretical cases there is generally agreement as to the kind of information that would be required in order decisively to settle the dispute. For example, discounting the (perhaps not insignificant) role of political and economic motives, disagreement over global warming arose from the fact that, since our climatological data is limited, it is difficult to determine whether recent trends are the result of human activity or merely natural fluctuations in the earth’s climate. Given adequate data, we will presumably be able to settle such questions to everyone’s satisfaction. However, in moral cases, as we will see, disagreement may persist even when all the relevant desiderata are available.

The structure of moral arguments Clearly MacIntyre is at least partially right: moral disputes do not terminate in the same way as theoretical discussions. But I would like to suggest that this is not necessarily due to any disagreement about the relevance of the values that inform their major premises, as MacIntyre argues, but more typically because of disagreements about how the considerations taken to be relevant are to be assessed and acted upon.15 In other words, moral disputes differ from theoretical ones not because they are less rational – less a matter of reason-exchange – but because, as we will see, more is required of the individual in the moral cases. I will argue that it is the individual, rather than the practice, that is responsible for “terminating” a moral argument. MacIntyre repeatedly claims that the interminability of moral arguments is a feature of contemporary moral discourse, one absent in earlier times. Ancient Greece is often held up in his writing as a kind of prelapsarian utopia in which agreement in opinions could be achieved by virtue of agreement in a common moral language. “Here,” MacIntyre claims, “there are agreed criteria for the uses of good, not only when we speak of ‘good horse’ and ‘good farmer’ but also when we speak of ‘good man.’ In this society there is a recognized list of virtues, an established set of moral rules, an institutionalized connection between obedience to rules, the practice of virtues, and the attainment of ends.”16 In order to see where – in my view – MacIntyre’s analysis goes wrong, it will therefore be helpful to consider examples from antiquity that militate against his claim that the interminability of moral debates is a phenomenon of recent vintage. Such examples might initially seem to suggest that the crisis brought on by incommensurability is even older than MacIntyre himself appreciates. My

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question, however, is whether MacIntyre is correct in thinking that at the root of rival “conclusions” one can always find rival moral “premises.” If agreement in moral vocabulary does not provide the kind of terminus MacIntyre thinks it should – if, in other words, “interminable” disagreements could erupt even in the heyday of “virtue” – then contemporary differences in opinions might not signal a crisis in moral discourse at all. Consider, for example, Euthyphro’s decision to prosecute his father. The facts of the case, as Euthyphro relates them in Plato’s dialogue, are these: The victim was a dependent of mine, and when we were farming in Naxos he was a servant of ours. He killed one of our household slaves in drunken anger, so my father bound him hand and foot and threw him in a ditch, then sent a man here to inquire from the priest what should be done. During that time he gave no thought or care to the bound man, as being a killer, and it was no matter if he died, which he did. Hunger and cold and his bonds caused his death before the messenger came back from the seer.17 Euthyphro himself recognizes that his decision to press charges against his father is open to criticism on the grounds (a) that his father, while responsible in one sense for the slave’s death, did not directly kill him, (b) that even if he had, the slave probably deserved to die, because he was a murderer and (c) that it is impious to dishonor members of one’s own family.18 Nevertheless, he apparently persists in his intended course of action, against the objections of his family and Socrates, citing the importance of impartiality and the pollution associated with murder.19 Here, then, we have a clear case of irresolvable disagreement at the level of the moral “conclusions” drawn by different protagonists. But can this disagreement be attributed to a difference in what each protagonist regards as a relevant moral reason? I suggest that it cannot: while it is perhaps true that the generality of (c) is part of what is in dispute, Euthyphro is himself willing to concede (a) and (b). And Socrates, who seems to disagree with Euthyphro’s decision, is nevertheless happy to grant that one who has killed unjustly should be punished.20 The problem is not that Euthyphro and Socrates argue from “incommensurable premises,” but that the values they share are recognized as being in tension with one another in this case. Consequently, they must be weighed, and differences in the weight assigned to different

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considerations result in differences of opinion about what is the just course of action. Thus, even in the well-ordered moral universe of antiquity, moral agreement seems to have been more elusive than MacIntyre’s analysis would lead us to expect. What this suggests is that the fact of moral disagreement is not wholly explicable in terms of incommensurability. Something similar is true, I suggest, in such contemporary disputes as the debate over abortion. It is perhaps notable that this debate is framed, at least in the United States, as a dispute between those who are “pro-choice” and those who are “pro-life,” rather than between those who are “pro-choice” and those who are “anti-choice” or between those who are “pro-life” and those who are “anti-life.” What this seems to suggest is that here, as in Euthyphro’s case, our shared commitments lie at the root of the conflict. Of course, the debate over abortion is not only – or even primarily – over whether to assign priority to the value of life or the value of liberty. It quickly gravitates toward the prior question of the moral status of the fetus. If the fetus does not possess rights, then its rights cannot be violated; conversely, if the fetus is an inviolable member of the human community, then the limits imposed on a woman’s liberties by the rights of the fetus are easily justifiable within a liberal framework. Consequently, those at either extreme in this debate typically do not see themselves as advocating the lesser of two evils. However, the structure of the problem is nevertheless similar to the one described in the Euthyphro. This problem is not that we find ourselves committed to incommensurable moral values, but that persuasive moral reasons, the intelligibility of which is not itself in dispute, can be assembled on behalf of mutually incompatible conclusions – conclusions that cannot be acted upon simultaneously. Now, in our moral vocabulary there are certain action-descriptions that possess evaluative content – e.g., “murder,” “stealing,” “lying.” To apply one of these terms to an action is ipso facto to condemn it. It might be argued, however, that disagreement about what can properly be subsumed under such terms suggests the presence of what MacIntyre would call “an element of arbitrariness and even of choice in their application.” Thus, it might be argued that two people who disagree about whether a given act is murder necessarily are applying the concept “murder” differently and, consequently, cannot be said to speak a common moral language. However, this conclusion need not follow. To call an act “murder” is not simply to say that it involves killing, but to say of this killing that it is not morally justifiable. Thus,

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the considerations brought to bear in a moral argument are not generally of the form, “Murder is wrong” – which would be inconclusive because uncontroversial – or “That is murder” – which would be conclusive but probably for that reason question-begging. Rather, the relevant considerations would be ones that would suggest, e.g., that “murder” is or is not the appropriate concept under which the behavior in question ought to be subsumed: “But he was unarmed,” “But he was a noncombatant,” “But he was innocent,” “But it was an accident,” “But it was self-defense,” “But the victim deserved to die,” “But she was terminally ill and in great pain.”21 As Socrates puts it in the Euthyphro, in such cases the protagonists “do not dispute that the wrongdoer must be punished, but they may disagree as to who the wrongdoer is, what he did and when.”22 In these disputes, Socrates warns, the protagonists may be “unable to come to a satisfactory decision,” i.e., one to which all parties agree.23 I do not mean to deny the possibility that the protagonists may actually be operating with different conceptions of what is morally relevant when it comes to the taking of life, but merely to note that they may also simply disagree about whether a particular killing is justified – i.e., whether a particular case is murder. As Cavell puts it, “[a]ctions, unlike envelopes and goldfinches, do not come named for assessment, nor, like apples, ripe for grading”; consequently, how a given “case” is to be described “forms part of the content of the moral argument itself.”24 Thus, when people disagree about whether an individual is guilty of murder, they can usually best be understood not as arguing from incommensurable premises, but as arguing on the basis of mutually intelligible reasons toward incompatible conclusions.25 A similar point can be made about the way the term “person” functions in the debate over abortion. As we saw from our earlier examples, the question of whether a fetus is a person is different from the question of whether a (particular) fetus is human. The latter is an empirical question, whereas the former concerns the moral significance that ought to be accorded to certain empirical facts. These two questions are not wholly unrelated, since being human – i.e., belonging to the species Homo sapiens – is generally regarded as a necessary condition of being a person; but they are not identical, since being human is not self-evidently a sufficient condition of personhood. Like the terms discussed in the previous paragraph, the term “person” possesses evaluative content in this context. To assign the term “person” is to make a moral claim, from which further moral claims can be inferred. In the case of the abortion controversy, as we can see from the above example

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debate, it is a claim that can usually be debated in terms of reasons whose relevance is not itself in dispute. Contrary, then, to what philosophers like MacIntyre seem to assume, terms like “person” and “murder” belong (at least initially) to the conclusions, rather than the premises, of moral arguments,26 and the shared method of applying such terms would seem to be one that often – though not always – allows for disagreement in these conclusions.27 MacIntyre argues that without agreements about the relevance of the considerations on which a moral conclusion might be made to rest, moral debate goes “on and on and on.” By contrast, I contend that without such agreement, moral debate tends to have difficulty getting underway. Consider, for example, a disagreement over the morality of using vivisection – the practice of operating on living animals – in scientific research. As R.W. Beardsmore notes, a scientist may regard vivisection “as one aspect of something which has a value in itself, namely free inquiry, or the scientific way of life.” Beardsmore continues: On the other hand, many people would wish to disagree with the scientist’s position. “Regardless of its value to science,” they might argue, “vivisection is an evil practice.” Of course such a person does not need to deny the importance which the scientist attaches to his work. They merely feel that it is more important that living creatures should not suffer.28 Like MacIntyre, Beardsmore argues that such disputes are rooted in conflicts between fundamentally incompatible moral Weltbilder, and that consequently “it no longer makes sense to talk of an ‘accepted procedure for settling the dispute,’ or of ‘common evidence.’”29 Since the moral relevance of facts is determined “by the moral convictions of the disputants, that is, by the moralities to which they belong,” no appeal to “evidence” can settle the dispute.30 What constitutes a relevant moral consideration is precisely what is in dispute.31 On closer examination, however, Beardsmore’s own example seems to point toward a rather different conclusion. He notes, for instance, that the anti-vivisectionist can appreciate vivisection’s value to science, and that the scientist recognizes that it causes suffering to animals. The activist, while presumably not otherwise opposed to free inquiry, feels that, given the choice, “it is more important that living creatures should not suffer,” while the scientist, Beardsmore leads us to believe, holds not that this suffering is irrelevant, but that it can be justified by

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the contribution vivisection makes to scientific investigation. In other words, contrary to what Beardsmore concludes, his own example shows that the moral relevance of the facts brought to bear – their intelligibility as reasons – is not what is at issue. It would be rather different if the scientist responded, “Of course vivisection causes suffering to animals, but what has that got to do with anything?” Conversely, the scientist would no doubt be perplexed if the activist’s objection to vivisection were not that it causes suffering but that it exposes internal organs to the human gaze, or that it necessitates the scientist’s coming into contact with blood. “How,” one might ask, “are those facts relevant?”32 In such extreme cases, the kind of moral disputes Beardsmore describes could not so much as get underway. That moral disagreement is indeed pervasive actually tends to militate against the generality of this sort of account and suggests that incommensurability, while not to be ignored, may nevertheless in many cases be a red herring. Similarly, while I do not wish to seem perverse, what strikes me on reading MacIntyre’s examples of moral disputes is how much agreement they manifest, not just at the level of “factual” information, but in terms of the kinds of considerations (including facts) that are regarded as morally relevant. Indeed, I find myself at least momentarily swayed, if not persuaded, by each of these incompatible positions. That different points of view on a given issue can coherently be maintained and defended within a single moral Weltbild is evidenced by the fact that one can have a genuine moral argument with oneself in a way one ordinarily cannot with respect to theoretical claims – something we would not be inclined to expect given MacIntyre’s own account. MacIntyre’s appeal to incommensurability at the level of “premises” may go some distance toward explaining inter-personal moral disagreements, but it cannot so easily account for the equally prevalent phenomenon of intra-personal moral disagreement. On the view for which I am arguing, by contrast, both forms of disagreement can be explained in terms of the character of moral discourse. In moral debates, unlike theoretical ones, no protagonist holds a “trump card.” As we have seen, MacIntyre and Habermas, among others, draw an invidious comparison between the agreement that is achieved in science and the interminability of moral discourse. But is this the relevant comparison to be making? Cavell has argued that “what makes science rational is not the fact of agreement about particular propositions itself … but the fact of a commitment to certain modes of argument whose very nature is to lead to such agreement.”33 Similarly, he suggests, “morality may be rational on exactly the same ground,

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namely that we commit ourselves to certain modes of argument, but now ones which do not lead, in the same ways, and sometimes not at all, to agreement (about a conclusion).”34 By focusing on disagreement at the level of moral positions and opinions, philosophers may tend to overlook the underlying agreements in a culture that make such disagreement possible. Consider, for example, the following ordinarily unstated principle: “If what a person does was done by accident, then he is not to be blamed – at least not as severely as if he deliberately did it.”35 Cavell writes: [I]f the commitment to morality (being a competent moral agent) involves commitments to such principles as that about accident and blame, then perhaps the fact that we may disagree, in a given argument, about other questions (e.g., how good an excuse “by accident” is; whether a man is entitled to that excuse in a particular situation; whether he ought not to have exercised greater care; what his real motive was (what he was really doing)) may seem to carry a very different weight – not to deny the rationality of a moral argument in which no appeal to “facts” seems to settle it, but to provide modes of argument whose characteristic feature is exactly that they can secure the rationality of both protagonists in the absence of agreement about a conclusion.36 In Chapters 4 and 5 I argued that agreement is essential to rationality, but that the agreement that matters is agreement in practices, not agreement in conclusions. To this we can now add that the nature of moral practices is such that they can sometimes accommodate disagreement at the level of conclusions.

Rationality and the “personal” in morality But if different conclusions can be drawn on the basis of the same body of evidence, does this not suggest that there is indeed something suspicious about moral deliberation and the conclusions it yields? Surely, it will be objected, incompatible moral claims can no more be equally valid than incompatible theoretical claims can be equally true. In theoretical contexts, reasons might be said to determine the outcome of a debate. Since moral problems cannot be settled in this way, we may be tempted to suppose that reasons play no part in their resolution – and hence that moral judgments are more akin to expressions of emotion, to which reasons are irrelevant. What I am suggesting is that

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there is a third possibility: that reasons do indeed play a role in moral arguments, but that this role is different from the role they play in theoretical contexts. Accordingly, I will argue, when speaking of the validity of a moral position it is important to distinguish its rationality – its capacity to be defended in terms of mutually intelligible reasons – from its moral acceptability. I suggest that it is precisely because of the sometimes misleading nature of the analogies drawn between moral questions and scientific or theoretical ones that these two issues are easily confused. Because it is characteristic of theoretical discussions that they issue in agreement in conclusions, questions of rationality (in the sense of defensibility in terms of mutually intelligible reasons) and questions of what can be appropriated converge in a way that questions regarding the rationality and personal acceptability of moral conclusions may not. What I mean can perhaps best be brought out by means of another example. A: That snake is a coral snake – one of the deadliest in the region. B: How do you know? A: It has red, black, and yellow bands. B: But scarlet kingsnakes – which are non-venomous – also have red, black, and yellow bands. The considerations brought to bear in the course of the argument systematically delimit the scope of what it is rational for either party to claim to know. B’s objection effectively reveals the inadequacy of the reason A produces in defense of her initial claim. Having recognized the relevance of B’s objection, A cannot, without further explanation, continue rationally to maintain that she knows that the snake in question is a coral snake. Unless A is prepared to deny B’s claim that scarlet kingsnakes have similar markings, A must either withdraw her own claim or offer an additional reason to support it (e.g., that on the specimen in question, red bands are adjacent to yellow ones, and that this is distinctive of the coral snake): this is required by the inferential relations implicit in the practice.37 As Cavell notes, “in epistemological contexts, the relevance of the doubt is itself enough to impugn the basis as it stands, and therewith the claim to knowledge.”38 In moral discourse, by contrast, the relevance of an objection is not, by itself, necessarily sufficient to override the rationality of holding a given position. The objections brought against a moral conclusion do not

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necessarily reveal gaps in its justification, as they do in theoretical contexts (though they may). Rather, they suggest that a rival conclusion might also be justifiable. This is why the person defending a moral position must in some way address, but need not deny, objections to it. As we have seen, Euthyphro does not deny the considerations Socrates and others bring to bear; he simply does not let these considerations count decisively against his decision to prosecute his father. Since mutually exclusive moral positions might both be rationally defensible within a given moral Weltbild, the actual taking up of a moral position will necessarily involve a personal element absent from theoretical contexts, where what can be accepted is, to a much greater extent, determined by the considerations raised in the course of the discussion. This “personal” or “human” element involves making some particular set of relevant considerations one’s own reasons – the reasons in terms of which one is prepared to explain oneself to others. Whether a given consideration is relevant – whether it is recognizable as a reason – is determinable in relation to the moral community of which one is a part. But as Theo van Willigenburg points out in the process of developing Christine Korsgaard’s reading of Kant, the recognition of the authority of a reason requires individual insight into its force. In taking something as a reason I will apply reason-types that are intelligible in the community of reason-givers, but something will not be a normative reason because others consider it to be so… . I am the cause of my action, the moment the insight has become mine and provides the reason for my action.39 In the process of deliberation, one takes up a position within what is intelligible by selecting from among the considerations taken to be relevant those one wishes to present to others as the basis for one’s views or actions. In this way, it is the individual, rather than the practice, which provides the “terminus” to the dispute. Since different moral positions can be based in this manner on different relevant considerations, incompatible positions can sometimes be regarded as equally rational. However, it does not follow that all rational positions must be regarded as equally acceptable. After all, in taking up a position, one implicitly (if not explicitly) declares this position to be superior to alternatives. For instance, although an opponent of the death penalty is not likely to be wholly insensitive to the relevance of the claims made by those on the opposite side of this debate,

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she cannot rationally regard their position otherwise than as morally inferior to her own. Similarly, to affirm that a fetus is a person is ipso facto to deny the contrary view. It is possible to regard a decision as rational, intelligible, indeed – in a sense – perfectly understandable, yet still think that it is morally wrong. Indeed, this is why people engage in moral arguments. One’s ability (if any) to regard alternative decisions as also, in some sense, acceptable will itself be an aspect of the moral position one adopts and is not a function of the moral practice that makes the taking up of that position possible. The observation that rational disagreement is possible in moral discourse does not rob such discourse of its point, for it does not entail that every rational moral position is a worthy one. In many cases – i.e., the ones we term “arguments” – the point of moral discourse is indeed to persuade one’s opponent of one’s own point of view – i.e., to show that it is morally superior. But even if this aim is not achieved, the argument has not necessarily been in vain. “Without the hope of agreement,” Cavell notes, “argument would be pointless; but it doesn’t follow that without agreement … the argument was pointless.”40 Furthermore, at least two things are achieved in the course of moral debate, even if consensus is not reached – the former corresponding to the axis of rationality and the latter to the axis of moral acceptability. In the first place, the rationality of one’s position is put to the test. For that matter it is worth noting that it is not a foregone conclusion that it will pass: in certain circumstances one may simply find oneself unable to meet the moral objections raised against one’s position. It may turn out, for example, that a person is obliged to acknowledge the relevance of considerations she initially had failed to consider, in the light of which the person’s original position can be seen as untenable. 41 On the other hand, as Peter Winch has noted, a person may come to the conclusion that “the alternatives to his position are subject to at least equal difficulties.”42 The aim of rational deliberation is not necessarily to arrive at a position free from difficulties, but to make one another aware of the difficulties for which each is obliged to take responsibility. Understanding the difficulties inherent in one’s own position – it might be said – is a condition of genuinely understanding the position itself. Winch argues that “[o]ne way in which a man exercises his reason in such disputes is precisely in understanding the moral positions of others opposed to his own, along with the difficulties in them, but equally in allowing them to highlight the difficulties in his own position.”43

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Secondly, the protagonists learn something about themselves and about one another – namely, the kind of moral positions for which they elect to be answerable. This second function of debate is closely connected to the first, since one cannot genuinely take responsibility for a position one does not understand. “[T]he point,” Cavell writes, “is to determine what position you are taking, that is to say, what position you are taking responsibility for – and whether it is one I can respect.”44 The reasons in terms of which one explains oneself to others reveal something important about one’s own identity as a moral agent. As Korsgaard puts it, “Your reasons express your identity, your nature; your obligations spring from what that identity forbids.”45

Criticism and character The importance of one’s identity or character as a moral agent can perhaps be illustrated by comparing a genuine moral argument in which each protagonist is passionately committed to the position she is defending with a formal debate in which the position that each protagonist must defend is determined by a coin toss. That it frequently is possible to defend a moral position that is not in reality one’s own is significant in its own right and serves to corroborate my claim that different points of view can often coherently be defended within a single moral framework. However, it also is significant that people do not choose their real moral positions by flipping coins. If anything, their positions seem to choose them. In a formal debate, one’s competence is put to the test; however, such a debate is essentially an intellectual exercise, a test of skill. What one says in the context of the debate is not ordinarily taken to have implications for one’s moral standing. Nor – and this is essentially the same point – is it taken to have implications for how one conducts one’s life outside the context of the debate. In a genuine moral argument, by contrast, the positions one defends are internally related to one’s character as a moral agent.46 What one says – the views for which one elects to take responsibility (or perhaps more accurately: for which one cannot but take responsibility) – do affect one’s moral standing. Thus, the aim of the critic is to effect a change not simply in her opponent’s words – by convincing her, e.g., that her claims are false or unwarranted – but in the life she brings to her words, the kind of person she is. As a result, however, the character of the critic – no less than that of the person she is addressing – can enter into the equation. MacIntyre

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argues that an important aspect of rationality goes missing unless we can say that a moral reason “either is or is not a good reason for performing [an] action independently of who utters it.”47 If, by a “good reason” MacIntyre means a relevant consideration, then I am happy to concur: the individual is not free to choose for herself what is a reason for what. However, when relevant considerations collide, the identity of the speaker can indeed come into play. Consider, for instance, the role in a culture of its moral exemplars and the importance of what is called their “integrity” or “authenticity.” John Kekes, who has discussed the nature of moral authority with great subtlety and depth, notes that there is an important difference between being in authority and being an authority. Whether one’s trust in a putative moral authority is warranted depends on the way in which the putative authority lives – how he or she conducts his or her own life. Kekes writes: The requirement that the conduct of moral authorities must be exemplary bridges the gap between being a moral authority and being accepted as such. Articulateness alone is insufficient for this because it is unclear whether verbal facility is evidence of knowledge, commitment, and reflectiveness or merely of rhetorical talent. But if the life and conduct of putative moral authorities are of a piece with the moral vision they articulate, then they demonstrate in the most convincing way possible that they mean what they say, that it is reasonable to trust them, and that they are moral authorities indeed.48 Ultimately, the critic must embody her criticism; her life must itself constitute the critique of alternative ways of living available within the wider culture. It is perhaps for this reason that the writings of great moral exemplars – such as Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. – however brilliant and penetrating, are sometimes less morally affecting than biographies of their lives (and deaths).49

The personal and the universal In discussing this “personal” element in moral deliberation, however, caution must be exercised in order to avoid confirming the suspicion that moral decisions are purely “subjective.” There are at least two reasons for thinking that an appropriate emphasis on the “personal” is compatible with an appropriate emphasis on the “universal.” First, it seems to me that MacIntyre is essentially correct to maintain that moral criticism “presupposes the existence of impersonal criteria – the

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existence, independently of the preferences or attitudes of speaker and hearer, of standards of justice or generosity or duty.”50 Such criteria are what distinguish rational moral criticisms from the mere expressions of personal preference the emotivists took them to be.51 MacIntyre’s contention is that the former have, in modern times, degenerated into the latter, but this, I suggest, rests on a confused assumption: that agreement on what is a reason for what ought necessarily to translate into agreement about what ought to be done. Peter Winch brings this confusion out through a discussion of Melville’s Billy Budd, in which “Starry” Vere, captain of H.M.S. Indomitable, is faced with the moral dilemma of how to judge Billy Budd, who is falsely accused of inciting mutiny and who inadvertently kills the ship’s master-at-arms. The important point to make is that what a man finds out about himself is something that can be expressed only in terms of the moral ideas by consideration of which he arrives at his decision. Thus Vere, faced with Billy Budd’s military offence, considers the conflicting claims of his duty as a naval commander and considerations of natural justice. This leads him to an understanding of what he must do: that is, of what is and is not morally possible for him in these circumstances… . But somebody else in such a situation, considering those very same arguments, might conclude that the moral possibilities were different for him …52 As Winch emphasizes, it is essential to Melville’s tale both that Vere is a morally serious person and that his “ideas of right and wrong” do not “differ so profoundly from our own.”53 In arriving at the decision he does, Vere is not acting arbitrarily: his criteria are “impersonal criteria,” and their relevance is recognizable within a moral Weltbild that Melville and many of his readers – those who can feel vicariously the tug of the incompatible demands on Vere’s conscience – also share, even if they like to think they might ultimately have acted differently themselves. In deciding to execute Billy Budd, Vere must ultimately refuse to accept as decisive countervailing moral considerations that, from a different point of view, might seem fundamental. But refusing to accept such considerations as decisive is quite different from ignoring them or denying their relevance. As Cavell notes: I can refuse to accept a “ground for doubt” without impugning it as false, and without supplying a new basis, and yet not automatically

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be dismissed as irrational or morally incompetent. What I cannot do, and yet maintain my position as morally competent, is to deny the relevance of your doubts (“What difference does it make that I promised, that he’s an enemy of the state, that I will hurt my friends”), fail to see that they require a determination by me.54 To read Melville’s story from a subjectivist point of view is to turn Vere into a tyrant, rather than to see him as a man pulled in two different directions precisely insofar as he is bound by duty.55 To suppose that the relevance of a moral objection were itself up to the individual would, I suggest, be to succumb to the kind of subjectivism that MacIntyre rightly decries. But this is not what is being argued. Although the norms implicit in our moral practices sometimes allow for the recognition of the rationality of more than one conclusion, the fact that there are norms operative in these contexts means that not just any conclusion need be regarded as rational. Habermas claims that to act morally is to act in accordance with valid reasons, and that consequently immoral behavior should be “viewed as irrational.”56 By contrast, I am claiming that recognizing the rationality of a position is a necessary but insufficient condition for regarding it as morally acceptable. Thus, although the view for which I am arguing denies that reasons play the same role in moral discourse that they play in other contexts, it retains an important place within morality for rational deliberation. In the first instance, then, morality can be understood as involving a personal element without reducing to mere subjectivism because the individual is not free to decide for herself which considerations are relevant (or, to put it slightly differently, what follows from a consideration).57 However, there is another, further reason why the idea of the “personal” should not be understood in terms of a contrast with the “universal.” The important point here is that one’s “own” reasons – the reasons in terms of which one explains oneself to the world – are reasons one hopes that others will find equally compelling. Thus, these reasons are public not merely in the sense that their relevance is accepted within the community, but also in the sense that they are put forward with the intention of persuading others to acknowledge the superiority of one’s own position vis-à-vis other rational options. Thus, van Willigenburg writes: Taking something as a reason is (implicitly) presenting to the public forum of reason-givers why one chooses to act as one does.

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Therefore, taking something as a reason is pointing out a consideration that cannot be entirely private and idiosyncratic. It is pointing out a principle, or in Kantian terms, it is laying down a law: a rule that should count in a minimally general way, that is, not only for me now, but for anyone (including my future self) who is in exactly the same circumstances.58 The point here is not that my reasons cannot be valid reasons for me unless others find them equally compelling – here I think Habermas is mistaken – but that insofar as I find them compelling, I implicitly claim for them the status of reasons whose force others ought to acknowledge in this situation. Although I find myself largely in agreement with van Willigenburg here, I would like to propose two friendly emendations to the point he is making in the quotation above. First, I am uncomfortable with the Kantian language of “laying down a law.” As noted earlier, moral reasons rarely take the form of explicit laws or rules. Perhaps what van Willigenburg means, however, is not that the reasons one puts forward are themselves laws, but that in putting them forward as one’s reasons one implicit puts forward a law to the effect that these reasons are the most appropriate reasons in these circumstances. However, to my mind it would be preferable to drop the legislative metaphor altogether and simply say that the reasons one puts forward are put forward with an implicit endorsement to the effect that they are here most appropriate – i.e., that the position one is defending is superior to other positions that might be defensible on the basis of other considerations whose relevance is not at issue.59 Van Willigenburg’s willingness to appropriate Kant’s legislative metaphor may be due to the fact that he wants to be able to claim that similar reasons should be treated as compelling “for anyone (including my future self) who is in exactly the same circumstances.” However, it is here that my second concern arises. Although I agree with van Willigenburg that one hopes that others will find persuasive the reasons one gives for one’s behavior, I think that it overburdens these reasons to claim that they must be such as to be compelling to all others who happen to find themselves in similar circumstances. Let us here distinguish two kinds of questions: (Q) Did person S act properly in circumstance P? (Q1) Is the proper way for S to act in P also the proper way for person S1 to act in circumstance P1?

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Once they have been distinguished, it can be seen that van Willigenburg conflates these two questions when he says that the reasons a person gives must be such as to be authoritative to others in “the same circumstances.” Apart from the difficulty of specifying the relevant respects in which these circumstances must be identical, the latter conclusion would follow only if there were no morally relevant distinctions among persons. But clearly one’s duties depend in large part on one’s abilities and roles – e.g., as spouse, parent, employee, elected official, lifeguard, and so forth. Everything seems to hinge on just how similar S is to S1, and just how similar P is to P1. Thus, although it is true that one hopes that the reasons one gives for a particular course of action will persuade others of its appropriateness, it does not follow that these reasons will necessarily transfer into other contexts: the fact that others agree on the appropriateness of your pursuing a given course of action does not automatically mean that they ought to pursue the same course of action in similar circumstances. Of course, this is less of an issue when what is at stake is the acceptability not of the courses of action of particular individuals, but of policies that pertain more broadly, such as the policy of opposing the death penalty. In any case, the important point is that one’s “own” reasons are not simply personal preferences, as the emotivist assumes. Although there is indeed an element of self-definition at work here, it is not merely an instance of private “self-fashioning.” Rather, by offering to others the reasons one takes to be authoritative, one defines oneself precisely in relation to the kind of community to which one would like to belong – i.e., a community that recognizes the moral superiority of the positions based on these reasons. This, then, is the second sense in which it can be said that the “personal” is not incompatible with the “universal.”

Conclusion: “tradition” and mutually rational dissent In much of MacIntyre’s work the concept of tradition is given pride of place. “Tradition” is his favored term for the moral framework within which a culture develops its distinctive shape. On MacIntyre’s account, traditions are teleologically structured, in the sense that moral endeavor is animated by a shared conception of the telos or “end” of human life. Whereas Habermas and Derrida would each in his own way like to free us from the traditions in which we happen to find ourselves – traditions that, on their account, can serve to oppress and repress – MacIntyre argues that we are in fact beholden to such traditions for our very capacity for rational moral thought. Or at any rate,

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we would be so beholden if this capacity were not presently in doubt. The problem, as he sees it, is that ours is a fragmented tradition, an incoherent culture. Whence this incoherence? The problem, as MacIntyre sees it, is that in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, we moderns no longer share a common conception of the telos. Consequently, we no longer agree as to which moral “premises” are relevant. Unlike the traditional societies of our forbears, contemporary liberal democracies are characterized by a plurality of competing moral vocabularies, each of which makes claims on us that are incompatible with the claims made by the others. As a result, we no longer possess the moral resources for anything more robust than a shrill, subjectivist discourse. To this it might be argued that if things were really as bad as all that, MacIntyre would lack the ability to decry the situation as vigorously as he does.60 Of course, a considerable amount of decrying is surely in order. To that extent MacIntyre’s analysis is entirely correct.61 However, it seems to me that MacIntyre confuses moral plurality with moral disarray.62 That a tradition is characterized by disagreement is not in itself a cause for concern. Indeed, I would contend that the prevalence of disagreement says more about the circumstances in which people find themselves and the degree to which self-expression is tolerated than it does about their moral vocabulary per se. On my view, there is greater cause for concern when a society refuses to accommodate dissent than when it is marked by vociferous moral debate (however inconclusive).63 The aim of this chapter was not to dispute the importance of traditions, but to challenge the conception of a tradition as something univocal. On the view for which I have argued, our traditions – our Weltbilder – are capacious enough to accommodate certain incompatible conclusions. Because agreement about what counts as a relevant consideration does not automatically translate into shared beliefs about every particular, mutually exclusive moral positions can sometimes be defended in terms of considerations whose intelligibility as reasons is not itself in dispute. Consequently, in certain circumstances dissent can be rationally warranted even when those with whom one disagrees are justified in holding the views they do. If this is correct, then much of the evidence in favor of MacIntyre’s contention that the language of morality is in disarray – namely moral disagreement – can be interpreted in a way that does not in itself impugn our traditions. By ignoring the “personal” element in moral deliberation, I contend,

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MacIntyre faults our traditions for failing to do for individual participants in them what they must do for themselves. Of course, not all disagreement can plausibly be interpreted as I have here been arguing much of it can. Some disagreement in conclusions really does stem from disagreements about which considerations are relevant (i.e., about what is entailed by the commitments one undertakes). As we have seen, religious differences afford us with a case in point. Here, too, however, caution must be exercised. The existence of multiple moral traditions – whether structured teleologically or otherwise – is not in itself evidence of the breakdown of any larger tradition. The differences among the respective moral beliefs of Tibetan Buddhists, Iranian Shiites, the Mennonites, and the Yanomamö are not simply differences of dialect within an all-encompassing but decentered moral language. Any pluralistic society – such as one characteristically finds in connection with liberal democratic institutions – will invariably be characterized by differences not simply at the level of conclusions, but also at the level of Weltbilder. On the other hand, differences among Weltbilder do not necessarily entail differences in conclusions either. One often finds, for example, that different people can agree on the same public policies for quite different reasons.64 One sometimes hears it said, with respect to the moral issues that divide us, that we must simply “agree to disagree.” There is something both fundamentally right and fundamentally wrong about this conclusion. What is right, I suggest, is that disagreement is an ineliminable feature of moral discourse – a feature characteristic of the kind of discourse it is. The mistake, however, is to conclude that rational deliberation and criticism are therefore rendered otiose.65 The argument in this chapter has presupposed a certain level of agreement about what counts as a reason for what – about which considerations are relevant. Its title – “Agreeing to Disagree” – is thus a kind of play on words. What I intend for it to connote are the shared commitments that enable people to take up positions on either side of divisive moral issues – agreements that allow us to carry on the kind of debates we do. As I noted in Chapter 5, however, individuals can also disagree about what follows from what. The following chapter addresses the notion of objectivity in moral discourse and argues that the norms by which we are in actuality bound cannot simply be equated with the patterns of inference dominant within a community.

7 The Return of Objectivity: Realism without (Rampant) Platonism

[F]or the Fascist, everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian… Benito Mussolini1 No question of Party loyalty can restrain me from speaking frankly for I place truth above the Party. I know well that in Marxist doctrine there is no such thing as truth – at least not in any absolute sense – there is only relative truth. I believe, however, that in so serious a matter it is … urgent to see matters as they are, not as we would wish them to be or had hoped that they might be. André Gide2 As we saw in Chapter 1, Richard Rorty argues that in the absence of a view from nowhere – a perspective on our practices that is not itself grounded in practice – we ought to see ourselves as answerable to one another, rather than to the world or the moral law: what is correct is what “our peers will, ceteris paribus, let us get away with” saying or doing.3 Objectivity is thus exchanged for solidarity. As we noted, however, the implications of this account are troubling. Because Rorty appeals to the “community” in order to distinguish what is correct from what is incorrect, he is ultimately unable to accommodate the thought that the vast majority of one’s peers could be guilty of violating a norm – moral or otherwise. Thus, he concludes that although it is possible to contrast the conventions of one com140

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munity with those of another, it is impossible to “appeal from the oppressive conventions of our community to something nonconventional, and thus hard to see how we could ever engage in anything like ‘radical critique.’”4 The choice with which Rorty presents us is a choice between conceiving of ourselves as answerable to the world understood platonistically – a world that seems to recede in proportion to our efforts to make contact with it – and conceiving of ourselves as answerable to nothing beyond the “retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow inquirers.”5 Since the former option is merely illusory, we are encouraged to accommodate ourselves to the latter, in spite of the fact – which Rorty acknowledges – that we have strong “intuitions” to the contrary. As we saw in Chapter 1, however, Rorty is “urging that we do our best to stop having such intuitions, that we develop a new intellectual tradition.”6 But what would such an intellectual tradition look like? Can we really regard ourselves as answerable only to something other than the subject matter of our discourse – the facts, objects, values, proprieties, etc., to which reference is made? In this chapter I argue that we cannot, for the simple reason that the notion of objectivity – of answerability to the world – is built right into the practices within which that discourse has its sense. I begin by showing that first-order truth-claims – for example, empirical statements – cannot be reduced to what Wittgenstein called “propositions of human natural history” – i.e., statements about what human beings agree on. Although agreement plays an important role in our discursive practices, it does not determine what it is correct to say. I then attempt to elucidate the structure of these practices in terms of what Robert Brandom calls a “scorekeeping” model. According to this account, objectivity can be understood in terms of a perspectival form, rather than a trans-perspectival content. This account of objectivity will enable us to appreciate that although it is indeed we who hold one another accountable, we hold one another accountable to something beyond mere consensus – something beyond ourselves. I argue that we are indeed answerable to the world, and, pace Habermas, that the world to which we are answerable can non-problematically be conceived as a realm of moral value. Although Brandom’s account of objectivity is not primarily concerned with moral discourse, I argue that it nevertheless sheds much light on the character of that discourse.7 The alternative to Rorty’s position for which I argue is pragmatic, but it retains a place for the intuitions that give rise to platonism. Indeed,

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we might follow John McDowell in distinguishing here between “naturalized” and “rampant platonism.” Naturalized platonism is platonistic in that the structure of the space of reasons has a sort of autonomy; it is not derivative from, or reflective of, truths about human beings that are capturable independently of having that structure in view. But this platonism is not rampant: the structure of the space of reasons is not constituted in splendid isolation from anything merely human. The demands of reason are essentially such that a human upbringing can open a human being’s eyes to them.8 Unlike the rampant platonism of which Rorty is rightly critical, the alternative for which I argue has its feet planted firmly on the ground: if it is platonism, it is pragmatic platonism. I conclude that, contrary to what Rorty would have us believe, we can be pragmatists without abandoning the notion of objectivity. As we will see, this conclusion has important implications for the possibility of dissent and criticism.

Truth and agreement According to Rorty, as we have seen, communal agreement decides what it is correct to believe and say. However, Wittgenstein anticipated, and was careful to disavow, this kind of interpretation of the implications of his view of normativity – an interpretation that gets “agreement” in the wrong place. In the Investigations he writes: “So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?” – It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.9 Wittgenstein’s point is that although the making of assertions and the distinguishing of true assertions from false ones would not be possible without background agreement within the community of discourse, that such agreement obtains is not itself part of the content of these assertions. To assert a proposition – to assert its truth – is not to assert that what the proposition states is the subject of widespread agreement.10 That the agreement that functions as a condition of claim-making does not itself enter into the claims that are made can be illustrated by

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comparing the contradictory of an ordinary first-order claim with the contradictory of the corresponding second-order claim about who is committed to the first-order claim. Consider the following passage from Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics: What you say seems to amount to this, that logic belongs to the natural history of man. And that is not combinable with the hardness of the logical ‘must.’ But the logical ‘must’ is a component part of the propositions of logic, and these are not propositions of human natural history. If what a proposition of logic said was: Human beings agree with one another in such and such ways (and that would be the form of the natural-history proposition), then its contradictory would say that there is here a lack of agreement. Not, that there is an agreement of another kind.11 In this passage – which might initially appear a bit cryptic – Wittgenstein is responding to the anticipated objection of his imagined interlocutor. A few pages earlier Wittgenstein had argued that “the phenomenon of language is based on regularity, on agreement in action. Here it is of the greatest importance that all or the enormous majority of us agree in certain things.”12 The interlocutor’s objection is that if – as he confusedly takes Wittgenstein to be suggesting – the propositions of logic could be reduced to propositions of “human natural history” – i.e., to propositions about who agrees with whom about what – we would be unable to make sense of the notion of logical necessity (the “hardness of the logical ‘must’”). In reply, Wittgenstein points to a fundamental difference between these two kinds of propositions – a difference that can be illustrated by contrasting the other claims with which each would be incompatible.13 His point is that to deny what is agreed upon is not to deny that it is agreed upon, and consequently that first-order affirmations – including logical claims – cannot be reduced to second-order affirmations – i.e., to propositions of human natural history. Thus, he writes, “The agreement of humans that is a presupposition of logic is not an agreement in opinions, much less in opinions on questions of logic.”14 Logical necessity belongs to what is said within, rather than about, logic. Of course, the general point is applicable outside the logical context in which Wittgenstein is here making it. Brandom writes: The point … is that the objectivity of propositional content – the fact that in claiming that the swatch is red we are … indeed saying

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something that could be true even if there had never been rational beings – is a feature we can make intelligible as a structure … of the norms, in a broad sense, that govern … the game of giving and asking for reasons. And we can make sense of practices having that structure even if we understand commitment and entitlement as themselves social statuses, instituted by the attitudes of linguistic practitioners. All that is required is that the commitments and entitlements they associate with ordinary empirical claims such as “The swatch is red” generate incompatibilities for these claims that differ suitably from those associated with any claims about who is committed to, entitled to, or in a position to assert anything.15 The claim “The swatch is green” is, for instance, incompatible with the claim “The swatch is red” but not with the claim that so-and-so is committed to the claim that the swatch is red, or with the claim that one’s peers will allow one to say that the swatch is red. Views according to which agreement determines what is true and false make the mistake of conflating two rather different kinds of claims. This difference can be articulated in terms of the norm of disquotability: what would make a statement true – its truth-conditions – can be formulated by removing the quotation marks from around the statement. For instance, the statement “The swatch is red” is true if and only if the swatch is red. On this account, whether an assertion is true depends – in a rather mundane way – on whether what it is about is as it states, not on whether it is an assertion with which everyone agrees. Even assertions of “human natural history” – assertions about what everyone believes – are true if and only if everyone believes what the assertion claims everyone believes: it does not matter whether everyone believes the assertion about what everyone believes. The import of disquotability is that statements about what is true and statements about what is agreed upon are not fungible. Moreover, in making this point, we have simply elucidated a commonplace and otherwise unremarkable feature of our discourse. What we have not done is to step “outside” that discourse in order to conceive of its conformity to reality from “sideways on.” Thus, that truth is simply what one’s peers will let one get away with saying is not something we should let Rorty get away with saying.16

Norms and objectivity As we saw in Chapter 4, Brandom argues that “assertions are fundamentally fodder for inferences.”17 The semantic content of a claim

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depends upon the inferential relations that connect it to other claims, by virtue of which it can be justified as well as function as a justification. Now, as Brandom notes, “a sentence in one person’s mouth does not typically have the same significance as that same sentence emerging from another person’s mouth, even where there is as much sharing of the language and as much mutual understanding as one likes.”18 The reason for this is that what follows from one’s commitment to a claim – what other claims one thereby becomes entitled to by virtue of the relevant relations of inference – can be assessed only against a background of collateral commitments, and not everyone shares exactly the same collateral commitments. Consider, for instance, the claim “The astronomical body known as ‘the evening star’ is really the planet Venus.” Whether one takes this statement to follow from the statement “The astronomical body known as ‘the morning star’ is really the planet Venus” will depend on whether one’s repertoire of collateral commitments – one’s set of background beliefs – includes something like the belief, “The astronomical body known as ‘the morning star’ is identical to the astronomical body known as ‘the evening star.’” The significance of a person’s claims can thus be characterized in terms both of what Brandom calls de dicto and de re ascriptions. The former are concerned with the commitments that the speaker herself would acknowledge as following from them; the latter take into account commitments that the critic, but perhaps not the speaker, would recognize as following from her claims. The distinction between de dicto and de re ascriptions thus marks the difference of social perspective “between inferences that are underwritten by substitutional commitments attributed” by the ascriber and “inferences underwritten by substitutional commitments that are undertaken” by the ascriber.19 Brandom refers to individuals as “scorekeepers” or “interpreters” insofar as they ascribe commitments to one another on the basis of their own background beliefs and compare the commitments ascribed in these de re specifications with the commitments actually acknowledged by these others.20 Since de re ascriptions may vary from one perspective to another, scorekeeping is an inherently perspectival activity. As Brandom notes, the relation between scorekeepers is symmetrical. From the point of view of the target of criticism, the relation between de re and de dicto is thus reversed. According to this I-Thou notion of intersubjectivity, no particular perspective – whether that of a given individual or that of a “community” – can be privileged as a perspective. On this view, the objectivity of our discourse can be understood as involving “a kind of perspectival form, rather than … a nonperspectival

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or cross-perspectival content.”21 Such a view does not in itself answer the question of which particular claims are true. However, it establishes that there is a difference between what is correct and what is merely taken to be correct. On this account, to interpret the members of a community as participants in discourse just is to interpret them “as binding themselves by objective, shared concepts whose proprieties of use outrun their dispositions to apply them.”22 From within a practice, inferential significance – what is taken to follow from what – is recognized as capable of varying from perspective to perspective, whereas conceptual content – which, as Brandom notes, “determines a function from perspective to significance” – is viewed as invariant.23 In this way, two individuals who disagree about the significance of a claim can still understand one another as employing the same concepts. Looked at slightly differently, Brandom’s view distinguishes “the proprieties governing correct use in which the concepts grasped by individuals consist … from the dispositions to apply concepts, make inferences, and perform speech acts, in which an individuals grasping of a concept consists.”24 In other words, it enables us to distinguish concepts from particular conceptions. On this view, an indefinite amount of variation in actual usage – a plurality of conceptions – is consistent with the attribution to individuals of shared concepts. “To be in the game at all, one must make enough of the right moves,” Brandom notes, “but how much is enough is quite flexible.”25 Within our own society, for example, there are some who claim – and apparently believe – that the earth is flat. Are we to suppose, then, that their practices differ, in some important respect, from the practices of those of us who think the earth is more-or-less spherical? On the contrary, it might be argued, the proper conclusion is not that “flat-earthers” adhere to a different but coherent set of norms for making and evaluating such claims, but that they are badly mistaken about the shape of the earth. In this way, individuals whose judgments and inferential dispositions vary dramatically – including individuals from communities with different Weltbilder – can nevertheless be interpreted as participating in a shared practice, and thus as “talking about the same objects, answering to the same set of objective facts.”26 Although, as we have seen, a certain amount of agreement in response is a necessary condition of discourse, part of what is agreed upon, in effect, is precisely that agreement does not determine what it is correct to say. Thus, although attitudes and responses of taking to be correct are required in order to institute norms, these norms can ul-

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timately be said to supervene upon even these initial attitudes and responses. Brandom writes: [T]he conceptual norms implicit in the practices attributed to a community outrun the nonnormatively specifiable behavioral discriminations members of that community are disposed to make. For this reason, conceptual norms can be understood as objective, and so as binding on all members of a discursive community, regardless of their particular attitudes.27 From the point of view of a scorekeeper, an individual can undertake unacknowledged commitments by acknowledging commitments that (according to the scorekeeper) entail them. “That I acknowledge commitment to p does not (according to the scorekeeper) mean that I do or will acknowledge commitment to its consequence q, only that I ought to – that I am, whether I realize it or not, committed to q.”28 What the various participants in a practice share is not necessarily a common accounting of whether one particular claim follows from another,29 but a common acknowledgment that this question has a determinate answer – an answer that is independent of what anyone may happen to say. Given differences in their collateral commitments, two scorekeepers may arrive at different conclusions about what one or the other is committed to, but they both recognize themselves as bound by the same conceptual norms, and thus as beholden to something larger than themselves – namely, the subject matter of their discourse. According to this account, talk of “objectivity” is itself a feature of our discursive practices, rather than dependent on a (rampantly) platonistic point of view from somewhere outside them. Whether a critic will succeed in convincing her opponent that q really follows from p – e.g., that the evening star really is Venus – is, of course, an open question. As Brandom notes, the actual sorting out of which claims should be treated as authoritative is “a messy retail business.”30 The social metaphysics of claim-making settles what it means for a claim to be true by settling what one is doing in taking it to be true. It does not settle which claims are true – that is, are correctly taken to be true. That issue is adjudicated differently from different points of view, and although these are not all of equal worth, there is no bird’s-eye view above the fray of competing claims from which those that deserve to prevail can be identified …31

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What the critic says may fail to convince her opponent. However, that she is in the minority does not in itself mean that the critic is wrong, or that those in the majority are rationally entitled to dismiss what she says. Because the norms implicit in a practice outrun even the responsive dispositions upon which they depend, the capacity of a critic to raise doubts about an accepted pattern of inference need not be understood as requiring an appeal to something “beyond” or “outside” the practice. One who questions the propriety of a pattern of inference does not typically see herself as forsaking the norms implicit in a shared practice; rather, she sees herself as questioning her peers’ grasp of these norms. Brandom notes that “[w]e are active participants in grooming our conceptions (what we take to follow from what), precisely because we are trying to improve our understanding of the concepts that we are all along anyway binding ourselves by.”32 And clearly, insofar as her peers’ grasp of these conceptual norms is in question, the critic cannot simply appeal to what her peers take to follow from what; she must see herself as appealing to the facts themselves, to their actual significance. The dispute, in other words, is not over which norm to follow, but over what the actual norms are. It is in this sense that the norms themselves can be said to be objective. Such a “conceptual realist” account is better able to accommodate the phenomenon of cultural change than are accounts that identify the practices of a culture directly with its accepted patterns of inference. Shifts in the riverbed of thought need not be viewed, on Brandom’s account, as marking the transition from one practice to another. The identity of a practice over time can be affirmed insofar as those who participate in it see themselves as bound by objective norms, in spite of variations in what these norms are taken to permit. We are all along attempting to reform our Weltbild – our world-picture – from within, by bringing our patterns of inference into line with the norms by which we are in fact bound. In this way – in addition to the ways discussed in the previous chapter – disagreement can be seen as a characteristic feature of culture, rather than as necessarily indicative of its fragmentation and disintegration. Whereas the point in the previous chapter was that those who share responsive dispositions can nevertheless still disagree in conclusions, the point here is that even those whose responsive dispositions differ in particular instances – who disagree over what is a reason for what – can nevertheless still be interpreted as answerable to the same reality – the subject matter of their discourse – in light of the same objective norms.33

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It is precisely his appreciation of the objectivity of these norms that distinguishes Brandom’s pragmatism from Rorty’s. For instance, after noting that Hilary Putnam once remarked that “a statement is true of a situation just in case it would be correct to use the words of which the statement consists in that way in describing the situation,”34 Rorty replies, “Putting the matter this way immediately suggests the question: correct by whose standards?”35 The implication is that since those in the majority serve as their own standard, it is impossible to criticize what they say except in relation to the standards of some alternative community, whether real or imagined. It is of course the case that the question of what is true can be answered only from one’s own perspective. However, it does not follow from the fact that what is taken to be true may differ from one perspective to the next that what is true differs from one perspective to the next, or that it can be identified with what is taken to be true from some privileged perspective – e.g., that of the “community.” From within our practices it can be affirmed that whether the application made of a term is correct depends on the situation being described. Instead of asking, “Correct according to whose standards,” we thus ought to ask, “Correct by virtue of what?”36 Rorty would object to the latter question on the ground that it presupposes some way of determining what is correct sub specie aeternitatis – from a standpoint external to our practices. But this is because he misconceives the nature of these practices. As James Conant notes, Rorty’s account of normativity presupposes “a very thin – essentially non-normative – understanding of the environing social ‘practices’” – an understanding which is much too meager “to enable one to get into view what it would be to misuse a linguistic expression, and thus what it could mean to be using an expression in accord with a practice.”37 When Rorty speaks of “practices,” he generally has in mind the patterns of speech and behavior typical of those in the majority. Insofar as he treats these patterns as normative – as determinative of what it is correct to say or believe – Rorty conflates two senses of “practice” that need to be distinguished. The rejection of a supposed perspective external to our practices should not be taken to imply that there is nothing that transcends various patterns of behavior and belief – including accepted patterns of inference – to which these patterns are answerable; indeed, it has precisely the opposite implication. From within our respective perspectives we can thus affirm what Rorty feels compelled to deny – namely, the “normative surplus of practice (as attributed by an interpreter) over behavior (nonnormatively specified).”38

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Justification and the rationality of dissent In Chapter 1 I noted that because he treats justification as a purely sociological phenomenon (i.e., as a matter of securing the approval of one’s immediate audience), Rorty is incapable of seeing how an individual could be said to be rationally warranted in rejecting what everyone else around her accepts, or in accepting what they reject. When – prior to being broken by O’Brien – Winston claims that two plus two equals four, and that he has seen a photograph of Rutherford, his claims fail to cohere with what those around him are saying. These are not claims that his peers accept, or that they will let him get away with. Thus, according to Rorty’s account, they are not claims that Winston can be warranted in making. But if we conceive of the relevant practices in normative rather than purely sociological terms, it becomes possible to see that dissent can be warranted when those around one fail to act in accordance with demands internal to a shared practice – a practice to which everyone who uses the language tacitly commits herself. Since, as we have seen, we may in particular cases disagree about what the norms implicit in that practice require, we may also disagree about whether in particular cases dissent is warranted or not. However, the important point here is that the latter question cannot be answered merely by taking a vote or conducting a poll. It is itself a normative matter that can be settled only by comparing and debating actual evidential and inferential claims, rather than, as Rorty argues, a “sociological matter, to be ascertained by observing the reception of S’s statement by her peers.”39 The statement “the evening star is Venus” is true not because our peers allow us to say it, and not because we have a way of grasping truth from a point of view external to our practices, but only if the evening star really is Venus. And we are warranted in saying that the evening star is Venus only if we have arrived at this conclusion in accordance with the norms internal to our practices – as opposed, say, to randomly drawing names of gods and goddesses out of a hat. If those around us abide by these same norms, and if they share the relevant background beliefs, then what they say may coincide with what we say.40 But the agreement that is reached is not itself what constitutes our warrant. It is rather a by-product of everyone individually thinking for herself. Similarly, within the context of Orwell’s novel, Winston is warranted in claiming to have seen a photograph of Rutherford not because his peers are willing to let him get away with it – they aren’t – and not

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because he has access to a way of determining warrant sub specie aeternitatis – what would that even mean? – but because (unlike those around him) he abides by the norms to which the use of terms like “photograph” and the making of perceptual claims in general commit one. Conant writes: Winston’s claims are warranted because they are in accord – not with what his peers, in fact say, but – with what his peers should say. Winston’s statement that he saw a photograph of Rutherford is warranted (not because he possesses some way of determining warrant sub specie aeternitatis, but rather) because he faithfully adheres to the only coherent norms members of his community have for applying concepts … and for making claims.41 What Winston’s peers should say is determinable in reference not to the sort of decontextualized standards of which Rorty is rightly skeptical, but to “the norms inherent in the community’s practices for making claims” – norms his peers can be accused of failing to observe.42 Insofar as he treats agreement as the source of warrant, Rorty is operating with a reified notion of the “community.” As we saw in Chapter 4, the community is simply a collection of individuals, and thus it cannot be contrasted with the individual in the way Rorty’s view requires. Thus, it does not follow that when one’s claims do not cohere with what others are saying, they are necessarily unwarranted and irrational. As Conant observes, “It is this capacity of individuals to assess the truth of claims on their own that threatens the absolute hegemony of the Party over their minds.”43 In reply to Conant’s criticisms, Rorty notes that memory claims are not “intrinsically veridical”: one sometimes misremembers.44 But this possibility does not somehow undermine our reliance on memory in general. Particular memory claims can indeed be defeated by particular considerations that tell against their veridicality, but in the absence of such considerations they stand. This is itself part of our practice.45 That one’s memories do not cohere with what others claim may of course cast some degree of doubt on their veridicality. However, potential “defeaters” can also be defeated. If Winston’s only reason for doubting his memory is that it does not cohere with the assertions made by those around him, and if he has reason to believe that the assertions made by those around him are not generally reliable, then he can be warranted in sticking by his guns. Of course, memory claims are

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by their very nature susceptible to doubts to which other kinds of statements are not – particularly when considerable time has elapsed subsequent to the remembered event. Thus, even if we grant that Winston’s memories are insufficiently strong evidence to support his claim to have seen a photograph of Rutherford, it does not follow that no evidence would be sufficient to warrant his dissent.

Answerability As we have seen, Rorty argues that instead of thinking of ourselves as answerable to the world platonistically conceived, we ought to see ourselves as answerable to one another. McDowell has pointed out, however, that these alternatives need not be construed as exhaustive of the options. What gives the seeming problems of mainstream modern epistemology their seeming urgency is not the sheer idea that inquiry is answerable to the world. The culprit, rather, is a frame of mind in which the world to which we want to conceive our thinking as answerable threatens to withdraw out of reach of anything we can think of as our means of access to it.46 McDowell argues, however, that “the threat of inaccessibility is not part of the very idea of the world as something other than ourselves to which our investigative activities are answerable.”47 It seems that in the process of rejecting the “world well lost,” Rorty ends up losing quite a bit of our ordinary world.48 What Rorty apparently fails to appreciate is that it is only within our practices, and not by getting “outside” them, that we can make contact with the real world. No doubt a large part of the problem is that – as we have seen – Rorty fails to distinguish carefully enough between our practices (in the relevant sense) and the things we may happen to say. Thus, he argues that, because “we shall never be able to step outside language,” we lack the capacity to distinguish between mere opinion and genuine knowledge, and between appearance and reality.49 However, to insist on such distinctions, McDowell notes, “is not to try to think and speak from outside our practices; it is simply to take it seriously that we really mean what we think and say from within them.”50 Rorty argues that we ought to stop thinking of ourselves as answerable to the world. But answerability to the world seems to me a natural and perfectly appropriate way of characterizing our situation in view of

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the obligations perceptible from within our practices. Indeed, unless we continue to see our investigative activities as answerable to the world, it is unclear how we can continue to see them as investigative activities – as opposed, say, to the purely formal moves of a game. For as McDowell notes, “Norms of inquiry are normative for the process of inquiry precisely because disquotability is the norm for its results.”51 To be sure, the world that is the subject of our investigations cannot be identified with the metaphysical “world well lost” without making investigation impossible; however, it cannot simply be identified with the world as we subjectively take it to be without making investigation pointless. Brandom writes: [O]ur practice puts us in touch with facts and the concepts that articulate them – we grasp them. But what we grasp by our practice extends beyond the part we have immediate contact with (its handles, as it were); that is why what we grasp is not transparent to us, why we can be wrong even about its individuation. How the world really is determines what we have gotten a hold of; but even though for that reason we do not know all the details about it, we still genuinely grasp it.52 Understood from within our practices, the world stands above, but not out of reach of, our investigative activities. The world thus understood is nothing more, but nothing less, than the world with which we interact in myriad quotidian ways. In Chapter 1 I referred to this understanding of answerability as “ordinary realism.” It is an innocuous position, but not for that matter an insignificant one. Here, however, it might be objected that what – admittedly with certain reservations – I have consented to label a form of realism is ultimately only disguised idealism. After all, the world to which I am suggesting we are answerable is a world understood from within language. Habermas raises this concern in relation to Brandom’s thought, which he characterizes as “a linguistic variation on an objective idealism.”53 Habermas praises Brandom for wanting “to take account both of truth’s claim to universality – and of the supposition of an identical world.”54 He also applauds Brandom’s refusal to grant “the actually prevailing consensus of the linguistic community an ultimate epistemic authority.”55 However, he charges that Brandom “does not conceive of our contract with the world as one that surprises us in the sense of constraining our attempts to cope with reality.”56 But this line of criticism depends precisely on refusing to appreciate that the world

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understood from within language can nevertheless function as a rational constraint on what is said – that it is the sort of thing to which one could be answerable. As McDowell notes, “It reflects the conviction that we have to choose between a coherentist denial that thinking and judging are subject to rational constraint from outside, on the one hand, and an appeal to the Given as what imposes the constraint, on the other.”57 The point, however, is that no such choice is required. It is possible to situate answerability within our practices, without denying that it is the world (in the only coherent sense that can be given this phrase) to which we are answerable. Although Brandom is happy to acknowledge that the world constrains our attempts to cope with it, he denies that “one can start with a conception of a world of objects and build up an intelligible account of what facts involving them (including, crucially, modal and normative facts) consist in.”58 His pragmatic approach insists that “in the order of understanding, discursive practice has a certain priority: one cannot understand what facts and concepts are without also understanding the practice of making claims and inferences.”59 On Brandom’s account, facts are true claims (where, by “claims,” he means claimable contents, rather than acts of claiming). These contents stand in inferential relations to one another, and thus they must be understood as conceptually structured. In short, facts “are distinguished precisely by their being in principle statable.”60 Thus, Brandom notes that although it is “in a sense up to us which noises and marks express which claims,” it is “not up to us which claims are true.” This is because “empirical and practical constraint on our arbitrary whim is a pervasive feature of our discursive practice.”61 Habermas, however, seems to want something more. He complains that on Brandom’s account – an account which, he notes, has its roots in the thought of Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger – “nothing but the provocation of ‘intraworldly’ contingencies is concealed behind objectivity – contingencies that have to be articulated in ‘our’ concepts and constructively dealt with ‘by us.’”62 Habermas contrasts such a view with the notion of “an independent world that can challenge even our best descriptions”63 by terminating “its hitherto proven willingness to play along in an action-context that no longer functions.”64 He writes, “The objective world can register this ‘protest’ only performatively by refusing to ‘go along with’ targeted interventions in a world of causally interpreted sequences of events.”65 In these passages, Habermas seems to be conceiving of the causal impact of the world as something which penetrates our practices and affords us a fleeting

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glimpse, as if from “sideways on,” of what lies outside them. But this is surely a confusion. The causal influence of the world on our practices is itself something that can be appreciated from within these practices. There is thus, so far as I can see, nothing in this vicinity that Brandom’s account cannot accommodate, and thus no reason to demote it to a form of “idealism.” Habermas rejects the “conceptual-realist assumption of a world that is ‘in itself’ propositionally structured,” in favor of a conceptual nominalism which “conceives the world as the totality of spatiotemporally individuated ‘objects’ about which we can state facts.”66 Here, however, it must be kept in mind that the Wittgensteinian claim that the world is the totality of facts is not intended as an alternative to the idea of a world of objects, for as Brandom points out, a “world of objects that can have facts true of them is, as such, conceptually structured.”67 The priority given to discursive practice on Brandom’s account is an explanatory priority. Brandom is thus able to insist that inquiry must answer to facts that antedate the institution of these practices,68 and that some of these facts – or the objects which they involve – can perfectly well be conceived of as causally significant. Of course, the concepts in terms of which the world is articulated are “our” concepts. But this does not have the implication Habermas seems to think it does – that of removing an important constraint on our thinking. Indeed, it has the opposite implication. It is a condition of the possibility of the world’s functioning as a constraint on our thinking that the world be located within the realm of what can be thought, while simultaneously being differentiated from the thought which it must constrain. Thus, McDowell writes, external constraint “comes from outside thinking, but not from outside what is thinkable.”69 In a similar vein, Brandom argues that “[i]t is wrong to think of facts and the objects they involve as constraining linguistic practice from the outside – not because they do not constrain it but because of the mistaken picture of facts and objects as outside it.”70 Neither Sellars’s “Given” nor Rorty’s “world well lost” could function as a rational constraint, precisely because each is placed outside the realm of the conceptual and thus rendered unthinkable. To speak of the “realm of the conceptual” – as I just did – can itself be misleading, however. There is, of course, an important difference between what Brandom calls “practices of concept use and the nonconcept-using world in which that practice is conducted.”71 But as McDowell emphasizes, in attempting to understand our relation to the world, “we must not picture an outer boundary around the sphere of

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the conceptual, with a reality outside the boundary impinging inward on the system.”72 Such a picture would make sense only if we could view the relation between thought and the world “from sideways on.”73 Insofar as he rejects such a (rampantly) platonistic perspective, McDowell agrees with Rorty. But what McDowell recognizes, and Rorty apparently does not, is that the rejection of such a perspective “requires us to delete the outer boundary from the picture.”74 Brandom makes a similar point. After noting that “[t]he way the world is, constrains proprieties of inferential, doxastic, and practical commitment in a straightforward way from within those practices,”75 he writes in a footnote, “So to speak – for according to the idiom being recommended, there is nothing that is in principle ‘outside’ discursive practice.”76 In rejecting the metaphysical – as opposed to the ordinary – distinction between appearance and reality we do not forfeit the world; rather, we retrieve it. To borrow the terms of the epistemological tradition we are here repudiating, “appearance just is the reality we aspire to know (unless things have gone wrong in mundane ways).”77 What must be given up is not the notion of answerability to the world, but the notion of a gap between “sayable and thinkable contents – thought of as existing self-contained on their side of the epistemic crevasse – and the worldly facts, existing on their side.”78 We are not, therefore, as Rorty sometimes suggests, “trapped” within our practices, unable to “turn to the facts,” as if facts could be gotten at only from outside our practices. When the imagined “outer boundary” is erased, it can be appreciated that although thought can be false, “there is no distance from the world implicit in the very idea of thought.”79 As we have seen, Rorty conceives of the notion of answerability to the world in terms of an infantile deference to power. Consequently, he suggests that it is represents an obstacle to human development that we would be better off without. But I have argued that it is the notion of answerability that enables the individual to resist the tyranny of the majority. Far from offering an alternative to power, the community – conceived as a majority – is one of its primary incarnations. At one point in Orwell’s novel, Winston writes, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”80 Rorty interprets this passage to mean that Orwell’s concern is with freedom of expression, not objectivity. On this reading, it is a matter of indifference that Winston believes that two plus two make four: he might just as well have written that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make six.”81 But Orwell’s point is better under-

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stood as a point about the recalcitrance of truth to power. The individual is cognitively free vis-à-vis her community precisely insofar as she is answerable to something beyond consensus. What matters is not merely that Winston is able to say that two plus two make four, or even that he believes it, but that the truth of the matter is independent of what anyone says or believes. Thus, we can conclude, pace Rorty, that to see ourselves as answerable to something other than the community is not to see ourselves as subservient before sheer power, but to see power – including the power of the community – as answerable to the force of reasons.

Moral obligation in context In Chapter 4 we examined Lewis Carroll’s regress argument and noted that its moral is that explicit rules cannot by themselves guarantee the validity of a deductive inference. Once this is recognized, we may be tempted to doubt what Wittgenstein referred to as the hardness of the logical “must.” In other words, we may come to suppose that in the absence of what Simon Glendinning refers to as “absolutely authoritative reasons or rules,” the logical can be reduced to the merely psychological or – if one is inclined to appeal to the community over against the individual – the merely sociological. But Wittgenstein’s point is that this way of construing the alternatives results in a false dichotomy (or false trichotomy). Wittgenstein does not reject the hardness of logical necessity; rather, his point is “simply that we must avoid a mistake about the perspective from which the demands of the logical ‘must’ are perceptible.”82 McDowell argues that a similar point can be made about what we might, by analogy, term the moral “must.” According to this way of thinking, “moral values are there in the world, and make demands on our reason.” However, “the world in which moral values are said to be is not the externally characterizable world that a moral platonism would envisage.”83 From within our moral practices it can be recognized that we are indeed morally answerable to something larger than the community to which we belong. As we have seen, because Rorty rejects an illusory point of view external to our practices, from which we could supposedly compare them with what he refers to as “the moral law,” he feels compelled to reject talk of “moral obligation” as similarly illusory. Thus, he suggests that those interested in promoting human rights – including the rights of women – should attempt to do so by appealing to the sentiments,

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rather than to objective obligations. However, I argued that Rorty is not entitled to invoke the concept of human rights without talking about obligation in some more robust sense than the putative obligation to conform to the expectations of one’s peers. What Rorty fails to recognize, I suggest, is that here, as in the theoretical cases discussed earlier, “answerability” can be understood within the context of our practices without collapsing into simple group-think. The moral need not be reduced to the purely sociological. In Chapter 1 I noted that although Rorty emphasizes agreement, he neglects the vital question of how such agreement is achieved. However, just as there are normative relations of inference that operate in the kind of intellectual contexts that Carroll was discussing – relations that are implicit in practice as opposed to explicit in the form of principles like the ones that the Tortoise slyly insists on having Achilles write down in his notebook – so, I have argued, there are normative relations of inference that govern the conclusions derived from moral considerations. It is in light of these relations that an individual can be said to possess determinate moral responsibilities vis-à-vis certain facts about the world. How to understand the relationship between facts and values is, of course, one of the familiar conundrums of moral theory. It has famously been argued – by Hume, among others – that it is logically impossible to move directly from one to the other – that one cannot “derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’” On the Humean view, there is something mysterious about the familiar move from a factual premise to a conclusion about what ought to be done. But this is because the Humean treats “facts” as properties of the world as it might be characterized from a point of view external to our moral practices. In other words, the alleged gap between facts and values is itself a by-product of the platonistic urge to transcend our language – in this case our moral language. When, by contrast, one views the world from the point of view constituted by one’s competence in a moral practice, it becomes evident that certain facts have moral significance. Put slightly differently, one’s commitments – those propositions one takes to be true – can entail obligations. In these cases, “ought” is not derived from “is,” as if some sort of alchemical transmutation were taking place: rather, the content of the term “ought” is exhausted by the reasons one presents on behalf of the course of action one is recommending in this way.84 The truth in the Humean argument about the impossibility of moving directly from facts to values is that the empirical observations of, say, the physicist or the biologist – observations of nature conceived

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as the realm of law – cannot serve as the basis of our moral practices: we cannot somehow weave relations of moral inference out of morally inert descriptions of the world. But given those practices, observations of factual states of affairs can nevertheless perfectly appropriately serve as the justificatory basis of – i.e., as providing warrant for – particular moral judgments.85 Rorty holds that “people are morally responsible for whatever their peers tend to hold them morally responsible for.”86 But such a view emphasizes agreement at the wrong level. The level at which agreement matters is not the level of particular conclusions, but the level of practice. Here “practice” refers not to the behavior the moral correctness of which is in question, but to the grammatical constraints to which the use of our moral vocabulary commits us – the relations of material inference licensed within our community of moral discourse. The question of what is required by the resulting moral demands cannot be reduced to the question of whether or not one’s peers hold one accountable to these demands. Sabina Lovibond thus writes: [T]he presence in a language of normative or critical terms reflects the material fact that (if not always, then at least overwhelmingly often) the people who speak that language agree in accepting certain modes of thought and conduct as correct, and rejecting others as incorrect. That is to say, it reflects the existence of intellectual and moral norms within the community in question. But this does not imply that when we call a proposition ‘true’ we mean that it commands general agreement, or that when we call something ‘good’ we mean that it is generally approved of.87 To say of an action that it is “good” or “right” is to say neither that it is an action of which one approves (as emotivists maintain) nor that it is an action of which one’s peers approve (as Rorty argues). Of course, one may approve of an action because one regards it as the right thing to do; but the approval is not itself what constitutes or confers warrant, much less what makes it the right thing to do. Because, as I argued in Chapters 5 and 6, the participants in a Weltbild generally agree as to what is a reason for what, it often is possible to distinguish between a person’s actual behavior and the kind of behavior that same individual would, on reflection, acknowledge to have been morally warranted. One’s moral responsibilities thus enjoy a kind of independence in the sense that it is possible deliberately to act contrary to what one acknowledges those responsibilities to require. In

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such cases, one forfeits one’s claim to be morally justified. One may, of course, have non-moral reasons for acting as one does, but from a moral standpoint these reasons at most explain – rather than justify or excuse – this course of action. It might thus be said that such responsibilities are objective – in a weak sense – insofar as they do not depend on what one’s peers are, as a matter of fact, willing to let one get away with. However, one’s moral responsibilities are also objective in the stronger sense that the question of what one’s responsibilities are cannot be reduced to the question of what they are taken to be. If the community could be said to be the ultimate arbiter of what is correct, then any inference which failed to conform to the expectations of the majority could be declared eo ipso invalid. On such an account, however, we surrender our ability to criticize the community itself. Consider the principle: “Women ought not to hold public office.” Not so long ago – as in many quarters still today – this principle might have seemed to express a widely accepted truth. If objective normative statuses could be said to correspond directly to actual attitudes of assessment, then any woman who aspired to hold office in such a society could be said to be violating the norms implicit in her culture; her behavior could be said to be irrational. On Brandom’s reading, however, principles such as this are simply endorsements of patterns of inference – patterns which, under suitable circumstances, can themselves be susceptible to criticism and revision. Attitudes of assessment serve to institute norms, but the norms thus instituted transcend these attitudes in the sense that “the instituting attitudes can be assessed according to those instituted norms and found wanting.”88 Whether the principle articulated by an endorsement accurately expresses an actual norm is itself a normative question. The objectivity of our norms in this strong sense is what makes possible criticism even of a culture’s dominant patterns of moral inference. From the critic’s viewpoint, the conclusion that a given individual ought not to run for public office belongs on the de dicto, rather than the de re, side of the equation. From her perspective, it is merely what is taken to follow, rather than what actually follows, from the facts. As we saw in Chapter 1, Rorty suggests that “the import of … pragmatism for movements such as feminism can be seen if we paraphrase Dewey as follows: do not charge a current social practice or a currently spoken language with being unfaithful to reality, with getting things wrong.”89 By “practice” here Rorty means precisely the behavior of which the feminist is critical. However, he confusedly treats this behavior as if it functioned normatively – as if it were somehow exempt from the kind

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of normative assessment that presumably underwrites the feminist’s dissatisfaction with her society.90 Rorty advises the feminist critic to “just make invidious comparisons between the actual present and a possible, if inchoate future,”91 but he fails to appreciate that insofar as they are normative – insofar as they purport to show that one kind of behavior is better than another (hence their invidiousness) – such comparisons are parasitic on the notion of objectivity of which Rorty is attempting to disabuse us. On a Brandomian account, the validity claimed for normative statements, including moral ones, is not fundamentally different in kind from that claimed for empirical statements. In both cases it is possible to make sense of the notion of objectivity in terms of the scorekeeping structure of our discourse. In this respect, the view for which I am arguing differs importantly from Habermas’s. As we saw in Chapter 2, Habermas insists upon a strict line of demarcation between theoretical and practical discourse. Because the world to which the former must respond is conceived as “an objective world from which [human beings] can obtain no normative guidance for their dealings with one another, they have to reach agreement in common on which norms they want in order to regulate their co-existence legitimately.”92 As we have seen, Habermas treats the “objective world” as a collection of “spatiotemporally individuated objects,” and thus he can find no place in it for value. Consequently, although Habermas affirms a realist conception of empirical truth, he settles for a merely epistemic conception of moral validity – albeit an epistemic conception that conceives of justification in idealized (rather than merely local) terms. He writes: “Truth” is a justification-transcendent concept that cannot be made to coincide even with the concept of ideal warranted assertibility. Rather, it refers to the truth conditions that must, as it were, be met by reality itself. In contrast, the meaning of “rightness” consists entirely in ideal warranted acceptability. For we ourselves contribute to the fulfillment of the validity conditions of moral judgments and norms by constructing a world of well-ordered interpersonal relationships.93 On the account for which I am arguing, however, “moral rightness” is just as justification-transcendent a notion as “empirical truth.” For this view sees no reason to insist that the world is one from which human beings, properly educated, can obtain no moral guidance. To be sure, the world thus conceived is richer than that part of it with which

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scientific inquiry is principally concerned. However, it does not follow – as Habermas supposes – that because we can obtain no such guidance from the morally inert, spatiotemporally individuated objects of scientific investigation, we must seek it somewhere other than in “the objective world.”94 By rejecting a structural difference between the validity claimed for moral statements and the validity claimed for empirical statements, the view for which I am arguing undermines the plausibility of Habermas’s contention that practical discourse is governed by special presuppositions such as (U). Habermas invokes (U) in order to distinguish his epistemic notion of moral validity from other epistemic notions, such as Rorty’s, which fail to safeguard the universality of moral locutions. Thus, as we have seen, he argues that, “[b]y justifying (U), discourse ethics rejects the basic assumptions of ethical relativism, which holds that the validity of moral judgments is measured solely by the standards of rationality or value proper to a specific culture or form of life.”95 Insofar as I questioned the relation between interests and norms implicit in Habermas’s formulation of (U), I may initially have appeared to be siding with the relativist – or at least with those, like Rorty, who equate validity with peer-acceptability. However, it should now be clear that the view for which I am arguing rejects (U) in favor not of the ethical relativism against which it is intended to serve as a bulwark, but of the kind of objectivity that characterizes our theoretical discourse. Here it might be wondered whether the distinction between moral discourse and discourse of non-moral varieties can itself be maintained. Brandom himself entertains such doubts – without either endorsing or dismissing them – when he writes, “One might take it … that although what are usually denominated ‘moral’ reasons for action are, at least often, genuinely reasons for action, there is nothing in particular that such reasons have in common that would justify grouping them together as moral reasons.”96 One could, of course, adopt such a “natural kind skepticism” about morality without assimilating all reasons to instrumental ones.97 Personally, however, I am inclined to agree with McDowell when he writes: Insofar as it matters to classify questions about what to do as moral or otherwise (which is perhaps not very far) anyone who has the idea at all can tell a moral question when she sees one. People who care about morality do not have a problem distinguishing “moral” facts from other states of affairs in the world. And it strikes me as

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dubious that the way to address those who do not have the idea of the moral at all is to give them a definition.98 The point, in any case, is that if a line of demarcation is to be drawn, it will be not on the basis of the kind of validity (epistemic or nonepistemic) claimed in each context, but – presumably – on the basis of the subject matter at issue.99 As we have seen, Rorty contends that there is no way to “break out of the social practices around you into a realm that transcends those practices.”100 However, his use of spatial metaphors in this context is misleading, since it gives the impression that our practices were geographically bounded in some way. As we have seen, the notion of such boundaries belongs to the very “sideways-on” view of language that Rorty purports to find unintelligible. Moreover, Rorty is wrong to draw the conclusion that one would need to be able to “break out” of one’s practices in order to find a foothold from which to criticize the institutions of a society or the behaviors of its members. Rorty suggests that those in power might be brought to do good to those who are weak out of niceness, rather than out of obligation. But to be able to claim that the powerful are under an obligation does not require us to step outside our practices; on the contrary, it requires us to remain within them. Contrary to what Rorty suggests, our practices are not limitations on – but conditions of – the possibility of social criticism. As we have noted, Rorty attributes the “residual popularity” of the notion of moral obligation to our resentment of the purported fact “that the people on top hold the future in their hands, that everything depends on them, that there is nothing more powerful to which we can appeal against them.”101 However, it should now be clear that moral normativity – like other forms of rational normativity – can be conceived otherwise than in terms of power. The recognition of the authority of the moral “ought” is precisely the recognition that there is something other than power to which the exercise of power is itself answerable. Thus, it is a mistake to conflate moral obligation with “a bottom-up way of achieving utopia, a quick reversal of fortune that will make the last first.”102 No one but the most innocent among us could fail to recognize that there is a sense in which the wicked prosper – not only in spite, but because, of their wickedness. To conceive of morality as more powerful than power is to fail to appreciate what is distinctive about the demands it imposes, to fail to see these demands precisely as normative.

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Conclusion: consequences of pragmatism? Let us recall from Chapter 1 some of the conclusions that Rorty takes to be “consequences of pragmatism”: (1) Truth is what “our peers will, ceteris paribus, let us get away with saying.”103 (2) Whether S’s statement is warranted is a “sociological matter, to be ascertained by observing the reception of S’s statement by her peers.”104 (3) “There is no procedure called ‘turning to the facts’” that would enable those in totalitarian societies to maintain a distinction between truth and propaganda.105 (4) “[P]eople are morally responsible for whatever their peers tend to hold them morally responsible for.”106 (5) “[M]oral obligation does not have a nature, or a source, different from tradition, habit and custom.”107 (6) “[W]hen the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form ‘There is something in you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond these practices which condemns you.’”108 Although these six quotations are drawn from five different sources (the earliest dating from 1979 and the most recent from 2000), it is easy to detect in them a common theme. This theme is well summedup in Rorty’s definition of pragmatism as “the doctrine that there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones – no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow inquirers.”109 In each of these six remarks, Rorty appeals to the community to fill the gap left by the retreat of “the world” or “the moral law” as that to which we are answerable. In each instance, however, what Rorty says is simply wrong: (1) that one’s peers will let one get away with a statement does not mean that it is true, (2) or that it is warranted; (3) there is a procedure called “turning to the facts”; (4) one’s moral responsibilities cannot be identified with what one’s peers say that they are, (5) nor are they merely customs or habits; and (6) there is something to be said to the torturer who violates the innocent, even if what the torturer does is

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sanctioned by the rest of his or her society. In forcing us to choose between a platonistic conception of answerability and a view that refuses to acknowledge any constraints except the (ultimately nonrational) constraints provided by the majority of one’s peers, Rorty presents us with a false dichotomy. Ironically, what it leaves out is precisely the “ordinary realism” that a thoroughgoing pragmatism can help to bring back into view. By “thoroughgoing” I mean a pragmatism that refuses to try to adopt the kind of external vantage point on our practices that Rorty officially disavows but unofficially treats as intelligible. In earlier chapters I noted that Habermas attempts to extricate valid norms from the contexts within which moral justification can rationally be carried out, whereas Derrida seeks to keep our practices constantly in question by leaving room for innovation and difference when it comes to the application and extension of norms. I argued that both views misconceive the relation between norms and practices. However, Habermas and Derrida are right to resist the thought that we are trapped within customs beyond which there is nothing to which the critic can appeal. The solution, I have argued, consists in the recognition that a capacity for critical reflection is built right into our practices. Rorty argues that pragmatism is fundamentally incompatible with what he takes to be the “common element of radical politics,” namely, “the craving for a sublime Otherness, something to which the everyday predicates in terms of which we describe the difference between the beautiful and the ugly, the pleasant and the painful, do not apply.”110 He writes, “It seems strange to associate Habermas – the most sensible, temperate, and effective spokesperson for social democracy among contemporary philosophers – with such a craving. Yet from the perspective of my linguistic historicism, Habermas’s distrust of contextualism, his search for ‘universal validity,’ is one more symptom of that craving.”111 If, however, by “radical change” one means change in certain of the dominant institutions and beliefs of a society – and this is presumably what most radicals do mean and want112 – then it should be clear from what has been argued that there is no contradiction between the pragmatist’s emphasis on practice (understood normatively) and the critic’s appeal to something beyond the beliefs and patterns of behavior dominant within her society.

Postscript Doing Justice: Criticism and Philosophy

Since the time of Socrates, the relationship between the philosopher and the polis has been a notoriously vexed and contentious topic. At the heart of this debate is a philosophical question concerning the very nature of philosophy itself. In this concluding postscript I will attempt to distinguish the kind of attention required of the social critic from that required of the philosopher, by commenting briefly on the activity in which each is engaged. Ultimately, however, I will suggest that criticism and philosophy can best be understood not as the respective projects of distinct individuals, but as complementary activities, each of which can be carried out from within the normative space occupied by its practitioners. Having come this far together, readers may be inclined to continue on in different directions. Let us begin, then, by considering two rival points of view. The first of these takes its cue from Wittgenstein’s remark that “[t]he philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That is what makes him into a philosopher.”1 Because of this remark, and because he inveighed against the philosophical tendency to “meddle” in language, Wittgenstein is sometimes interpreted to have held that the philosopher must refrain from personal involvement in the practices she seeks perspicuously to represent.2 Allan Janik gives expression to this conception of the relation between philosophy and social criticism when he writes: Moreover, to be true to the spirit of Wittgenstein’s philosophizing, [philosophical investigation] would have to reject social criticism for a form of redescription of political phenomena that would cease to make them problematic to us. To achieve a philosophical perspective on politics the philosopher would have to 166

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remain outside the sphere of the political: a citizen belonging to no community.3 Janik notes that his “endorsement of Wittgenstein’s so-called quietism” may seem “offensive or absurd to politically engaged philosophers and intellectuals generally.” However, he argues that “there is a certain kind of discipline bound to Wittgenstein’s alleged quietism”4 – a discipline which involves refusing to impose one’s own partisan agenda on the subject matter on which one is reflecting. In contrast to those critics who, following Marx, contend that the point is to change the world, rather than simply to understand it, Janik suggests that “we might obtain a certain clarity about the political by leaving things how they are.”5 The second view of the relation between philosophy and social criticism emphasizes, by contrast, Kierkegaard’s repeated reminder that the philosopher is also a human being.6 Simon Critchley articulates this concern when he writes that “the philosopher is one who dwells in the polis, which is the space of doxa, and who questions, criticizes, and judges doxai.”7 The philosopher’s home is in the community – not somewhere outside it in the realm Aristotle reserved for gods and monsters – and her role in it is that of a gadfly. On Critchley’s account, the philosopher and the social critic are one and the same: philosophical reflection on our beliefs and practices is ipso facto critical reflection. Critchley writes, “philosophy is a constant activity of criticizing and legitimizing doxai. Socratic midwifery is simply the process of critical dialogue upon the doxai of a particular community which enables citizens to come to the truth of doxa.”8 Sabina Lovibond expresses a version of this view when she argues that “the ethical theorist [should be] pictured not as a mere onlooker, but also, and primarily, as an ethical subject, actively engaged in the mode of thought on which (as a theorist) she reflects, and finding her incentive to theory precisely in the desire to think more competently or intelligently about ethical matters.”9 Here it is precisely one’s interest in changing the world that the philosophical interest in understanding it is said to subserve. Those who champion one of these rival conceptions of philosophy may be inclined to dismiss the other as deeply misguided. However, it strikes me that each view has something important to offer. Those who, like Janik, rally around the first conception are concerned – rightly, in my view – to distinguish philosophical activity from the activity appropriate to the social critic. Their point is that the philosopher, unlike the social critic, is interested precisely in the fray as

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such, rather than in its outcome. Hers is a disinterested kind of an interest – an interest in how the game is played, rather than with winning. It is in this sense that philosophy can be said to involve wonder. On the other hand, those philosophers, like Critchley and Lovibond, who insist on the latter conception are concerned – again rightly, in my view – to refuse to arrogate to themselves an imagined perspective on our practices that is not itself grounded in practice. Philosophy, like critical activity, must be conceived as a thoroughly intra-linguistic enterprise: there is no perch “above the fray” from which it might be possible to engage in disembodied observation. There are no “mere onlookers,” as Lovibond puts it. Insofar as each of these rival conceptions of philosophy has something important to offer, each also helps to bring to light certain deficiencies in the other. The first conception seems to me to preserve a distinction between the perspective of the philosopher and that of the participant in discourse in a way that renders the former virtually unintelligible. After claiming that “[t]o achieve a philosophical perspective on politics the philosopher would have to remain outside the sphere of the political,” Janik proceeds to observe that this requirement “would tend to disqualify nearly everybody writing on the subject of political philosophy today.”10 Indeed, it would appear to disqualify Janik himself, who – on the very same page – suggests that “the question of what is political extends far beyond the ‘politics of the politicians’ to every sphere in which human beings compete to influence one another’s behavior.”11 If, as Janik goes on to claim, “the life of a speaking animal is shot through with politics,” then the philosophical stance he advocates – a sort of teleological suspension of the political – would seem, by his own admission, to be completely unfeasible.12 Moreover, even when remaining “outside” is feasible, it is not clear that the perspective of an “insider” is necessarily a biased perspective, or – for that matter – that the perspective of an “outsider” is necessarily unbiased. Thus, even if we grant that the philosopher’s role differs from that of a social critic, Janik’s conclusion that the philosopher must remain outside the domain she seeks perspicuously to represent does not seem required. On the other hand, while I agree with Lovibond that the ethical theorist – or, as I have preferred to say, the moral philosopher – is often also a participant in the kind of thinking on which she reflects, I find problematic her suggestion that the motivation to philosophize necessarily coincides with the motivation to be a better person. Just as an interest in the problems of fluid dynamics need not lead a physicist to the kind

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of reflection characteristic of philosophy of science, so a concern with moral problems need not – and typically does not – drive an individual to engage in anything resembling moral philosophy. And just as philosophers of science do not necessarily think more competently than their colleagues in physics departments about the problems with which the latter are professionally concerned, so moral philosophers do not necessarily think more intelligently than do others about the moral problems they encounter in their own lives. It is true, of course, that philosophy can help to clear up confusions (when it is not busily engendering them), but this by itself does not entail that philosophers are more intelligent participants in discourse than their nonphilosophically-minded counterparts.13 After all, the confusions with which philosophy deals are philosophical confusions – confusions that arise in the act of reflecting on everyday life, rather than in everyday life itself (except insofar as philosophical reflection can itself be said to belong to one’s everyday life).14 Moreover, the philosopher’s interest in morality need not be – and typically is not – limited to her interest in her own moral difficulties. While rightly insisting on the humanity of the philosopher, this latter view thus blurs the lines between philosophy and other disciplines, such that “philosophy” ceases to name a distinctive enterprise. The difficulty, then, is to see how it might be possible to honor two reasonable but seemingly incompatible commitments: (1) the notion that the philosopher should strive to give disinterested attention to disputed questions – not in an effort to settle these disputes but in an effort to understand their character – and (2) the fact that the philosopher is necessarily an existing human being. Ironically, in the very process of attempting to reflect philosophically on moral engagement, we may appear to be presupposing the sort of disengaged view from above that we have purported to disavow. This is the unsettling conclusion at which Michael Weston arrives in the final pages of an otherwise illuminating study of Kierkegaard’s thought and its relation to contemporary continental philosophy. Weston ends his book with a “concluding revocation” in which he suggests that Kierkegaard would have objected “to the sort of ‘distance’ which appears required” by philosophical discourse: That discourse has, in attempting an “exposition” of the existential dialectic and so a direct communication, presupposed a position outside it in “disinterest.” But such a position is subject to ethical criticism itself: it is inappropriate for an existing individual, and so

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inappropriate tout court. The only appropriate mode … recognizes that all reflection upon existence is by an existing individual … and thus must take place within the existential dialectic itself …15 What should we make of this conclusion? Notice, first, that Weston says that adopting a point of view outside discourse is “inappropriate” and “subject to ethical criticism.” But recall from Chapter 1 that Kierkegaard’s claim was not that the philosophical urge to achieve such a vantage point is unethical, but that it is comical.16 The reason it is comical is that such a perspective is unintelligible. Thus, if Weston has in fact succeeded in achieving a disinterested interest in discourse – and it is precisely this achievement for which he here feels compelled to apologize – he has plainly not done so by adopting a position outside existence. The confusion, I suggest, lies in equating a disinterested interest in discourse with a position “outside it.” Here it is important to appreciate that philosophy is itself an activity that takes place within the normative space occupied by its practitioners. Brandom writes, “The structure of [our] practices can be elucidated, but always from within normative space, from within our normative practices of giving and asking for reasons.”17 To be sure, the philosopher is not as such in the business of advocacy – and thus philosophical activity must be distinguished from the activity appropriate to the critic – but she cannot avoid writing from a particular perspective. After all, philosophers have lives – lives which are not wholly incidental to their vocation as philosophers. On this account, philosophy differs from other kinds of activities, including social criticism, not because it is carried out from a special point of view – as Janik imagines – but because it aims to reflect from within the game of giving and asking for reasons on the game of giving and asking for reasons. In this sense it is a descriptive as opposed to a prescriptive activity, but it is a descriptive activity that is pursued from within a particular normative space. I read Wittgenstein’s remark that “the philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas” as meaning not that the philosopher must somehow step outside the language she seeks to describe – for of course Wittgenstein, like Kierkegaard, stressed the absurdity of any such endeavor – but that the philosopher’s interest qua philosopher is not that of a partisan. The philosopher’s perspective can thus be compared to that of the author of the Iliad, of whom Simone Weil wrote, “One is barely aware that the poet is a Greek and not a Trojan.”18 What philosophy seeks is not a view from above the fray, but a view of the fray from within it.

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Doing Justice: Criticism and Philosophy 171

D.Z. Phillips has called the latter a “contemplative conception” of philosophy. It is contemplative insofar as it “demands a kind of attention to our surroundings that we are reluctant to give them.”19 This reluctance derives in part from the hold certain philosophical confusions can have on our thinking. But it also derives from the various other interests that vie for our attention – including the “interest in arriving at answers and solutions.”20 As Weil appreciated, it is precisely our rootedness that can create difficulties for a conception of philosophy that emphasizes the role these roots play in our thinking. Peter Winch has noted that philosophy “is a task of enormous difficulty, both at the technical level and also because of the moral demands it makes on the writer, who will of course him or herself have strong moral or religious commitments and will also be hostile to certain other possibilities.”21 Notice that Winch speaks of philosophy’s moral demands. This can be misleading if it is taken, on the one hand, to imply that the demands made on the philosopher issue from a particular moral outlook authorized by philosophy. That philosophy can be made to serve in this judicial capacity is, of course, precisely what Winch is denying. His remarks would be equally misleading if taken to mean that the philosopher qua individual must refrain from getting her hands dirty in concrete deliberation and action. Again, such a reading does violence to the intention of Winch’s point, which emphasizes rather than downplays the philosopher’s “strong moral or religious commitments.” Philosophy, when practiced contemplatively, is not incompatible with deep conviction. Far from advocating the detached vantage point of an aesthete or dilettante, a contemplative conception of philosophy emphasizes the infinite distance between merely knowing one’s way around a Weltbild and inhabiting it. What, then, can Winch mean in speaking of the moral demands that philosophical contemplation places on the philosopher? It is perhaps not coincidental that we may be inclined to speak of philosophy’s attempt to “do justice” to discourse. Wittgenstein once wrote, “Our only task is to be just. That is, we must only point out and resolve the injustices of philosophy, and not posit new parties – and creeds.”22 Philosophy’s demands might be said to be moral insofar as they ask us to try to understand what Winch calls “different possibilities of making sense of human life,”23 in despite of what can sometimes be an almost overwhelming urge to ignore or misrepresent these possibilities.24 As Wittgenstein himself observed, the obstacles to philosophical clarity are, in many cases, not intellectual obstacles arising at

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what Winch calls the “technical level,” but obstacles of the will. Thus, he writes, “working in philosophy … is really more like working on oneself.”25 Such a conception of philosophy as descriptive rather than prescriptive is sometimes claimed to harbor a conservative bias. For example, Christopher Norris associates Wittgenstein with the so-called “strong program” in the sociology of knowledge, which defines “knowledge” in terms of what is collectively endorsed. Comparing Wittgenstein’s views with “modish (i.e., French-derived) currents of thought,” Norris writes, “[T]he Wittgensteinian doctrine has probably done more harm through its placid endorsement of the way people talk and think within this or that language-game or cultural life-form, and hence its refusal to acknowledge that some such language-games might just be wrong – scientifically misinformed – or objectionable on other (e.g., moral or political) grounds.”26 He adds, “In its orthodox form this doctrine has acquired a remarkable, almost talismanic power to stifle thought and produce the kind of reflex conformist response that declares – in effect – ‘this is our (or their) language-game so critics had better keep off.’”27 But this view – which unfortunately is not unique to Norris – represents a gross misunderstanding. As we have seen, the practices which the philosopher seeks to describe are normative, rather than merely sociological. In other words, a capacity for dissent and criticism is written right into these contexts. A practice – in the relevant sense – can be distinguished from a behavioral regularity or a disposition precisely insofar as “it is specified in explicitly normative terms – in terms of what, according to the practice, it is correct, or proper to do, what one ought to do, what one becomes committed or entitled to by a certain sort of performance, and so on.”28 Thus, although descriptive activity must be distinguished from critical activity, the one is not necessarily incompatible with the other. M. Jamie Ferreira writes, “If we simply count noses we will not be doing description in the way Wittgenstein intends. What Wittgenstein is advocating is a description of the norms generated in practice… . In other words, he calls for a description of the prescription within the practice…”29 The philosopher’s aim in describing the game of giving and asking for reasons is certainly not to put a stop to it. Moreover, insofar as conceptual norms are conceived as objective – insofar as the actual norms of a practice cannot be read directly off the responsive dispositions required for their institution – the philosophical attempt to elucidate these norms, while not reducible to advocacy, is nevertheless itself a normative enterprise. Brandom argues that

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Doing Justice: Criticism and Philosophy 173

logic – by which he means that branch of philosophy, rather than the norms that are its subject matter – “can help us make explicit (and hence available for criticism and transformation) the inferential commitments that govern the use of all our vocabulary” but that it is “not a canon or standard of right reasoning.”30 Even the question of what is a distinct practice – the question of how practices are to be identified and differentiated – is a normative question. Thus, the structure of our practices cannot simply be identified with what the philosopher takes it to be, as if the philosopher occupied a privileged point of view in this regard. Because philosophy itself takes place within the space of reason-exchange, its descriptions are also susceptible to contestation and revision. Of course, a contemplative conception of philosophy does not deny that it is possible for a philosopher – qua participant in moral discourse – to have a spirited interest in the resolution of moral problems; it simply denies that it is impossible for her to have any other kind of interest in them. Although social criticism and moral philosophy are distinct activities – the former characterized by a kind of moral interest and the latter by a kind of disinterested interest in morality – they are, however, complementary in the sense that they can be practiced by one and the same individual. The proof of this is that they have been (and continue to be) so practiced.31 The view for which I have argued here thus distinguishes between philosophy and social criticism, but not necessarily between the philosopher and the social critic. At the end of the day, there need be no contradiction between the claim that philosophy should “leave everything as it is,” and the critic’s conviction that the point is not to merely to understand the world, but to change it.

Notes Introduction 1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929), Axi, n.α. 2 Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” in Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, trans. Lewis White Beck (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1949), 286. 3 Horkheimer and Adorno famously began their Dialectic of Enlightenment with the following assessment: “In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.” Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1944 and 1972), 3. 4 Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 20. 5 News of Derrida’s death arrived as this book was going to press. His originality and philosophical gifts will surely be missed. To him we nevertheless owe a new appreciation of the way in which texts can take on a life of their own, apart from the conscious and intentional presence of their author. As he put it, “For the written to be the written, it must continue to ‘act’ and to be legible even if what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has written, for what he seems to have signed, whether he is provisionally absent, or if he is dead, or if in general he does not support, with his absolutely current and present intention or attention, the plenitude of his meaning, of that very thing which seems to be written ‘in his name.’” Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 316. 6 Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 23. 7 W. David Ross, Foundations of Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), 1. 8 Jeffrey Stout, Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents, 2d ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 109. 9 Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 253. 10 Insofar as one’s responsiveness to reasons is shaped by one’s education, it belongs to what McDowell calls one’s “second nature.” See John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 84–85. 11 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 25. 12 Thus, Kant distinguishes the “practical good” from the “agreeable.” The latter “influences the will only by means of feeling from merely subjective 174

Notes 175 causes … and not as a principle of reason.” Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 25. 13 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), xii. 14 Alice Crary, “Wittgenstein’s Philosophy in Relation to Political Thought” in The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London: Routledge, 2000), 118. 15 Crary, 118.

Chapter 1 Solidarity and Dissent: Rorty and the “Consequences of Pragmatism” 1 V.S. Naipaul, “East Indian” (1965) in Literary Occasions (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 41. 2 Alice Walker quoted in David Kaplan et al., Is it Torture or Tradition?, Newsweek, Dec. 20, 1993, 124. Quoted in Radhika Coomaraswamy, “Different but Free: Cultural Relativism and Women’s Rights as Human Rights,” in Religious Fundamentalisms and the Human Rights of Women, ed. Courtney W. Howland (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 79. 3 J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), 105. 4 Coetzee, 106. 5 Coetzee, 106. 6 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xlii. 7 Richard Rorty, “Response to Conant,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert B. Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 342. 8 Coetzee, 133. 9 Coetzee, 133. 10 Coetzee, 152. 11 Pragmatists disagree over the sense in which practice should be accorded priority. Rorty sometimes seems to suggest that there were no facts prior to the institution of discursive practices, whereas in Chapter 7 I will argue that the priority in question is explanatory. Such a view can acknowledge the existence of (non-normative) facts that pre-date language. 12 Wittgenstein insisted that “words are deeds.” See, e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1958), I:§546 and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch, ed. G.H. von Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 46e. Wittgenstein also acknowledged “trying to say something that sounds like pragmatism.” See Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), §422. Interestingly, however, he resisted categorization as a “pragmatist” – largely, it seems, because he took pragmatism to equate validity with practical utility. Thus, he writes, “I don’t call an argument a good argument just because it has the consequences I want (Pragmatism).” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Anthony Kenny (Berkeley: University of

176 Notes

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14 15

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26 27 28 29 30 31

California Press, 1974), 185. Of course, one need not endorse such a view in order to count as a pragmatist. For a useful discussion of Wittgenstein’s relation to pragmatism, see Russell B. Goodman, “Wittgenstein and Pragmatism,” Parallax 4:4 (October 1998): 91–105. “On my view,” Rorty writes, “James and Dewey were not only waiting at the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy traveled, but are waiting at the end of the road which, for example, Foucault and Deleuze are currently traveling.” Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xviii. Richard Rorty, “Response to Habermas,” in Rorty and His Critics, 60. Rorty has recently written, “If I were writing Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature now, I would do my best to avoid the words ‘metaphysics’ and ‘epistemology.’ … For using the names of purported disciplines buys in on exactly the understanding of the history of philosophy that I was trying to reject: the history of philosophy as a series of attempts to deal with familiar sets of problems – some ethical, some epistemological, some metaphysical.” Rorty, “Response to Williams,” in Rorty and His Critics, 214. Rorty notes that “one can be a philosopher precisely by being antiPhilosophical.” Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xvii. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 373. Rorty writes: “‘Platonism’ in the sense in which I use the term does not denote the (very complex, shifting, dubiously consistent) thoughts of the genius who wrote the Dialogues. Instead it refers to a set of philosophical distinctions (appearance-reality, matter-mind, made-found, sensibleintellectual, etc.): what Dewey called ‘a brood and nest of dualisms.’” These dualisms dominate the history of Western philosophy, and can be traced back to one or another passage in Plato’s writings.” Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, xii. In what follows I shall prefer the adjectival form “platonistic” over “platonic.” Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xix. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xvi. Rorty deems such a distinction “logocentric.” Richard Rorty, “Universality and Truth,” in Rorty and His Critics, 7. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 378. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 378. Rorty, “Response to Williams,” 215. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, xii. Rorty, “Emancipating our Culture,” in Debating the State of Philososphy: Habermas, Rorty, and Kolakowski, ed. Józef Niznik and John T. Sanders (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996), 25. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 164. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 176. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xxxii. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 76. Richard Rorty, “Relativism – Finding and Making,” in Debating the State of Philosophy, 44. Richard Rorty, “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983): 583–584.

Notes 177 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

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Rorty, “Response to Habermas,” 60. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 178 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 385. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 9. Richard Rorty, “Is ‘Post-Modernism’ Relevant to Politics?” Truth, Politics and ‘Post-Modernism’ (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1997), 36. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 173. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 173. Indeed, Cora Diamond suggests that tyrants might find Rorty’s own writings congenial. See Cora Diamond, “Truth: Defenders, Debunkers, Despisers,” in Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy, ed. Leona Toker (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), 195–221. Putnam also suggests that “a fascist could well agree with Rorty at a very abstract level – Mussolini, let us recall, supported pragmatism, claiming that it sanctions unthinking activism. If our aim is tolerance and the open society, would it not be better to argue for these directly, rather than to hope that these will come as the by-product of a change in our metaphysical picture?” Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, 24–25. Putnam, 21. Rorty, “Putnam and the Relativist Menace,” Journal of Philosophy 90 (1983): 450. Rorty, “Putnam and the Relativist Menace,” 449. Putnam has recently noted the apparent discrepancy between Rorty’s “sociological” notion of justification and his suggestion that “maybe a majority can be wrong.” Putnam writes, “[I]t is hard to see how the sociologist, qua sociologist, could determine that S is warranted in asserting p when a majority of S’s cultural peers disagree… . Can a sociologist, qua sociologist, determine that a majority is wrong? How? – by determining that the majority contains some dubious characters? Is ‘dubious character’ a sociological notion?” Putnam, “Richard Rorty on Reality and Justification,” Rorty and His Critics, 84. Rutherford was a political cartoonist who, having fallen out of favor with “the Party,” was convicted of treason and executed. Winston later discovers a newspaper photo that contradicts the “confession” extracted from Rutherford during his trial. See George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949), 75–79. Orwell, 219; quoted by Conant, “Freedom, Cruelty, and Truth,” 304. Richard Rorty, “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” in Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, ed. Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 225. Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 182. Rorty, Truth and Progress, 182. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 165. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 179. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xlii. Rorty, “Response to Conant,” 347. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xxxvii.

178 Notes 53 Rorty says that pragmatists “cannot make sense of an appeal from our community’s practices to anything except the practice of a real or imagined alternative community.” Rorty, Truth and Progress, 214. 54 Richard Rorty, “Truth and Freedom: A Reply to Thomas McCarthy,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 3 (1990): 640. 55 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 83. 56 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 78. 57 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 78. 58 Richard Rorty, “On Moral Obligation, Truth, and Common Sense,” in Debating the State of Philosophy, 50. 59 Rorty, “On Moral Obligation, Truth, and Common Sense,” 50. 60 Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 39, italics and bold font in original. 61 Rorty, “On Moral Obligation, Truth, and Common Sense,” 50. 62 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 217–218. 63 Rorty credits the Argentinean jurist and philosopher Edwardo Rabossi with the distinction between human rights foundationalism and a human rights culture. See Edwardo Rabossi, “La teoría de los derechos humanos naturalizada,” Revista del Centro de Estudios Constitucionales 5 (1990): 159–179. 64 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 326. 65 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 171. 66 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 185. 67 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 172. 68 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 181–182. 69 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 176. 70 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 179. 71 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 185. 72 Rorty, “Response to Habermas,” 63. 73 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna V. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 120, italics added. 74 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 213. 75 Thus, he writes: “We pragmatists are often told that we reduce moral disagreement to a mere struggle for power by denying the existence of reason or human nature, conceived of as something that provides a neutral court of appeal. We often rejoin that the need for such a court … is itself a symptom of power worship …” Rorty, Truth and Progress, 211, footnote 21. 76 For instance, Jack Donnelly writes, “The correlation of rights and duties is a standard topic in the theory of rights. As ordinarily conceived, A’s right to x with respect to B implies duties of B with respect to A’s having or enjoying x; i.e., A’s right entails B’s obligation.” Jack Donnelly, “Human Rights and Human Dignity: An Analytic Critique of Non-Western Conceptions of Human Rights,” The American Political Science Review 76: 2 (June 1982): 309. 77 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 190–191. 78 Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Don’t Be Cruel: Reflections on Rortyian Liberalism,” in Richard Rorty, ed. Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 152. 79 Elshtain, 152. 80 Elshtain, 153.

Notes 179 81 Philip P. Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There (New York: Harper Torchbooks), 10. Speaking, by contrast, of the town’s Vichy mayor, Hallie writes, “For him, moral obligations held only in the realm of ‘one of us’: native Frenchmen; they did not apply to ‘one of them’: foreigners, German Jews.” Hallie, 122. Note that the latter point is intended precisely as a criticism. 82 Elshtain, 154. 83 Recently Rorty has said that he “would concede … that one can give the notion of ‘moral obligation’ a respectable, secular, non-transcendental sense by relativizing it to a historically contingent sense of moral identity.” In this sense, it might be suggested, the Chambonnais acted on the basis of a moral obligation to save Jews – an obligation stemming from their collective identity as a community. They were obligated to rescue Jews insofar as they regarded themselves as so obligated. As Rorty himself proceeds to point out, however, according to this account of moral obligation, “a Nazi who could not live with himself if he spared a certain Jew is under a moral obligation to kill that Jew.” Rorty, “Response to Habermas,” 61. Such a view cannot accommodate the important distinction between what is morally required and what is taken to be morally required. 84 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xxix–xxx. 85 Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, xii. 86 This position might be characterized as a variety of what Paul Horwich terms minimalism. Horwich has observed that “[t]he term ‘realism’ is an over-used, under-constrained piece of philosophical jargon, and one can no doubt invent senses of it such that the minimalist approach qualifies either as ‘realist’ or ‘anti-realist.’” Paul Horwich, Truth, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 56. 87 Putnam writes, “If saying what we say and doing what we do is being a ‘realist,’ then we had better be realists – realists with a small ‘r.’ But metaphysical versions of ‘realism’ go beyond realism with a small ‘r’ into certain characteristic kinds of philosophical fantasy.” Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, 26. 88 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, ed. G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees, G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1978), VI §23.

Chapter 2 The Force of Reasons: Habermas on Norms and Justification 1 Plato, Crito, trans. G.M.A. Grube, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 48a. 2 See Jürgen Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” in Rorty and His Critics, 32. 3 Rorty, “Response to Habermas,” 36. 4 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 164. 5 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 83. Rorty writes, “I am trying to substitute a neo-Darwinian description of human beings for one which distinguishes sharply between what animals do (causal manipulation) and

180 Notes

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what we do (offering rationally convincing arguments).” Rorty, “Response to Habermas,” 59. Curiously, Rorty is not above employing what purport to be rationally convincing arguments to get this point across. Jürgen Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity: Revised Edition, ed. Peter Dews (London: Verso, 1992), 248. Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” 52. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 307–308. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1, 302. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1, 17. Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990), 87. Note that Habermas’s technical use of the term “discourse” is more narrowly extended than its use by other philosophers in reference to discussion or “talk.” See, e.g., Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 86ff. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 89. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 91. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 60. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 56. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 76. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 67. The use of the term “disruption” may be misleading, however, since it seems to imply a primordial consensus of some kind. On Habermas’s view, as we will see, a consensus may need to be established, before it can be “repaired.” Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 61. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 84–86. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 204. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 92–3. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 65. Formulated in this way, (U) is ambiguous as to whether the reference to “everyone’s interests” is meant in a “strong” sense – to refer to identical interests shared by all – or in a “weak” sense – to refer to everyone’s particular interests. In other words, it is ambiguous as between a collective and a distributive interpretation. In other writings, Habermas appears to endorse the strong interpretation. However, for a discussion of some of the difficulties that arise in connection with either interpretation, see Gordon Finlayson, “Does Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Moral Theory Apply to Discourse Ethics?” in Habermas: A Critical Reader, ed. Peter Dews (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 41–45. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 56. Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” 52. Thomas McCarthy, “Private Irony and Public Decency: Richard Rorty’s New Pragmatism,” Critical Inquiry 10 (1990): 360–361. Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” 50. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987), 323. Cf. Habermas’s remark that “[l]anguage games only work because they presuppose idealizations that transcend any particular language game; as a necessary condition of

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43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

possibly reaching understanding, these idealizations give rise to the perspective of an agreement that is open to criticism on the basis of validity claims.” Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 199. Michael Williams, Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of Skepticism (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 266. Quoted by Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” 40. McCarthy, 370. Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” 41, italics added. Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” 41. Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” 51. Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” 45. Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” 48. Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” 41. Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” 47–48. Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” 49. McCarthy, 370. Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 86. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 125. I will adhere to this distinction when expositing Habermas’s thought. Since, however, I ultimately reject his way of drawing this distinction, I use the terms interchangeably in most of the rest of this book. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 123. Lawrence Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), 410. Perhaps Kohlberg means that this is what is held to be right by a person at this stage of development. But this raises certain concerns about the possibility of adequately accounting for moral education in the way Kohlberg does. After all, is a child at this stage already sufficiently initiated into the practices of a moral community in order to warrant attributing to him or her developed conceptions of duty – ones which nevertheless differ importantly from those implicit in the community of which she is a part? Kohlberg, 411. Kohlberg, 412. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 177. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 104. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 109. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996), 113. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 201. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 162. Maeve Cooke writes, “In the case of questions of moral validity, universal agreement achieved under ideal justificatory conditions does not simply authorize validity, it guarantees the rightness of moral judgements. In short, whereas Habermas insists on the disjunction between truth and justification, he defends a purely epistemic conception of moral truth. Ideal rational acceptability exhausts the meaning of moral validity.” Maeve Cooke, “Critical Theory and Religion,” in Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century, ed. D.Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 233.

182 Notes 54 Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998), 38. 55 Jürgen Habermas, Truth and Justification, ed. and trans. Barbara Fultner (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), 8. 56 Habermas, Truth and Justification, 257. Of course, for Rorty the latter reference is missing even in the case of theoretical discourse. 57 Eagleton, 114–115. 58 Jürgen Habermas, Justification and Application, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), 143. 59 Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, 14. 60 Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1983), 12. 61 Jürgen Habermas, “Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in this World,” in Habermas, Modernity, and Public Theology, ed. Don S. Browning and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 231. 62 Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), 15. Indeed, even as early as 1971 Habermas recognized that religious practice, however confused, can harbor authentic human interests. Thus, one task of postmetaphysical philosophy is to “take into itself an interest in liberation and reconciliation, which till then had been interpreted in religious terms.” Habermas, PhilosophicalPolitical Profiles, 23. 63 Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, 15. 64 Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, 7. 65 Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, 10. 66 Habermas does not consider the question of whether a moral concept can retain its intelligibility when abstracted from the religious context in which it was originally embedded. Indeed, as I point out below, his entire project rests on a strict distinction between justification and application, which is subject to the objection that a norm would be unintelligible without some reference to its mode of application. For a discussion of how certain moral concepts can appear to live one in the absence of the religious framework of thought essential to their sense, see James Conant, “Reply: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Anscombe on Moral Unintelligibility,” in Religion and Morality, ed. D.Z. Phillips (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 250–298. 67 Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity, 249. 68 Cooke, 230. 69 Cooke, 231. Habermas himself is ambivalent with respect to whether this is simply a temporary phenomenon: “Philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will be able neither to replace nor to repress religion as long as religious language is the bearer of a semantic content that is inspiring and even indispensable, for this content eludes (for the time being?) the explanatory force of philosophical language and continues to resist translation into reasoning discourses.” Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, 51. He adds, “As long as no better words for what religion can say are found in the medium of rational discourse [philosophy] will even coexist abstemiously with the former, neither supporting it nor combating it.” Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, 145. In spite of such apparent expres-

Notes 183

70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

94 95 96 97

98 99 100

sions of détente, Habermas also seems to me to be more skeptical than Cooke is about the possibility of a distinctively religious form of validity: “The basic concepts of religion and metaphysics had relied upon a syndrome of validity that dissolved with the emergence of expert cultures in science, morality, and law on the one hand, and with the autonomization of art on the other.” Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, 17. Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, 7. Moreover, if the reference to “everyone’s interests” in (U) is interpreted to mean universally shared interests, then, to the extent that it makes sense to speak of “reasons” that might be adduced in favor of a moral norm, these reasons cannot include considerations whose relevance is determined in relation to particularistic religious convictions. Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, 39. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 67. See footnote 18. Habermas, Justification and Application, 36. Habermas, Justification and Application, 35. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 60. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 28: Law and Political Theory, trans. Thomas Gilby (Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1966), Q.94, Art. 4. I have benefited greatly from Stanley Cavell’s discussion of similar issues. See Cavell, 264. Plato, Euthyphro, trans. G.M.A. Grube, in Complete Works, 8d. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 60. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 60. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 206. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 205. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 206. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 206. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 206. Habermas, Justification and Application, 38. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 207. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 206–207. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 181. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 207. Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity, 251. Georgia Warnke, “Communicative Rationality and Cultural Values,” in The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Stephen K. White (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 131. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 65. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 217. Robert Piercey, “Not Choosing Between Morality and Ethics,” The Philosophical Forum 32, no. 1 (2001): 66–67. Frank I. Michelman, “The Problem of Constitutional Interpretive Disagreement: Can ‘Discourses of Application’ Help?” in Habermas and Pragmatism, ed. Mitchell Aboulafia, Myra Bookman, and Catherine Kemp (New York: Routledge, 2002), 114. See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §218. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 106. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 105.

184 Notes 101 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 107. 102 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 107. Cf. Habermas, Justification and Application, 35. 103 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 112. 104 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 108. Cf., 124, 152, 154. 105 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 106. 106 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 6. 107 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 65. 108 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 68. 109 J.M. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (London: Routledge, 1995), 102. 110 Habermas, Justification and Application, 43. 111 Bernstein, 101–102, italics added. 112 John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 33. 113 Robert Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts: A Reply to Habermas,” European Journal of Philosophy 8, no. 3 (2000): 363–364. 114 McDowell writes, “It is not to be denied that behaviour that is in fact virtuous can in some cases be found unsurprising through being what one would expect anyway, given an acceptably ascribed desire that is independently intelligible… . Such coincidences constitute possible points of entry for an outsider trying to work his way into appreciation of a moral outlook… . What is questionable is whether there need always be an independently intelligible desire to whose fulfillment a virtuous action, if rational at all, can be seen as conducive.” John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 83–84. 115 It may be objected that such a view also robs moral imperatives of their categorical nature by making them contingent upon a prior interest in moral considerations. As Phillips has noted, however, this line of argument confuses “the conditions under which a man has reasons for paying attention to moral considerations with his reasons for paying attention. He will not have such reasons unless he cares, but the fact that he cares is not his reason for caring.” D.Z. Phillips, Interventions in Ethics, 133. Phillips’s point can be illustrated by the fact that a lack of interest in moral considerations is not ordinarily taken to excuse a person from observing moral demands. 116 McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 86. 117 Interestingly, Habermas has much in common, on this point, with Rorty, who writes: “[W]hen I face a choice between incriminating my child or breaking my country’s laws by committing perjury, I start looking around for some ethical principles. I may not find any that help, but that is another question.” Richard Rorty, “Response to Simon Critchley,” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996), 41. What Rorty apparently fails to appreciate is that the choice he describes would pose a moral problem only for someone already in possession of a number of ethical or moral commitments. Indeed, I suspect that the nature of the problem – assuming it is indeed a moral problem at all – could not even be articulated without the use of distinctly moral terms like “betrayal,” “lies,” “duty,” and “obligation.”

Notes 185 118 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 199. He adds that “moralities are tailored to suit the fragility of human beings individuated through socialization.” Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 200. 119 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 199. 120 Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity, 250. 121 Peter Winch, Ethics and Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 172–173.

Chapter 3 Norms, Interpretation, and Decision-Making: Derrida on Justice 1 Aeschylus, The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 256. 2 Immanuel Kant, “On the Proverb: That May Be True in Theory, But Is of No Practical Use,” Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), 62. 3 McCarthy, 370. 4 Cicero, De Re Publica and De Legibus, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 319. 5 According to Cicero, “the most foolish notion of all is the belief that everything is just which is found in the customs or laws of nations. Would that be true,” he asks, “even if these laws had been enacted by tyrants?” Cicero, 343. 6 Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” trans. Mary Quaintance, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 14. 7 Derrida, 14. 8 Derrida, 21. I have taken the liberty of placing the word “justice” in inverted commas here, to make it clear that Derrida means to contrast it with what he calls “justice in itself.” The contrast, in other words, is between justice in itself and what we call “justice.” 9 Derrida, 22. 10 Derrida, 17. 11 Derrida, 17. 12 Derrida, 17. 13 Justice, according to Derrida, is “rebellious to rule.” Derrida, 22. 14 Derrida, 17. 15 Derrida, 23. 16 Derrida, 24–25. 17 Derrida, 4. 18 In what follows I concentrate on theoretical concerns internal to the deconstructive enterprise. However, it should be noted that concerns of a more practical nature about the relation between deconstruction and ethics had arisen around this same time in the wake of the 1987 revelation that Paul de Man, a Yale deconstructionist and friend of Derrida, had published anti-Semitic articles in the early 1940s. Mark Lilla writes, “These might have been dismissed as youthful errors had Derrida and some of his American

186 Notes

19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41

followers not then interpreted away the offending passages, denying their evident meaning, leaving the impression that deconstruction means you never have to say you’re sorry.” Lilla concludes, “It now appeared that deconstruction had, at the very least, a public relations problem, and that the questions of politics it so playfully left in suspension would now have to be answered.” Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), 175. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff, trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 146. Michel de Montaigne; quoted in Derrida, “Force of Law,” 12. Blaise Pascal; quoted in Derrida, “Force of Law,” 12. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 14. Derrida’s allusion is to the final line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 1974), §7. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 13–14. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 13. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 13. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 14. Derrida, Limited Inc, 150. Derrida, Limited Inc, 136. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 158. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 15. See also Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 28, and Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis, ed. Giacomo Donis and David Webb (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 56. In what might be characterized as an interesting deconstructive “slippage,” there seems to be a lack of agreement among Derrida’s English translators as to how this term is to be spelled. Mary Quaintance (“Force of Law”) and Peggy Kamuf (Specters of Marx) evidently prefer “undeconstructible,” whereas Giacomo Donis (A Taste for the Secret) opts for “indeconstructible.” For what it matters, I happen to favor the latter, since it corresponds better with the English “indestructible.” Simon Critchley, “Deconstruction and Pragmatism – Is Derrida a Private Ironist or a Public Liberal?” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, 37. Derrida, Limited Inc, 152. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 21, italics and inverted commas added – see footnote 8. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 20. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 20. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 19. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 15. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 40. Derrida made this remark in an interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta on June 17, 1971. Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), ix. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 90. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 25.

Notes 187 42 Derrida, “Force of Law,” 25. 43 Derrida, “Force of Law,” 25. 44 Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge; The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 47. 45 Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 17. 46 Jacques Derrida, “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” Deconstruction and Pragmatism, 82. 47 James K.A. Smith, “Re-Kanting Postmodernism?: Derrida’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone,” Faith and Philosophy 17 (October 2000), 566. 48 Derrida, “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” 82. 49 John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 47. 50 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 59. 51 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 13. 52 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 7. 53 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 23. 54 Simon Glendinning, On Being With Others: Heidegger – Derrida – Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 1998), 100. Crispin Wright interprets Wittgenstein along similar lines, arguing that “it might be preferable, in describing one’s most basic rule-governed responses, to think of them as informed not by an intuition (of the requirements of the rule) but [by] a kind of decision.” Crispin Wright, “Wittgenstein’s rule–following considerations and the central project of theoretical linguistics,” in Reflections on Chomsky, ed. Alexander George (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 240. 55 Derrida, Limited Inc, 107. 56 Derrida, Limited Inc, 8. As John Caputo puts it in the process of developing Derrida’s line of thought, “the effects of which ‘iterability,’ the code of repeatability, is capable cannot in principle be contained, programmed, or predicted.” John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 101. 57 Derrida, Limited Inc, 119. 58 Martin Stone, “Wittgenstein on Deconstruction,” in The New Wittgenstein, 86. According to Glendinning, “the possibility of repeating a linguistic element in new contexts, its iterability, is not to be explained by recourse to an indefinitely repeatable ‘form’ that we must learn to recognise and reidentify. Rather, the claim is that ‘this “form” only constitutes itself by virtue of its iterability’.” Glendinning, 125. 59 Derrida, “Force of Law,” 23, italics added. 60 Derrida, “Force of Law,” 23. 61 Derrida, “Force of Law,” 23. 62 Derrida, “Force of Law,” 16. I will later suggest, however, that there is a perfectly ordinary sense in which rules can be said to mandate particular forms of behavior. 63 Derrida, “Force of Law,” 23, italics added. 64 Derrida, “Force of Law,” 25, italics added. 65 See, e.g., Drucilla Cornell, “The Violence of the Masquerade: Law Dressed Up as Justice,” in Working Through Derrida, ed. Gary B. Madison (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 77–93.

188 Notes 66 Derrida, “Force of Law,” 16. 67 Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, 2d ed. (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1999), 275. 68 Derrida, “Force of Law,” 24. 69 “Those who consider it advantageous to be under a kingship hold that laws only speak of the universal and do not command with a view to circumstances… . Yet that same universal account should also be available to rulers; and what is unaccompanied by the passionate element generally is superior to that in which it is innate.” Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 111. 70 Derrida, Limited Inc, 144. 71 Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992), 157. Cornell’s use of the phrase “metalanguage” is, however, misleading. Habermas’s proposal is grounded transcendentally, but it does not invoke a new language. 72 Rorty, “Universality and Truth,” 20. 73 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 326. 74 Cornell helps to bring this out by contrasting Derrida’s position with that of Stanley Fish, whose views on law have much in common with Rorty’s views on social practices more generally: “For Fish, since law, or any other social context, defines the parameters of discourse, the transformative challenges to the system are rendered impotent because they can only challenge the system from within it. ‘There is’ no other ‘place’ for them to be but within the system. But for Derrida ‘there is’ no system that can catch up with itself and therefore establish itself as the only reality.” Cornell, “The Violence of the Masquerade,” 87. 75 Samuel C. Wheeler, III, Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 215. 76 Derrida, “Force of Law,” 14. 77 Derrida, “Force of Law,” 19. 78 Jacques Derrida, “I Have a Taste for the Secret,” in A Taste for the Secret, 21. 79 See Derrida, “Force of Law,” 25. 80 Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit, 113. 81 Derrida, “Force of Law,” 15. 82 Anselm Kyongsuk Min writes, “Deconstructive political praxis, then, comes down to ‘hoping’ for an impossible breach of the present, ‘bending’ and ‘twisting free’ of the present rules and conventions to ‘let a little alterity loose,’ and thus ‘preparing’ for the coming of justice, which we cannot ‘calculate’ or ‘program’ or ‘control.’” Anselm Kyongsuk Min, “The Other without History and Society – a Dialogue with Derrida,” in Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century, 178. 83 See Thomas McCarthy, Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), 97–119. 84 See Derrida, Positions, 71. 85 Smith, 571, footnote 32. 86 Nancy Fraser, “The French Derrideans: Politicizing Deconstruction or Deconstructing the Political?” Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

Notes 189 1989), 87. Some commentators, including Critchley, have attempted to associate Derrida’s conception of justice with that of Levinas – a move that might help to infuse the former with content by placing it within the context of what Levinas calls “Jewish humanism.” See, e.g., Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. Note, however, that Derrida himself has expressed reservations about such an assimilation. See, e.g., “Force of Law,” 22. 87 Axel Honneth draws on this dimension of Derrida’s thought to offer a critique of Habermasian discourse ethics. See Axel Honneth, “The Other of Justice: Habermas and the Ethical Challenge of Postmodernism” in The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, 289–323. By contrast, Simon Critchley suggests that Derrida’s emphasis on particularity would benefit from “a fullblown theory of justice, complete with a procedure, like the categorical imperative procedure, capable of assessing and testing the validity of moral norms and values and arbitrating particular cases in the light of certain shared and binding principles.” Thus, he proposes “a marriage between the Habermasian and Derridian frameworks, that is, between universalism and antiuniversalism.” Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, 269. Although I am sympathetic to Critchley’s concern to allow space for both universality and particularity, I am not convinced that it is possible to honor both insights without rethinking the relation between moral norms and moral decisions. In the following chapter I will attempt to do just that.

Chapter 4 Norms and Normativity: Between Regulism and Regularism 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A133/ B172. Brandom, Making It Explicit, 23. McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 242. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I: §84. In Carroll’s essay, the statements are: “(A) Things that are equal to the same are equal to each other. (B) The two sides of this Triangle are things that are equal to the same. (Z) The two sides of this Triangle are equal to each other.” Lewis Carroll, “What the Tortoise said to Achilles,” Mind 4, no. 14 (April 1895), 278. Carroll, 279. Carroll, 279–280. Glendinning, 102. Glendinning, 104. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I: §84. See Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). See Crispin Wright, Wittgenstein on the Foundations of Mathematics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980). McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 233. Glendinning, 100. Glendinning, 101. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I: §186.

190 Notes 17 Glendinning, 100. 18 Glendinning, 101. See G.P. Baker and P.M.S. Hacker, An Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations: Rules, Grammar and Necessity, vol. II (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 104–106. 19 Glendinning, 101. 20 Glendinning, 101. 21 Glendinning, 126. 22 Glendinning, 126. 23 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 28. 24 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 28. 25 Glendinning, 101. 26 Glendinning, 100. 27 David H. Finkelstein, “Wittgenstein on Rules and Platonism,” in The New Wittgenstein, 69. 28 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I: §201. 29 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I: §219. Wittgenstein notes that “[d]isputes do not break out (among mathematicians, say) over the question whether a rule has been obeyed or not. People don’t come to blows over it, for example. That is part of the framework on which the working of our language is based (for example, in giving descriptions).” Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I: §240. 30 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I: §87. 31 See, e.g., Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I: §84–87. Cf. Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), 68, and Stone, “Wittgenstein on Deconstruction,” 106–7. Derrida’s claim that the use to which a sign is, as a matter of fact, put is only one “interpretation” within “a ‘total’ system open, let us say, to all possible investments of sense” is central to his view that our concepts are inherently repressive, the product of an irreducible “interpretative violence.” See Derrida, Of Grammatology, 45 and Limited Inc, 150. 32 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 20. 33 As Brandom notes, Wittgenstein uses the term Regel (“rule”) in a variety of distinct ways. Brandom, by contrast, understands a “rule” more narrowly – i.e., as denoting an explicit statement specifying what is correct or incorrect by saying or describing it. In this sense of the term “rule,” not every normgoverned practice involves rules. See Brandom, Making It Explicit, 64–66. 34 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 20. 35 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I: §224. 36 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I: §202. 37 Brandom writes, “normative attitudes of taking or treating applications of concepts [or rules] as correct or incorrect institute normative statuses that transcend those attitudes in the sense that the instituting attitudes can be assessed according to those instituted norms and found wanting.” Brandom, Making It Explicit, 137. 38 Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, VII §9. 39 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 46. 40 Brandom terms this an “I-Thou” account of inter-subjectivity and distinguishes it from “I-We” accounts that privilege the community. See Brandom, Making It Explicit, 598–601.

Notes 191 41 Geoffrey Bennington argues that the “necessary possibility of the death of the writer, in this extended sense” implies that “writing can never fully ‘express’ a thought or realize an intention.” Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 55. 42 Who is regarded as an authoritative interpreter is itself a question that can be answered only from within a practice. Notice, however, that being an authoritative interpreter is not equivalent to enjoying the kind of privileged perspective denied by Brandom’s “I-Thou” account of intersubjectivity. For more on the latter notion, see Chapter 7. 43 Nor does it follow that activism is necessarily the handmaiden of progressive social policy. 44 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 206. 45 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 323. 46 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 121. 47 Alasdair MacIntyre makes a similar point: “Does this mean that the authority of the morality does not extend beyond the community whose social practices are in question? One is tempted to reply, Does the authority of arithmetical rules extend beyond the community in which the practice of counting is established? … [T]o connect rules and social practice in this way is not obviously to give moral rules less of a hold on us than mathematical, except that no society could advance far without the same type of simple counting, whereas there can be wide variations in the social practice to which moral rules are relevant.” Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 265–266. 48 Brandom argues convincingly that formal validity can be explained in terms of material validity, rather than the other way around. On his view, “the validity of inferences in virtue of their logical form is to be understood as a sophisticated, late-coming sort of propriety of inference, founded and conceptually parasitic on a more primitive sort of propriety of inferences.” Brandom, Making It Explicit, 134. 49 See Brandom, Making It Explicit, 168–169. 50 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 173. 51 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 168. 52 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 173. 53 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 174. 54 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 174. 55 See Brandom, Making It Explicit, 248. 56 Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 90. 57 Habermas contends that facts must be distinguished rather strictly from norms. On Brandom’s view, by contrast, norms can themselves express facts. Thus, he distinguishes not between facts and norms, but between non-normative and normative facts. Given the latter terminology, it would thus be more accurate to say that the considerations brought to bear are typically putative non-normative facts, although such facts can have significance as moral reasons only in the context of normative facts. Moreover, in certain cases, as we will see, the latter – expressed explicitly – may be subjected to the game of giving and asking for reasons.

192 Notes

Chapter 5 “In the Beginning was the Deed”: the Ungrounded Grounds of Rational Criticism 1 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Axi, n.α. 2 Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind, trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge, 2002), 43. 3 Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice (London: Routledge, 2000), 186. 4 W.D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 30. 5 Ross, The Right and the Good, 29. 6 Ross, The Right and the Good, 30. 7 Ross, The Right and the Good, 30. 8 Ross, The Right and the Good, 31. 9 Ross, The Right and the Good, 30. 10 Mark Timmons, Morality without Foundations: A Defense of Ethical Contextualism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 214. 11 Timmons, 214–215. 12 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §253; quoted in Timmons, 178. 13 Timmons, 187. 14 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §243. 15 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §341. 16 See George Edward Moore, “A Defence of Common Sense,” Philosophical Papers (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959), 32–59 and “Proof of an External World,” Philosophical Papers, 127–150. Cf. George Edward Moore, “Certainty,” Philosophical Papers, 226–251. Moore begins the first of these essays “by enunciating … a whole long list of propositions, which may seem, at first sight, such obvious truisms as not to be worth stating.” According to Moore, “they are, in fact, a set of propositions, every one of which (in my own opinion) I know, with certainty, to be true.” Moore, “A Defence of Common Sense,” 32. 17 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §521. 18 See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, II: 221–222. 19 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §519. 20 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §115. 21 I will go on to question the appropriateness of such verbs. As we will find, however, the difficulty is to locate any alternatives. 22 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §655–§657. 23 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §144. 24 See, e.g., Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §167, §253, §296, §402, §403, §411, §414, §449. 25 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §423. Cf. §347–§350. 26 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §608. 27 David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis: the Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1955), 49. 28 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §130. 29 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I: §482. 30 Wittgenstein writes, “I might also put it like this: the ‘law of induction’ can no more be grounded than certain particular propositions concerning the material of experience.” Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §499.

Notes 193 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51

52

53 54

Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §559. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §359. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §167. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §105. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §94. See Peter Winch, “Judgement: Propositions and Practices,” Philosophical Investigations 21 (July 1998): 198. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §152. See Winch, “Judgement: Propositions and Practices,” 198. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §476. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §143. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §478. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §411. This is what I take Wittgenstein to mean when he says that “the languagegame is so to say something unpredictable.” It cannot be inferred from any prior “foundation,” since it is only in the context of the language-game that the foundation can be recognized as such. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §519. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §411. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §402. See also Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 31. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §110. Cf. §204. Winch writes, “Much of Wittgenstein’s discussion seems to take the form of trying to substitute some other word for ‘know’ in these contexts: such as ‘believe’, ‘assume’, ‘presuppose’, ‘take for granted’. The outcome of these attempts is that none of these suggestions is satisfactory. But the conclusion is not meant to be that we must look harder till we have found the right word, but that we are looking in the wrong direction altogether.” Winch, “Judgement: Propositions and Practices,” 192. Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, II: 180. Here Wittgenstein writes, “Doesn’t a presupposition imply a doubt? And doubt may be entirely lacking.” See D.Z. Phillips, “On Trusting Intellectuals on Trust,” Philosophical Investigations 25 ( January 2002): 44. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §337. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §467. The distinction at issue here is not the distinction, criticized by Davidson, between “conceptual schemes” and their putative “content.” The distinction Wittgenstein is attempting to elucidate is a distinction within language, whereas the distinction criticized by Davidson is a distinction between language and something onto which it is thought to map. See Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation (London: Oxford University Press, 1984), 183–198. Wittgenstein writes, “For each one of these sentences I can imagine circumstances that turn it into a move in one of our language-games, and by that it loses everything that is philosophically astonishing.” Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §622. Cf. §347. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §350. Cf. §423. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §553.

194 Notes 55 Moore had written, “I can prove now, for instance, that two human hands exist. How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, ‘Here is one hand,’ and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, ‘and here is another.’” Moore, “Proof of an External World,” 146. In the Investigations Wittgenstein had responded: “It is possible to imagine a case in which I could find out that I had two hands. Normally, however, I cannot do so. ‘But all you need is to hold them up before your eyes!’ – If I am now in doubt whether I have two hands, I need not believe my eyes either. (I might just as well ask a friend.)” Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, II: 221. 56 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §461. Cf. §247. 57 Cf. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §311–§312. 58 Timmons, 214. 59 Timmons, 215. 60 Cavell, 251–2. In a letter to H.O. Mounce on the nature of moral statements, Rush Rhees once wrote, “You mention ‘Honesty is good.’ I cannot remember ever hearing anyone say this, unless it be in a philosophical discussion. And I cannot imagine just the circumstances under which anyone would say it. I remember once when someone did say very seriously, ‘Well, thanks for the honesty; that’s much better than philosophy.’” Rush Rhees, Moral Questions, ed. D.Z. Phillips (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 56. 61 One conceivable situation in which such principles might be invoked is when one is appealing to moral as opposed to non-moral considerations for justification. For example, in response to the argument that it would be useful to tell a lie to avoid certain undesirable consequences, someone might plausibly retort: “But lying is wrong!” The point would be to remind one’s interlocutor that not all reasoning is prudential. 62 As we have already noted in Chapter 4, these reasons can include what are called “facts.” Indeed, I will argue in Chapter 7 that it is only within a moral practice that the alleged gap between “is” and “ought” can be broached. 63 Timmons, 221. 64 Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, 4. 65 As I noted earlier, difficulties arise when attempting to offer positive characterizations of our relation to these matters about which doubts and questions do not arise. 66 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §323. He adds, “Thus we should not call anybody reasonable who believed something in despite of scientific evidence.” §324. Similarly, we would not be likely to regard as morally competent anyone who failed to see, e.g., that whether an action was done by accident makes a difference to the culpability of the actor. Cf. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §206, §283, and §310ff. In the absence of any justificatory context, doubt is simply irrational – not because it represents a minority viewpoint, but because it is not supportable by reasons. 67 Rhees, Moral Questions, 61. 68 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 65. 69 Brandom, Articulating Reasons, 38. 70 Brandom, Articulating Reasons, 38.

Notes 195 71 McDowell writes, “The desire for the good of others is related to charity as the desire for one’s own future happiness is related to prudence; not, then, as a needed extra ingredient in formulations of reasons for acting. Rather, the desire is ascribed, as in the prudential case, simply in recognition of the fact that a charitable person’s special way of conceiving situations by itself casts a favourable light on charitable actions. Of course a desire ascribed in this purely consequential way is not independently intelligible.” McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 84. 72 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §359. 73 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §308. 74 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 89. It should be noted, however, that another presupposition, according to Habermas, is that “every speaker may assert only what he really believes.” Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 88. 75 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 88. 76 Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 223–224. 77 Gaita, 184. 78 Sabina Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 126. 79 Lovibond, 127. 80 Lovibond, 127–128. 81 Peter Winch, Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 188. 82 Winch writes, “Did Orwell and Gandhi share a common culture? Obviously there can be no simple answer to that. Their backgrounds were indeed enormously different, no doubt sometimes engendering a certain mutual incomprehension. But one can press that too far: Orwell understood very well much of what Gandhi was saying… . They certainly had enough in common to engage with each other on certain matters, if not on all.” Winch, Trying to Make Sense, 187. 83 Lovibond, 128. 84 Lovibond, 129–130. 85 Lovibond, 129–130. 86 Lovibond, 132. 87 Derrida, “Force of Law,” 13–14. 88 McDowell, Mind and World, 81. 89 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §96. Cf. §88, §210–§211. 90 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §97. 91 W.V. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” From a Logical Point of View, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 20–46. 92 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §98. 93 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §309. Cf. §319–§321. 94 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §93. In 1925, Moore had listed, among the propositions he claimed to know with certainty to be true, that there were “large numbers of other living human bodies, each of which has … been, at every moment of its life after birth, either in contact with or not far from the surface of the earth …” Moore, “A Defence of Common Sense,” 33. 95 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §106. 96 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §108. Cf. §286.

196 Notes 97 98 99 100 101

102

103 104

105

106

107

108 109

Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §108. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §608. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §609. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §611–§612. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §92. Moore claimed to know that “the earth had existed also for many years before my body was born.” Moore, “A Defence of Common Sense,” 33. As Brandom puts it, “finding out how things really are and finding out what really follows from what and what is really incompatible with what are two aspects of one process.” Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts,” 359. In Chapter 7 I argue for a conception of our norms as objective. My contention is that what one might initially be inclined to characterize as contests between rival “logical spaces” can better be understood as disagreements over the contours of the actual playing filed. Ludwig Wittgenstein; quoted in Rush Rhees, Discussions of Wittgenstein (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), 101. Rush Rhees writes, “There is no one system in which you can study in its purity and its essence what ethics is. We use the term ‘ethics’ for a variety of systems, and for philosophy this variety is important. Obviously different ethical systems have points in common. There must be grounds for saying that people who follow a particular system are making ethical judgments: that they regard this or that as good, and so forth. But it does not follow that what these people say must be an expression of something more ultimate.” Rhees, Discussions of Wittgenstein, 101. Wittgenstein; quoted in Rhees, Discussions of Wittgenstein, 103. Note that Wittgenstein is simply recognizing moral diversity, not – as is sometimes thought – advocating a relativist position with respect to it. William McNeill, The Rise of the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 717n; quoted in James D. Wallace, Moral Relevance and Moral Conflict (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 128. Note that one’s readiness to recognize it as such a system is itself reflected in the kinds of criticisms one might wish to bring against someone who thought in such a way. Gaita, 181. In the previous paragraph I referred approvingly to Rai Gaita’s remark that cultures can be distinguished in part by what is not questioned within each. Here, however, I am suggesting that the identity of a culture can be maintained over time despite shifts in its Weltbild. Indeed, Gaita makes the same point in the remark about Peter Singer quoted further down in this very paragraph. Can these two claims be reconciled? Perhaps. Gaita’s remark in the previous paragraph does seem to me to express an important insight into what we mean when speaking synchronically about “different cultures.” However, we tend to use the term “culture” somewhat differently when speaking diachronically. Thus, we are inclined to speak of “the culture of China” and “Western culture” as enduring historical entities, in spite of the fact that contemporary participants in each may have more in common with one another than, say, with their respective forebears two centuries ago. The lesson here may be that “culture” is an ambiguous and polyvalent term, and that the boundaries amongst cultures are not hard

Notes 197

110

111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119

120 121 122 123 124

125 126

and fast. Moreover, in seeking to identify a culture (to the extent that this is even necessary), it may prove helpful to attend to the continuity not merely of what is accepted, but also to debates about such matters. In other words, instead of seeking an “essence,” it might be better to investigate “family resemblances.” In Chapter 6 I will argue for a more capacious conception of moral “traditions.” Singer writes, for example: “When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed… . Therefore, if killing the haemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him.” Peter Singer, Practical Ethics: Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 186. Gaita, 183. John H. Whittaker, “‘At the End of Reason Comes Persuasion’” in The Possibilities of Sense, ed. John H. Whittaker (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 141. Whittaker, 141. Whittaker, 143. Whittaker, 146. McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 85. McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 85–86. José Medina, The Unity of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy: Necessity, Intelligibility, and Normativity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 191. Medina, 191–192. David R. Cerbone makes a similar point when he writes, “Wittgenstein is not, as I read him, ruling out (or slowing down) the possibility of conceptual change, but showing more vividly just what such a change involves, namely a reorientation in how one lives. Such a reorientation is by no means impossible, though it can be difficult, and it certainly requires more than an act of decision.” He goes on to note that “to change one’s concepts means changing how one lives, what one takes to be important, what facts have priority.” David R. Cerbone, “The Limits of Conservatism: Wittgenstein on ‘Our Life’ and ‘Our Concepts’” in The Grammar of Politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, ed. Cressida J. Heyes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 58, 59. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 65, italics added. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 25. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 171. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, 225. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, 224. It might be argued, however, that although what is regarded as “orthodox” has changed, unofficial tests of orthodoxy have not themselves disappeared from the university. There are consequently certain (otherwise not uncommon) forms of moral argument that one can be fairly confident of not encountering in a modern liberal university – e.g., those in which passages from the Bible or the Qur’an are cited in defense of particular moral positions. Stanley Fish, “Postmodern Warfare: The Ignorance of our Warrior Intellectuals,” Harper’s Magazine, July 2002, 36. Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 3.

198 Notes 127 For some of the best recent work on this topic see Christopher J. Eberle, Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Michael J. Perry, Under God? Religious Faith and Liberal Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 128 Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 168. 129 Wittgenstein notes in On Certainty that “the concept ‘proposition’ itself is not a sharp one.” Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §320. In Philosophical Grammar (1932–1934), Wittgenstein asks, “[D]oes everything that sounds like a sentence in English fall under our concept of proposition? ‘I am tired,’ ‘2 × 2 = 4,’ ‘time passes,’ ‘there is only one zero’?” Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, §69. In 1930, Wittgenstein had written, “A proposition construed in such a way that it can be uncheckably true or false is completely detached from reality and no longer functions as a proposition.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Raymond Hargreaves and Roger White (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), §225.

Chapter 6 Agreeing to Disagree: Toward a More Capacious Conception of Tradition 1 Aquinas, Q.94, Art. 4. 2 That such concerns about the adequacy of our moral discourse can arise after having renounced platonism is nicely brought out by James Lindemann Nelson, who writes that “it might be argued that those skeptical about ethics as a form of knowledge base their doubts on features of the language game that are plainly accessible – the prevalence and endurance of deep ethical disagreement, for example … Such observations do not require taking a ‘sideways on’ view of ethics but rely rather on the presumably laudable activity of describing differences among language games.” James Lindemann Nelson, “Review of Ethical Formation by Sabina Lovibond,” International Philosophical Quarterly 42(8) No. 168 (December 2002), 556. 3 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 6. 4 MacIntyre suggests that our alleged present predicament is one “which almost nobody recognizes and which perhaps nobody at all can recognize fully.” MacIntyre, After Virtue, 4. However, it is worth noting that MacIntyre is not the first to have suggested such an “hypothesis.” Emile Durkheim, for example, suggested that “morality … is going through a real crisis.” He continues, “Our faith has been troubled; tradition has lost its sway; individual judgment has been freed from collective judgment.” Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. George Simpson (New York: The Free Press, 1933), 408–409. 5 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 1. 6 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 238. 7 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 210. 8 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 4. 9 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 4.

Notes 199 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25

26 27

MacIntyre, After Virtue, 14. Cf. MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, 257–260. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 8. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 8. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 6. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 6. As will become clear, I am not denying the possibility of disagreement about what is a reason for what; I am merely denying that all moral disagreement is of this type. MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, 265. Plato, Euthyphro, 4c–d. Plato, Euthyphro, 4d–e. Plato, Euthyphro, 4b–c. Plato, Euthyphro, 8c–d. If terms like “murder” already possess evaluative content, then injunctions like the prohibition of murder in the Decalogue might be thought to be essentially redundant. Since two people may agree on the wrongness of murder while disagreeing over which acts constitute murder, philosophers who regard such commandments as prototypical moral norms will find it difficult to give an adequate account of moral disagreement. Nevertheless, I do not think that such commandments are vacuous. Their function, it seems to me, is to keep the demands of morality ever before us. To seek to “keep the commandments” is to subject oneself to ongoing moral scrutiny in order to ensure that one’s actions do not fall under the forbidden categories. Plato, Euthyphro, 8d. Plato, Euthyphro, 7d. Cavell, 265. It might be argued that the difference between protagonists who assign different weight to rival considerations can be explained in terms of the fact that each is committed to a different “ordering principle.” Thus, it might be argued, each is in fact arguing from different premises. It seems to me, however, that such a view is overly rationalistic. It is true, of course, that there is an important difference between the respective beliefs of two protagonists who disagree, say, over whether a particular act is murder. But it is doubtful whether this difference can helpfully be explained in terms of any antecedent belief in abstract principles – principles to which the protagonists are committed independently of the case in question. In other words, the difference in commitments manifests itself not in the premises from which they argue but in the conclusions at which they respectively arrive. Moreover, if ordering principles really played the role here imagined, we would not expect to encounter the kind of intra-personal disagreement and turmoil that in fact we often do. As D.Z. Phillips has pointed out, the existence of moral dilemmas constitutes an objection to moral theories that presuppose “an ordered hierarchical system of goods.” Phillips, Interventions in Ethics, 210. If they do feature in the premises, these premises themselves become suitable topics for debate and discussion. Notice, though, that this is different from Derrida’s claim that moral norms always require interpretation.

200 Notes 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41

42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49

R.W. Beardsmore, Moral Reasoning (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 107. Beardsmore, 107. Beardsmore, 108. Beardsmore, 108–109. J. Kemp makes a similar point when he writes, “If I am asked to justify my action in refusing to give money to a beggar in the streets I might say that I could not afford to, or that the man was not really as poor as he looked, or that giving money to beggars tends to weaken the moral fibre of the community. It might be disputed whether any of these were good reasons, or just how good any one of them was, but there would be no dispute that the reasons offered were at least relevant to the question at issue. But if, when asked to defend my refusal, I say that Glasgow is west of Edinburgh nobody would accept this as in any way relevant to my lack of generosity; it is no reason at all, not even a bad one.” J. Kemp, Reason, Action and Morality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 106–107. Cavell, 261–262. Cavell, 262. Cavell, 262–263. Cavell, 263, italics added. See Cavell, 267. Cavell, 267. Theo van Willigenburg, “Shareability and Actual Sharing: Korsgaard’s Position on the Publicity of Reasons,” Philosophical Investigations 25 (April 2002): 180. I do not think that van Willigenburg would want to say that in arriving at a conclusion about what the right thing to do is, one makes it the right thing to do by the mere fact of thinking it is. If whatever decision one made were ipso facto the right decision, the difficult work of moral decision-making would be evacuated of its entire significance. Cavell, 254–255. It is important to distinguish the question of whether a given consideration is relevant from the question of whether, as a matter of fact, it plays any role in the formation of an individual’s moral position: a fact need not be considered in order to be a relevant consideration. This is acknowledged by our ordinary discourse. For instance, having been reminded that I promised to do such-and-such, I may alter my plans so as to be able to discharge the obligation I recognize myself to have incurred by my promise. Peter Winch, “Apel’s ‘Transcendental Pragmatics’,” in Philosophical Disputes in the Social Sciences, ed. S.C. Brown (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), 66. Winch, Trying to Make Sense, 189. Cavell, 268. Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 101. Of course, a participant in a formal debate may as a matter of fact agree with the position she is asked to defend. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 9. John Kekes, The Art of Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 54. Moreover, part of what gives such writings the force they do possess is our appreciation of the way in which their authors lived out their convictions.

Notes 201 50 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 9. 51 “One crucial ingredient of Stevenson’s picture is the implication that no substantial distinction can be drawn among methods of inducing people to change their minds on ethical matters, between making reasons available to them on the one hand and manipulating them in ways that have nothing in particular to do with rationality on the other.” McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 155. 52 Winch, Ethics and Action, 168–169, italics added. 53 Winch, Ethics and Action, 166. Winch notes the tendency of philosophers “to include far more cases … than seems to me proper” within the category of cases in which a person’s moral convictions differ profoundly from our own. This tendency is perhaps not surprising, given (a) the widespread assumption that agreements at the level of moral convictions ought to issue in agreements in conclusions and (b) the fact that moral disagreement is common. 54 Cavell, 267. 55 As Winch notes, “it is quite clear that Vere is to be taken as appealing to a well-established and agreed system of ideas, according to which such cases as this are to be judged.” Winch, Ethics and Action, 162. 56 Habermas, Justification and Application, 43. 57 Nor, as I argued in Chapters 4 and 5, is the community free in this regard. 58 Van Willigenburg, 179. 59 That position may in fact be the appropriateness of a law (in the ordinary sense of the term), but it confuses matters unnecessarily to say that advocating a law (in the ordinary sense) involves putting forward an implicit law (i.e., a rule) to the effect that advocating this law is morally acceptable. 60 See Phillips, Interventions in Ethics, 42–44, and Stout, Ethics After Babel, 205–208. 61 I am inclined to agree with Jeffrey Stout when he writes: “Moral discourse in pluralistic society is not threatened … by disagreement among its members about the good. Neither is it threatened by the confusion of tongues manifested in its various moral languages. It is threatened by the acids of injustice … and by the possibility of nuclear war… And it is also threatened by the corruption our lives have already suffered from idolizing external goods and the erosion of our most valuable practices by habits of mind and heart appropriate to the marketplace and the bureaucracies.” Stout, Ethics After Babel, 287. 62 Phillips notes that “a plurality of moral perspectives, for MacIntyre, is a kind of incoherence.” Phillips, Interventions in Ethics, 54. 63 As Aristotle noted, it is characteristic of tyranny that residents of the city are “habituated to having small thoughts.” Aristotle, The Politics, 174. 64 This is true at the international level as well. Often a particular statement of a human right – as articulated in a given declaration – can command respect among representatives of different nations, each of whom is able to ground that respect in values internal to his or her culture. 65 Cavell himself sometimes gives the impression that morality offered a means of overcoming disagreement by securing mutual respect among protagonists. Thus, he writes, “Morality must leave itself open to repudiation; it provides one possibility of settling conflict, a way of encompassing

202 Notes conflict which allows the continuance of personal relationships against the hard and apparently inevitable fact of misunderstanding, mutually incompatible wishes, commitments, loyalties, interests and needs, a way of mending relationships and maintaining the self in opposition to itself and others. Other ways of settling or encompassing conflict are provided by politics, religion, love and forgiveness, rebellion, and withdrawal. Morality is a valuable way because the others are so often inaccessible or brutal; but it is not everything …” Cavell, 269. In Chapter 2 I criticized the assumption that morality is for something. A thoroughgoing critique of Cavell’s position would, I suggest, also question his assumption that religion, love and forgiveness should be regarded as “ways” to some common goal. My argument in this chapter is not that morality provides a way of eliminating conflict – of reinterpreting disagreement as agreement – but that a certain kind of agreement can manifest itself in the conflict that does occur.

Chapter 7 The Return of Objectivity: Realism without (Rampant) Platonism 1 Benito Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism” [1932]. In Michael Oakeshott, The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), 166. 2 André Gide, “André Gide,” in The God That Failed, ed. Richard Crossman (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), 195. 3 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 176. 4 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 213. 5 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 164. 6 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xxix–xxx. 7 Referring to his monumental Making It Explicit, Brandom elsewhere notes that “[t]he words ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’ … do not so much as occur in this long book.” He adds, “It is not claimed that we get any special enlightenment about moral norms from thinking about the more fundamental class of discursive ones, but it is natural to hope that this might eventually turn out to be possible.” Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts,” 371. The present chapter attempts to take steps in the latter direction. 8 McDowell, Mind and World, 92. 9 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I: §241. 10 As Brandom puts it, Wittgenstein’s “insistence that unless the responsive dispositions of a community are consilient, there can be no proprieties of practice is a point concerning presupposition, not reduction.” Brandom, Making It Explicit, 46. 11 Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, VI §49. 12 Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, VI §39. 13 See also Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, II: 226. Here Wittgenstein notes that “the propositions ‘Human beings believe that twice two is four’ and ‘Twice two is four’ do not mean the same.” 14 Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, VI §49. 15 Brandom, Articulating Reasons, 203. For a much fuller account of this argument, see Brandom, Making It Explicit, 601–607.

Notes 203 16 Although I am reluctant to indulge in transcendental arguments, I cannot resist pointing out that Rorty’s view seems to be self-referentially incoherent, since it is not a view that his peers have tended to let him get away with. Thus, if he were right, he would be wrong. 17 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 168. 18 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 509. 19 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 506, italics added. 20 Brandom is careful to distinguish this notion of “interpretation” from the kind of interpretation that is limited to explicit hypothesis formation. Brandom, Making It Explicit, 508–509. 21 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 600. 22 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 636. 23 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 635. 24 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 636. 25 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 636. 26 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 636. 27 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 631. 28 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 627. 29 As we have seen, though, we can presume considerable agreement on individual cases, even if, in light of differences in collateral commitments, we cannot presume agreement on the entirety of a claim’s inferential significance. 30 See Brandom, Making It Explicit, 600. 31 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 601. 32 Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts,” 359. 33 Discourse among individuals with different Weltbilder can be understood in terms of the same perspectival scorekeeping structure characteristic of discourse among individuals who share a common Weltbild. In both cases, each participant distinguishes between the commitments the other is prepared to acknowledge, on the one hand, and the commitments the other has (in one’s view as a scorekeeper) actually undertaken, on the other. That one’s opponent’s Weltbild differs from one’s own makes a difference in the de dicto column, not the de re column, of one’s scorekeeping books. Brandom calls this “the collapse of external into internal interpretation.” He writes, “So the norms governing the use of the home idiom determine how to project the concepts used to specify the content of the stranger’s attitudes … in the same way they do for the ascriber’s own remarks. This is so even in the case where the stranger is best made intelligible by attributing concepts that differ from those used in the home community.” Brandom, Making It Explicit, 647. 34 See Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1988), 115. It is important to note, however, that Brandom’s inferentialist account gives propositions explanatory priority over singular terms. 35 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 213. 36 Cf. John McDowell, “Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity,” in Rorty and His Critics, 199. 37 Conant, “Freedom, Cruelty, and Truth,” 335, n.160. 38 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 631. 39 Rorty, “Putnam and the Relativist Menace,” 449.

204 Notes 40 In moral cases, as I argued in the previous chapter, agreement may still prove elusive. 41 Conant, “Freedom, Cruelty, and Truth,” 305, italics added. Here, it must be noted, Conant is speaking as a scorekeeper – whether he realizes it or not. Of course, insofar as the novel is told from an omniscient, third-person point of view, Conant’s perspective as a reader is arguably to be “privileged” over those of the characters. In real life, however, no perspective is privileged as a perspective. 42 Conant, “Freedom, Cruelty, and Truth,” 305. 43 Conant, “Freedom, Cruelty, and Truth,” 299. 44 Rorty, “Reply to Conant,” 343. 45 Brandom refers to this “innocent until proven guilty” attitude as the “default and challenge structure of entitlements.” As he observes, “[e]ntitlement is, to begin with, a social status that a performance or commitment has within a community. Practices in which that status is attributed only upon actual vindication by appeal to inheritance from other commitments are simply unworkable; nothing recognizable as a game of giving and asking for reasons results if justifications are not permitted to come to an end.” Brandom, Making It Explicit, 177. For more on the significance of this point, see Chapter 5. 46 McDowell, “Toward Rehabilitating Objectivity,” 110. 47 McDowell, “Toward Rehabilitating Objectivity,” 110. 48 For instance, since Rorty equates the metaphysical “world well lost” with the natural world as investigated by science, he is led to the conclusion that “Science may well converge to agreement on how the world should be described in order to facilitate technological control, but this description will not be of Nature as it is in itself.” Rorty, “Is ‘Post-Modernism’ Relevant to Politics?” 41. Rorty’s conclusion is puzzling: in what sense do scientific descriptions – e.g., the description of water as H2O or as boiling at 100 degrees Celsius – fall short? How does Rorty know that nature is otherwise? 49 Rorty, “A World Without Substances or Essences,” 48. Rorty’s confusion can perhaps ultimately be traced to his failure at crucial points to question not merely the possibility, but the sense of “stepping outside language.” Elsewhere Rorty writes, “For without the traditional concepts of metaphysics one cannot make sense of the appearance-reality distinction …” Richard Rorty, “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, 14. 50 McDowell, “Toward Rehabilitating Objectivity,” 118. 51 He adds, “If following what pass for norms of inquiry turns out not to improve our chances of being right about the world, that just shows we need to modify our conception of the norms of inquiry.” McDowell, Mind and World, 150, 151. For more on this point see McDowell, “Toward Rehabilitating Objectivity,” 118–119. 52 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 632. 53 Jürgen Habermas, “From Kant to Hegel: On Robert Brandom’s Pragmatic Philosophy of Language,” European Journal of Philosophy 8, no. 3 (2000): 332. 54 Habermas, “From Kant to Hegel,” 332. 55 Habermas, “From Kant to Hegel,” 344.

Notes 205 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79

80 81

82 83

Habermas, “From Kant to Hegel,” 332. McDowell, Mind and World, 26. Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts,” 358. Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts,” 357. Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts,” 357. Brandom, Making It Explicit, 331. Habermas, “From Kant to Hegel,” 341. Habermas, “From Kant to Hegel,” 335. Habermas, “From Kant to Hegel,” 339. Habermas, “From Kant to Hegel,” 339. Habermas, Truth and Justification, 31. Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts,” 358. The “facts” at issue here would be non-normative facts. But Brandom’s view also allows room for normative facts – facts concerning practices. Thus, he writes, “To understand the concept fact, we have to understand the concept claim. It applies only where there are normative facts, about what practitioners mean, what they have committed themselves to do, how it would be correct for them to proceed, and so on. But they make it possible to state, and so under the right circumstances to know nonnormative facts that antedated the practice instituting normative facts such as that someone claims something (takes it to be a fact).” Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts,” 369–370. McDowell, 28. Brandom, Making It Explicit, 332. Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts,” 357. McDowell, Mind and World, 34. McDowell, Mind and World, 34. McDowell, Mind and World, 34. Brandom, Making It Explicit, 332. Brandom, Making It Explicit, 686, n. 58. Elsewhere he writes, “In an important sense there is no such boundary, and so nothing outside the realm of the conceptual.” Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts,” 357. McDowell, “Toward Rehabilitating Objectivity,” 112. Brandom, Making It Explicit, 333. McDowell continues, “But to say there is no gap between thought, as such, and the world is just to dress up a truism in high-flown language. All the point comes to is that one can think, for instance, that spring has begun, and that very same thing, that spring has begun, can be the case. That is truistic, and it cannot embody something metaphysically contentious, like slighting the independence of reality.” McDowell, Mind and World, 27. Orwell, 79. Thus Rorty claims that “it does not matter whether ‘two plus two is four’ is true, much less whether this is ‘subjective’ or ‘corresponds to external reality.’ All that matters is that if you do believe it, you can say it without getting hurt.” Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, 176. For a sustained critique of Rorty’s reading, see Conant’s essay, “Freedom, Cruelty, and Truth.” McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 215. McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 215–216.

206 Notes 84 See Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 318. 85 Here it is important to avoid a reductive understanding of what can constitute a “fact.” We might say that the impossibility of working forward from facts – conceived in non-moral terms – to values is analogous to the impossibility, referred to earlier, of working forward from objects – conceived as existing “outside” the sphere of the conceptual – to facts. Here, too, we must reverse the order of explanation. 86 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xxxii. 87 Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics, 149–150. 88 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 137. 89 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 217–218. 90 Recall from Chapter 5 that such dissatisfaction can be rational only when one’s critical resources exceed the patterns of inference of which one is critical. Thus, not all patterns of inference are, from any given point of view at any given time, equally subject to critique. 91 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 217–218. 92 Habermas, “From Kant to Hegel,” 352. 93 Habermas, Truth and Justification, 247–248. 94 McDowell writes, “If a conception of a set of circumstances can suffice on its own to explain an action, then the world view it exemplifies is certainly not the kind of thing that could be established by the methods of the natural sciences. But the notion of the world, or how things are, that is appropriate in this context is … not a scientific one: world views richer than that of science are not scientific, but not on that account unscientific (a term of opprobrium for answers other than those of science to science’s questions).” McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 83. 95 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 121. 96 Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts,” 372. 97 See Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts,” 372. 98 John McDowell, “Responses,” in Reading McDowell: On Mind and World, ed. Nicholas H. Smith (New York: Routledge, 2002), 301–302. Lovibond writes, “The ethical, let us say, pertains to what people learn to value through immersion in a community acquainted with ideas of right, duty, justice, solidarity, and common social or cultural interests extending beyond the lifetime of the present generation … Of course, to the extent that we acknowledge the presence of this social or cultural region within the ‘firmament of values,’ we must resign ourselves to a state of affairs in which there will not always be a definite answer to the question whether this or that consideration is an ‘ethical’ (as opposed, say, to an ‘aesthetic’ or an ‘educational’) one. But though this complication may create a penumbra around the edges of the domain of ethical value, there is still a central area within which certain evaluative concepts (or in linguistic terms, predicates) will clearly fall.” Sabina Lovibond, Ethical Formation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 33–34. 99 Joseph Heath arrives at a similar conclusion in his book Communicative Action and Rational Choice (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001). See, e.g., pp. 307–308. Recall, too, that in Chapter 6 I argued that the role of reason-giving in moral contexts differs from the role of reason-giving in theoretical contexts. 100 Rorty, “Response to Conant,” 347.

Notes 207 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112

Rorty, Truth and Progress, 182. Rorty, Truth and Progress, 182. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 176. Rorty, “Putnam and the Relativist Menace,” 449. Rorty, “Response to Conant,” 342. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xxxii. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 76. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xlii. Rorty, “Consequences of Pragmatism,” 164. Rorty, Truth and Progress, 325. Rorty, Truth and Progress, 325. In fact, John Dewey, Rorty’s philosophical hero, defined “radical” in precisely this way: “[L]iberalism must now become radical, meaning by ‘radical’ perception of the necessity of thorough-going changes in the setup of institutions and corresponding activity to bring the changes to pass.” John Dewey, The Philosophy of John Dewey: Volume II: The Lived Experience, ed. John J. McDermott (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973), 647. Thomas McCarthy cites this passage in his “Postscript: Ironist Theory as a Vocation,” Ideals and Illusions, 42.

Postscript

Doing Justice: Criticism and Philosophy

1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), §455. 2 Ironically, he also is sometimes accused of holding that the philosopher cannot understand language-games in which she does not participate. This latter view is central to the charge of fideism. 3 Allan Janik, “Notes on the Natural History of Politics” in The Grammar of Politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, 101. 4 Janik, 101. Notice that Janik uses the term “quietism” in reference to Wittgenstein’s alleged refusal to participate in the practices he describes. It should be noted, however, that other writers, including McDowell, use the term to mean almost precisely the opposite – namely, Wittgenstein’s refusal to attempt to adopt a “sideways-on” perspective on these practices. See, e.g., McDowell, Mind and World, 93. See also Lovibond, Ethical Formation, 21ff. 5 Janik, 102. 6 See, e.g., Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 120ff and 190ff. Kierkegaard writes, “Socrates essentially emphasizes existing, whereas Plato, forgetting this, loses himself in speculative thought. Socrates’ infinite merit is precisely that of being an existing thinker, not a speculative thinker who forgets what it means to exist.” Kierkegaard, 205. 7 Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, 237. 8 Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, 238. 9 Lovibond, Ethical Formation, 8. 10 Janik, 101. 11 Janik, 101. 12 Janik, 111.

208 Notes 13 I certainly do not mean to deny that disciplined reflection is as such relevant in moral contexts, or that one might be brought to engage in such reflection as a result of the difficulties with which one is confronted in one’s life. The entire thrust of the present work has been in the opposite direction. It is perhaps worth noting the recent emergence of a number of new disciplines organized around the moral issues that arise in connection with the sometimes quite technical complexities of various nonphilosophical pursuits – e.g., medical and health-care ethics, business ethics, etc. My aim is by no means to disparage these disciplines, but simply to call attention to a mode of reflection the aim of which is not related directly to problem-solving. 14 Although it is true that the problems of philosophy would not be what they are if our lives were wholly different than they are, these problems are nevertheless distinctively philosophical problems – problems which, as anyone who has taught an introductory course in philosophy knows, tend to strike those otherwise unfamiliar with the discipline as fairly far removed from everyday concerns. 15 Michael Weston, Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1994), 176–177. 16 Kierkegaard writes that “all abstract thinking in relation … to all existenceissues is a trial in the comic.” Kierkegaard, 304. He notes that “the comic contradiction of wanting to be what one is not, for example, that a human being wants to be a bird is no more comic than the contradiction of not wanting to be what one is, as in casu an existing individual.” Kierkegaard, 120. 17 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 649. 18 Simone Weil, “The Iliad or The Poem of Force,” in Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 244. Referring to the difficulty of doing equal justice to hostile moral outlooks, Winch writes, “A writer who described these kinds of difficulty as well as anyone I can think of was Simone Weil, whose admiration – not to say veneration – for the author of The Iliad may well have been a reflection of her realization how difficult she herself found it to do justice to ethico-religious views as variance with her own passionately held ones.” Peter Winch, “Doing Justice or Giving the Devil his Due,” in Can Religion Be Explained Away?, ed. D.Z. Phillips (London: Macmillan, 1996), 173. 19 D.Z. Phillips, Philosophy’s Cool Place (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 2. 20 Phillips, Philosophy’s Cool Place, 2. 21 Winch, “Doing Justice or Giving the Devil his Due,” 173. 22 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions: 1912–1951, ed. James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993), 181. 23 Winch, Ethics and Action, 41. 24 Phillips writes, “In philosophy, we resist having to give up certain ways of thinking. But the hold these ‘ways of thinking’ have is not personal, nor is the source of their temptation. They are ways of thinking to which anyone

Notes 209

25 26 27 28 29

30 31

can be susceptible, because their power is in the language that we speak.” Phillips, Philosophy’s Cool Place, 46. I would be inclined to qualify these remarks by noting that while the temptation is not itself personal, what we are tempted to sublime and what ignore often is. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 16e. Christopher Norris, Deconstruction and the ‘Unfinished Project of Modernity’ (New York: Routledge, 2000), 181–182. Norris, 182. Brandom, Making It Explicit, 625. M. Jamie Ferreira, “Normativity and Reference in a Wittgensteinian Philosophy of Religion,” Faith and Philosophy 18 (October 2001), 449, bold font in original. Brandom, Articulating Reasons, 30. Although the aim of the present work is not biographical, it should be noted that Wittgenstein was in his own way a vigorous social critic.

Index abortion, xv, 36–7, 120–1, 124, 125, 131 Adorno, Theodor W., 174n3 Aeschylus, vi, 46 agreement, xviii, 15, 21–2, 24, 35–6, 64, 76–8, 81, 88, 99, 127, 128, 131, 139, 141, 142–4, 146, 158 answerability, xii, xvi, 6–7, 140, 141, 152–7, 158, 164, 165 application, xii, xiii, xiv, 33–8, 46, 56–7, 66ff, 85, 149 compare decision(s) see also rules Aquinas, Thomas, 34, 117 argumentation, 11, 21, 23–4, 25, 120–8, 131–2, 134 Aristotle, 167, 188n69, 201n63 authority, 5, 7, 14, 15, 77, 78, 130, 133, 163 compare power

Consequences of Pragmatism, 3, 8 Cooke, Maeve, 32–3 Cornell, Drucilla, 58, 59, 60, 79 Crary, Alice, xviii Critchley, Simon, 51, 58, 167–8 critic, xv, xvii, 22, 59, 82, 103, 111, 112, 119, 132–3, 145, 147–8, 160, 165, 166ff criticism, viii, ix, xi, xvii, 15, 19, 59, 60, 87, 102, 103, 116, 117, 118, 141, 165, 166ff moral, xi, 63, 98, 101, 113, 134, 139, 160, 169 of self, 5, 102–105 culture(s), 2, 4, 80–1, 110, 137, 148, 160, 196

Baker, G.P., 71, 75 Beardsmore, R.W., 126 Bennington, Geoffrey, 191n41 Bernstein, J.M., 40–1 Brandom, Robert, ix, xiv, xvi, 42, 67, 72, 76, 78, 83, 100–1, 115, 141, 143–9, 153–6, 162, 170, 196n102 Caputo, John, 55, 187n56 Carroll, Lewis, 67–8, 157, 158, 189n5 Carter, Stephen L., 115 Cavell, Stanley, x, xvi, 97, 125, 127–8, 129, 131, 132, 134–5, 201n65 Cerbone, David R., 197n119 character, xvi, 132–3 Cicero, xix, 47, 50, 185n5 Coetzee, J.M., 1–3, 9 community, 6, 7, 15, 28, 30–1, 60, 69–70, 76, 77, 78, 102–3, 113, 130, 140–1, 145, 147, 149, 151, 157 Conant, James, xix, 149, 151, 182n66 concepts, 6, 76, 86, 111, 119, 146, 154, 155 vs. conceptions, 146, 148 realm of conceptual, 155–6, 205n76 see also language, limits of see also language

Davidson, Donald, 193n51 decision(s), xiii, 49, 56–9, 62–4, 66, 70–2, 74, 76 deconstruction, ix, 44–5, 48, 49–50, 51, 52, 55, 61, 113, 185n18 see also Derrida, Jacques de dicto vs. de re ascriptions, 145, 160 democracy, xii, 6, 15, 39, 55, 61–2, 138, 139 Derrida, Jacques, ix, xiii, xiv, 19, 44–5, 46ff, 66, 69, 78–9, 80, 82, 84–5, 104, 112, 113, 137, 165, 174n5 see also deconstruction Dewey, John, 4, 7, 207n112 Diamond, Cora, 177n39 disagreement, see morality discourse ethics, ix, xii, 24ff, 113 see also Habermas, Jürgen dissent, xii, 9, 14, 102, 103, 118, 138, 150–2, 172 Donnelly, Jack, 178n76 doubt, xiv, 69, 75, 76, 90–3, 99, 194n66 Durkheim, Emile, 198n4 Eagleton, Terry, 28, 30–1 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 16–7 emotivism, xvi, 118, 120, 134, 137 Enlightenment, the, viii, xi, xii, 10, 115, 138

210

Index 211 epistemology, 4, 7 ethics, 104–5, 109, 167, 196n104, 206n98 as branch of philosophy, xix and morality, xix, 28, 32–3, 181n42 see also discourse ethics; morality Euthyphro, 34, 123–4, 125, 130 facts, 2, 82, 84, 85, 111, 125, 126, 127, 146, 154, 155, 162, 164 normative vs. non-normative, 154, 191n57, 205n68 and values, 158–9, 194n62, 206n85 feminism, 12–3, 60, 160–1 Ferreira, M. Jaime, 172 Finkelstein, David H., 73 Fish, Stanley, 114, 188n74 foundationalism, ix, 59, 87–8, 92, 93, 94, 193n43 Fraser, Nancy, 62 Gaita, Raimond, 86–7, 102, 110 Gandhi, Mohandas, 103, 133, 195n82 Gide, André, 140 Glendinning, Simon, 56, 69–72, 73, 74–6, 157, 187n58 God, 2, 5, 15, 32, 33, 53, 114

intuitions, x, 17–18, 19, 22, 30, 40, 88, 141 James, William, 4, 25 Janik, Allan, 166–8, 170 justice, xiii, 1–2, 10, 17, 47, 48–9, 51–3, 55, 57–9, 60–2 justification, xii, xiv, 7, 8–9, 12, 15, 26–7, 29–31, 35, 80–1, 87ff, 96–7, 98–102, 109, 125, 150–2, 160 see also morality; warrant compare truth Kant, Immanuel, viii, 10, 40, 46, 63, 64, 65, 86, 130, 136, 174n12 Kekes, John, 133 Kemp, J., 200n32 Kierkegaard, Søren, xvii, 5, 167, 169–70, 207n6, 208n16 knowledge, x, 4, 5, 6, 7, 90, 94, 95–6 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 28–9, 181n44 Korsgaard, Christine, 130, 132 Kripke, Saul, 69, 77

Habermas, Jürgen, ix, xii–xiii, xiv, xix, 8, 19, 20ff, 46, 59, 62–4, 65, 79–82, 84–5, 98, 101, 113, 119, 135, 137, 153–5, 161–2, 165 see also discourse ethics Hacker, P.M.S., 71, 75 Hallie, Philip, 16–17, 179n81 Heath, Joseph, 206n99 Honneth, Axel, 189n87 hope, 12, 14, 18 Horkheimer, Max, 174n3 Horwich, Paul, 179n86 human rights, 13, 15–16, 55, 112, 157–8, 178n76, 201n64 Hume, David, 92, 100, 158

language, 143 limits of, xviii, 2, 5, 26, 163, 204n49 see also concepts, realm of conceptual moral, 117–20, 122 and reality/world, xi, 4, 5, 26, 55–6, 144, 152 strategic vs. non-strategic uses of, xii, 21–3, 110–1 see also agreement; concepts; de dicto vs. de re ascriptions law, ix–x, xiii, xiv, 22, 38–9, 41–2, 47ff, 57–8, 67, 79, 112, 136 Lilla, Mark, 185n18 logic, 67–8, 83–4, 98, 143 as branch of philosophy, 105, 172–3 Lovibond, Sabina, 102–4, 159, 167–68

inference, 11, 68, 83–4, 87, 88, 92–3, 97, 98, 100, 101, 104, 144–5, 148, 158 material, 64, 83–4, 159, 191n48 interests, xii, xiii, 25, 39–44, 60, 100–1, 180n23, 183n71, 184n114 of philosophy, 167–70, 171, 173 interpretation, 35–6, 47, 50, 52, 58, 63, 65–6, 73–4, 78–9, 82–3, 145, 191n42, 203n20

MacIntyre, Alasdair, xv, 102, 114, 118ff, 132–3, 134, 137–9, 191n47 Marx, Karl, 167 McCarthy, Thomas, 25–6, 27–8, 61 McDowell, John, 43, 67, 70, 104–5, 111, 142, 152–7, 162–3, 174n10, 184n114, 195n71, 201n51 Medina, José, 112 Melville, Herman, 134–5 messianic, the, 53–5, 61–2, 113

212 Index Michelman, Frank I., 37–8 Min, Anselm Kyongsuk, xix, 188n82 Montaigne, Michel de, 50 Moore, G.E., 90, 92, 95, 99, 108, 192n16, 194n55, 195n94, 196n101 morality, 24, 28, 41–4, 80, 103, 112, 119, 128, 163, 169, 201n65 and ethics, xix, 28, 33 and justification, 29–31, 35, 80–1, 87–9, 96–7, 98–102, 109, 125, 160 and law, ix–x, xiii, xiv, 22, 38–9, 41–2, 47–8, 50, 136 and particularity, xiii, xv, 24, 35–7, 48, 63, 113, 189n87 and the “personal”, xvi, 130–7, 138–9 and rationality, x, xi, xvi, 100, 101, 102–3, 118, 122, 127–8, 129–30, 131, 135–7 and religion, 31–3, 53–5, 113–15, 139 and universality, 24, 28, 30–1, 35–7, 39, 80–82, 113, 133–7, 189n87 moral acceptability, 129–132 moral decisions, xiii, 49, 57–9, 62–4 moral descriptions, 124–6 moral disagreement, x, xv–xvi, 33–4, 109, 118ff, 138, 139 moral distances, xv, 109–10 moral judgment(s), 28–9, 49, 57, 63–4, 80, 88, 97, 101 moral law, 2, 6, 12, 15, 164 moral obligation(s), 6–7, 9, 10, 13, 15–17, 28, 157–60, 163, 164, 179n83 moral relevance, xv, 36–7, 110, 118, 122–8, 129–30, 135, 139, 200n32, 200n41 moral validity, xii, xiv, xvi, 13, 24–5, 29–30, 33–4, 81, 87–9, 100, 128–9, 161–2, 181n53 see also ethics; language; norms; intuitions; reasons Mussolini, Benito, 140, 177n39 Naipaul, V.S., 1 Nelson, James Lindemann, 198n2 Neurath, Otto, 103 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10 normativity, xiii–xiv, 15, 63, 71, 76, 77, 82, 85, 98, 112, 113, 116, 163, 170, 172

norms, 67, 82–5, 100, 144, 147, 148–9, 150–1, 172 explicit vs. implicit, ix, xiv, 66, 76, 84–5, 97, 113, 158 moral, ix, xii, xiii, 20–1, 24–5, 33ff, 48ff, 62–4, 84–5, 97–8, 100, 112, 113, 135, 139, 160 see also rules Norris, Christopher, 172 objectivity, xi, xii, xvi–xvii, 6, 8, 15, 140–1 and morality, xi, 6, 116, 139, 141, 160, 161–2 of norms, 147, 148–9, 160, 172 scorekeeping model of, xvi, 141, 145–8, 161, 203n33 and theoretical discourse, xvi, 6, 27, 161–2 obligation, 6–7, 9, 10, 13, 15–17, 28, 153, 157–60, 163, 164, 179n83 On Certainty, xiv, 89ff Orwell, George, 8, 9, 103, 150–2, 156–7, 195n82 Pascal, Blaise, 50 Peirce, C.S., 4, 8 persuasion, xv, 11, 107, 110–2 Phillips, D.Z., xix, 171, 184n115, 199n25, 201n62, 208n24 philosopher, 4, 166ff Philosophical Investigations, 67, 70, 90, 142 philosophy, xvii, xviii, 4, 5, 108, 166ff Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 4, 6, 12, 176n15 Piercey, Robert, 37 Plato, 5, 10, 20, 34, 123 platonism, viii, xi, xvi, 4–5, 6, 10, 11, 14, 17–18, 19, 117, 141, 157, 176n18 rampant vs. naturalized, 142 pluralism, x, 24, 32, 138, 139, 201n61, 201n62 power, 5, 10, 13, 15, 157, 163, 178n75 compare authority practice(s), xiv, xvi, 2, 4, 6, 11, 12, 14, 20, 42, 62, 74, 76, 79–80, 82, 84, 85, 98, 113, 117, 131, 146, 147, 148, 149, 152, 154–5, 156, 157, 160, 163, 165, 173, 178n53 primacy of, 3, 154–5, 175n11 two senses of, 149, 152, 172

Index 213 pragmatism, xi, xii, xvi, 3, 4, 7, 11–2, 17, 37–8, 75, 141–2, 165 principle of universalization, see universalization, principle of progress, viii, 11, 60, 62 proposition(s), xiv, 84, 87, 90–8, 100, 105, 115, 198n129 Putnam, Hilary, ix, 8, 149, 177n39 Quine, W.V.O., 105 Rabossi, Edwardo, 178n63 rationality, x, xi, xvi, 11, 21, 23, 93, 100, 101, 102–3, 107, 118, 122, 127–8, 129–30, 131, 135–7 realism, 14, 17–18, 19, 27, 29–30, 179n87 and anti-, 18 ordinary, xvi, 18, 19, 117, 153–5, 165 reality, 4, 14, 153 appearance and, 5, 12, 17, 152, 156 see also world reason(s), 7, 93, 99, 108, 112, 115, 118, 129–130, 142, 173 force of, xii, 104, 111, 130, 157, 200n49 game of giving and asking for, xi, xiv, xvii, 91, 93, 99, 104, 108, 115, 144, 170, 172, 204n45 moral, xi, xvi, 42–4, 96–8, 99, 100, 101, 104, 109, 123–7, 129–30, 132, 135–7, 162, 194n61 regularism, xiv, 69–72 regulism, xiv, 66–9 relativism, 51, 79–82, 162 religion, x, xv, 31–3, 53–5, 110, 113–15, 139, 182n62, 182n69 responsibility, 6–7, 9, 10, 132, 159, 164 Rhees, Rush, 99, 194n60, 196n104 riverbed of thought, 105–6, 108, 110, 148 Rorty, Richard, ix, xi–xii, 2ff, 21–2, 25ff, 46, 59, 61, 80, 113, 117, 140–1, 149, 150–2, 156, 157–9, 160–1, 163, 164–5, 179n83, 179n5 Ross, W.D., x, 87–9, 92, 97, 98, 101, 109 rules, 50, 63, 65–6, 82–3, 89, 96, 105, 190n33 as explicit, xiv, 63, 76, 82, 84–5 regulative vs. constitutive, xiii, 41–2

rule-following, xiii–xiv, 56–8, 66ff, 190n29 see also application; norms; regularism; regulism science, 80, 91, 100, 104, 107, 113, 118–19, 126, 129, 161–2, 169, 204n48, 206n94 scorekeeping, see objectivity Sellars, Wilfrid, xi, 155 sentimental education, 13, 111–112 Singer, Peter, 110, 197n110 Smith, James K.A., 54, 61–2 Socrates, 10, 34, 36, 123, 125, 166 solidarity, xii, 6–7, 10, 15, 17, 31, 140 Stone, Martin, 57 Stout, Jeffrey, x, 201n61 subjectivism, xvi, 118, 133, 135, 138 Timmons, Mark, 88–89, 96–7, 98 tradition(s), xvi, 5, 9, 31, 118, 137–9 truth, xi, xiv, xvi, 5, 6, 8, 9, 22–3, 141, 142–4, 147, 157, 164 correspondence theory of, 6, 26–7 and justification, xiv, 7, 12, 26–8, 29–30, 161, 164 compare justification unconditionality, xiv, 20, 26, 63 universality, xiii, xiv, 24, 25, 26, 28, 30–1, 35–7, 39, 48, 65–6, 79–82, 113, 133–7, 189n87 two senses of, 80–82, 113 universalization, principle of, xii, xvi, 20, 21, 25, 28, 29, 30, 33, 39–41, 65, 81, 162 validity, xii, xiv, xvi, 13, 23, 24–5, 26, 29–30, 33–4, 81, 87–9, 100, 128–9, 161–2, 181n53 van Willigenburg, Theo, 130, 135–7 vivisection, 126–7 Walker, Alice, 1 Warnke, Georgia, 36–7 warrant, 6, 8–9, 14–15, 21–2, 150–2, 164 see also justification Weil, Simone, 86, 170, 171, 208n18 Weltbild, 93, 99, 101, 104, 105, 106, 108–9, 113, 114, 115, 126, 127, 130, 134, 138, 139, 146, 148, 159, 203n33 Weston, Michael, 169–70

214 Index Wheeler, Samuel C. III, 60 Whittaker, John H., 110–1 Williams, Michael, 26 Winch, Peter, 44, 103, 131, 134, 171–2, 193n47, 195n82, 201n53, 208n18 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xiii–xiv, xvii, xviii–xix, 3, 38, 56, 67, 70ff, 89ff, 142–3, 157, 166–7, 170, 171–2, 175n12

world answerability to, xii, xvi, 7, 14, 27, 140, 141, 148, 152–7, 164 as rational constraint, xvi, 6, 7, 21, 154–7 as realm of moral value, xvi, 141, 157, 161–2 “well lost”, 6, 14, 153, 155, 204n48 see also reality Wright, Crispin, 69, 77, 187n54