a response to rorty

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A Response to Rorty Author(s): Daryl Koehn Source: Business Ethics Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Jul., 2006), pp. 391-399Published by: Philosophy Documentation CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3857923Accessed: 13-08-2015 15:04 UTC

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A RESPONSE TO RORTY

Daryl Koehn

In his SBE address, Richard Rorty argues against any attempt to validate objective truths or norms. He makes no claim that his account of the nature and scope

of the discipline of philosophical business ethics is true. From his perspective, no account is objectively true because the world we experience is always mediated by narratives contingently shaped by culture and history. The standard for assessing an account should not be whether it is true but whether it efficaciously enables us to achieve social justice and to ameliorate suffering. Like Michel Foucault, Rorty sees himself as undermining institutions and controlling narratives in order to free us to imagine new ways to reduce the injustice and human pain resulting from the spread of global capitalism.

Rorty makes three major claims: 1. Philosophy has played an important historical role in curtailing the power

of religion and allowing science to advance. Now that science has triumphed over religion, that role (along with its attendant truth claims) ought to be abandoned. Lan- guage be it ordinary, literary, poetic, historical, or philosophicalnly provides us with a description of an ever-changing world. Every description is irreducibly historical and contingent in nature. Therefore, we should give up the illusion that there is some Archimedean point we can use to ground our theories.

2. Since philosophy has no special or unique access to the truth, we should not think of it as the universal arbiter of values or norms and should not look to philosophers to discover or to build a foundation for ethics. But if ethical theory cannot provide us with an objective, solid foundation for norms, what should business ethicists be doing? Must they settle for critiquing the work of foundationalists? Rorty denies us even this option because he insists there is no non-historical, non- contingent language for adjudicating among competing claims or theories. We have no objective place on which to stand when making the case that our critique is more grounded or correct than someone else's.

To understand what Rorty is arguing, it is helpful to situate these claims in the context of his larger body of work. Elsewhere Rorty argues that philosophy, like poetry, is a language game, and the proper function of human linguistic activity is to articulate imagined worlds, not to reflect an unmediated reality, which does not exist in any case. The lover of wisdom must settle for re-describing human activity and the world. The appeal of any such re-description is, ultimately, not rational, for Rorty denies reason an adjudicating role. Instead, we embrace values because they appeal to us. If we philosophers succeed in re-describing a host of things, events, and

C) 2006. Business Ethics Quarterly, Volume 16, Issue 3. ISSN 1052-1SOX. pp. 391-399


392 BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY issues, then perhaps others will begin to see the world as we do and will embrace it. If a paradigm shift does occur, it will not be because we have reasoned things through but because we have started seeing them afresh:

The method is to re-describe lots and lots of things in new ways, until you have created a pattern of linguistic behavior which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it.... This sort of philosophy does not work piece by piece, analyzing concept after concept, or testing thesis after thesis. Rather it works holisti- cally and pragmatically. It says things like "try thinking of it this way" or more specifically, "try to ignore the apparently futile traditional questions by substituting the following new and possibly interesting questions." It does not pretend to have a better candidate for doing the same old things which we did when we spoke in the old way.... Conforming to my own precepts, I am not going to offer arguments against the vocabulary I want to replace. Instead, I am going to try to make the vocabulary I favor look more attractive by showing how it may be used to describe a variety of topics.'

3. What kind of world does Rorty think is especially "attractive"? In other writings, he has devoted his considerable linguistic skills to portraying an ideal world, a tolerant place where we all, as the British say, "rub along and muddle through":

What is needed is a sort of intellectual analogue of civic virtue-tolerance, irony, and a willingness to let spheres of culture flourish without worrying too much about their "common ground," their unification, the "intrinsic ideals" they suggest, or what picture of man they "presuppose."2

We business ethicists should be telling stories of exemplary figures with a view to inspiring our students to act. From Rorty's pragmatic point of view, there is no point in trying to articulate and justify moral principles since there can be no objective foundation for any morality. As he confided in an interview:

It's hard to keep moral philosophy as an academic sub-discipline going if you're a pragmatist. The name of the game in moral philosophy is finding principles and then finding counter-examples to the other guy's principles. Pragmatists aren't very big on principles. There isn't much to do in moral philosophy if you're a pragmatist.3

As other commentators have noted, Rorty is not a relativist if one takes a relativist to be someone who believes all values are equally good. Rorty unequivocally commits himself to liberal values of solidarity and autonomy. Moreover, he favors descriptions emphasizing (or even celebrating) irony and the contingency of every narrative, all the while conceding that his own ironic portrayals of the world lack objectivity and cannot be proven. The most we can hope for is that our fellow human beings try on Rorty's way of viewing the world and find that doing so opens up new vistas. Having once imagined a better world, we will be in a position to set about realizing that world.

Much of Rorty's analysis takes the negative form of arguing against other peoples' foundational moralities or interpretations. Such negativity has prompted critics to charge that "Rorty is only one step away from Baudrillard, the self-proclaimed


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'intellectual terrorist' who prefers simply to blow up ideas with unsubstantiated claims and outrageous exaggerations rather than attending to matters of evaluating truth or falsehood, or patient empirical demonstration of his claims."4 This charge may have some merit, but for purposes of this discussion, I will assume that Rorty's agenda is a positive one: by focusing on the importance of creating ourselves anew through the imagination, he seeks to liberate us from an unnecessary obsession with foundations and ever more convoluted refinements of moral principles and maxims. Once freed, we will perhaps be able to think more imaginatively and to leave behind stultifying inherited worldviews. To paraphrase Shakespeare: there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamt of in ethicists philosophy.

Rorty's three claims are interdependent and, by his own admission, stand or fall as a whole picture or description. Either we see the world as mediated via contingent, historical narratives, or we don't. If we don't find this portrayal to be emotionally compelling, we won't be persuaded to show solidarity with Rorty and to join forces with him in reforming the world. Separating Rorty's portrayal into three strands (;'claims" may be too strong, given that we are supposedly dealing only with "re-descriptions") may somewhat misrepresent his project, but one has to begin somewhere. Furthermore, for all of his talk about literature and fiction, Rorty is not writing novels or lyric poetry. He is advancing reasoned considerations for his position and, to that extent, his position can be rationally dissected.

This last observation leads me to my first concern. Rorty is not merely committed to certain values: he is equally devoted to presenting his porb ayal in a coherent way. He takes pains to ensure that what he says at the opening of his address is not contradicted by what he says in middle or at the end. Why, though, does he bother with coherence? Why not, say, along with the poet Walt Whitman, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself"? Why behave in a way that reveals he is committed to the law of non-contradiction? Kant and Plato have an answer: we are essentially the sort of beings who do not wish to assert both A and not-A. For Kant, we are rational beings who (if our consciences are not utterly corrupted) experience self-respect rooted in regard for the moral law. To put the point slightly differently: reason has its own interests and, consequently, has motivating force in our lives. For Plato, our souls are constituted in such a way as to be more satisfyingly ordered when reason gives orders to desire rather than the reverse. It seems to me that Rorty also shows himself to be the kind of being for whom reason has motivating interests if his self-respect did not demand coherence, he would not be so concerned to maintain it in his writings. So, although Rorty explicitly rejects essences, he certainly acts and speaks as if he believes we are essentially rational beings.5

In his SBE address, Rorty speaks about coherence in general. In other works7 he has argued that we must settle for "local" coherence: what we say and do should accord with a limited subset of beliefs because we cannot hope to bring all of our beliefs into harmony with each other. Thus, Rorty would likely argue that the Sul- livan Principles played a useful role in weakening apartheid, even though we might not be able to show that these principles were part of some globally coherent system


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of moral principles.6 Two points need to be made about this idea of local coherence: first, what gives Rorty's recommendation its normative force? That is, why should we settle for local coherence? Since settling for local coherence is equivalent to saying that we are perfectly content to live in contradiction with ourselves; and since the latter course is exactly what rational beings reject, it could be argued that Rorty's recommendation does not have any normative force. Thrasymachus's position has a kind of local coherence. Yet, when Socrates shows that the position is not coherent with a host of other beliefs, Thrasymachus has the good grace to blush. Plato and Kant can account for why Thrasymachus blushes-he feels shame at being caught in contradiction. As far as I can see, Rorty has no way to explain Thrasymachus's blush.

Nor does the example of the Sullivan Principles support Rorty's notion of a merely local coherence. Leon Sullivan was a Christian minister who understood these principles to be grounded in the objective nature of God's creation. He maintained, "There is no greater moral issue in the world today than apartheid. . . . Apartheid is against the will of God and humanity."7 The Sullivan Principles garnered widespread support among other clergy who also believed in a complex, elaborated moral system of objective rights, duties, and principles that generations of Judeo-Christian theologians have taken care to make as consistent and persuasive as possible. Without sustained pressure from church leaders who believed in the global coherence of the underlying moral system, the Sullivan Principles, I would argue, would never have gained widespread acceptance among Western executives.

Second, to aim at even a local coherence means granting reason's rule in this narrower domain. Consequently, this refinement does not deny the force of the above objection. In fact, talk of local coherence raises another set of issues: just how small could this set of local beliefs be? One or two beliefs? If a speaker were to present a position with miniscule local coherence, we would accuse him or her of sloppy thinking and suspect the speaker of trying to pull the wool over our eyes. Why is the speaker focusing on only these beliefs and not other aspects and facts? Catching a whiff of the arbitrary, we would be on our guard against sophistry. Else- where llorty concedes that any account will have to be able to encompass many things if it is to have any hope of producing a paradigm shift. Thinkers like Kant and Plato have an explanation of this drive toward comprehensiveness. Since we are constituted such that we do not want to live in contradiction with ourselves, every belief in which we are invested needs, in principle, to be reconciled with the other claims in which we have put our trust. Our essence or psychological makeup prevents us from being persuaded by half-baked theories that fail to harmonize with the whole of our experience. And it is, as Plato would say, the reasoning part of our psyche, not emotions or feelings, that imposes this harmonizing demand and points the way to ordering our beliefs accordingly. (Neither Plato nor I would deny that a felt unease and/or inspiration also play a part in driving this process of integration forward. So this process does have a subjective component. But it is reason that


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sorts through the contradictions and comes up with better formulations intended to overcome identified inconsistencies).

I come now to my second objection to Rorty's position. Part of what reason considers when deciding whether to alter previously held positions is "the fact of the matter." According to Rorty, though, there are no facts that do not depend on contingent historical narratives. Everything we see and do is mediated by our beliefs or worldview, which may be more or less rational. As Anais Nin writes, ;'We see the world not as it is, but as we are." I readily concede that many of our beliefss and even our perceptions, are, to some extent, a function of other things we've encountered or been taught. Several years ago I heard an interview on National Public Radio with children from a "primitive" part of the world who, upon arriving in a modern city, saw their first bus. They thought it must be large animal of some sort with large white eyes. Familiar with animals, they assimilated this machine to that which they already knew with what fit into their framing narrative, a narrative contingent upon their previous experiences in the jungle.

At first glance, this example would seem to support Rorty's position. However, I think we must be exceedingly careful. This example equally suggests that the process of assimilation is not arbitrary. These children thought of animals in a matter akin to that of Aristotle. In De Anima, Aristotle defines animals as organisms able to initiate self-motion. The children did not think the bus was a huge coconut tree or a star or the number three. They saw that it moved and so they reasonably theonzed that the bus was a huge, lumbering animal. The division between plants and animals itself seems to be a non-arbitrary division, given that peoples all over the world distinguish between self-moving and stationary organisms. In his fasci- nating essay "A Quahog Is a Quahog," the biologist Stephen Jay Gould argues that peoples from around the world charactenze birds into roughly the same species.8 Grouping birds using characteristics we employ (color, form, beak type), they amve at divisions almost identical to those we make:

The literature on non-Western taxonomies is not extensive, but it is persuasive. We usually find a remarkable correspondence between Linnaean species and non-Western plant and animal names. In short, the same packages are recognized by independent cultures.... Several biologists have noted these remarkable correspondences.... Ernst Mayr himself describes his experience in New Guinea: ';Forty years ago, I lived all alone with a tribe of Papuans in the mountains of new Guinea. These superb woodsmen had 136 names for the 137 species of birds I distinguished.... That Stone Age man recognizes the same entities of nature as Western university-trained scientists refutes rather decisively the claim that species are nothing but a product of the human imagination." (italics mine)9

Working with other populations, Jared Diamond, Ralph Bulmer, Brent Berlin, Dennis Breedlove, Peter Raven, and other biologists have confirmed Mayrs finding.l

Here, then, is some evidence that Rorty is wrong. Human beings do not imaginatively generate distinctions willy-nilly. Our divisions are non-arbitrary: "We live in a world of structure and legitimate distinctions" (italics mine).l' Gould argues


396 BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY that this striking empirical similarity of division implies either 1) that human beings possess similar hardwired species-distinguishing frameworks and, consequently, our divisions reflect this natural human essence; 2) that there are natural kinds in the world and we are, in Socratic language, all cutting at the same natural joints; or 3) that both possibilities hold true. I take no position here on which of these possibilities is the correct one. I simply note that each option represents a kind of fact an objective feature of the natural self and/or the natural world that controls how we organize our experience. Under all three scenarios sketched by Gould, objective nature produces the distinctions; distinctions do not contingently produce nature. Indeed, Gould relates how three biological anthropologists who initially contended that how various peoples organize the world depends contingently upon their local social narratives subsequently repudiated their findings. When the anthropologists returned and interviewed the tribes more carefully with a more competent transla- tor, they discovered significant convergence or overlap between how Westerners and non-Westerners divvy up bird and plant species.

To summarize: Although we assimilate new things we encounter to those that we already know; and although our experiences (or, at least, some of them) have a contingent dimension, it does not follow that our narratives, distinctions, and theories merely reflect a particular historical outlook. If, as Gould, Aristotle, Plato and others argue, our past experiences have been organized objectively (or, at a minimum, admit of being so organized), then the assimilated present will also have an objective foundation.

A related point: yes, reason interprets what we experience it gives meaning to that which we experience. However, reason is always interpreting something. This something is the experienced facts, which possess an integrity all their own. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and flooded much of the city. The space shuttles Challenger and Columbia blew up. What these events mean is open to debate; that they occurred is not. As Hannah Arendt has argued, it will always be true that Germany invaded Belgium, not the reverse. Holocaust deniers may try to re-write history, but that does not alter the fact that they are deniers. Those who experienced Hurricane Katrina or who witnessed mass murder know a truth that cannot be gain- said, even though this experiential truth cannot be proven by reason.

In my view, Rorty makes two inter-related mistakes. First, he treats existence as a predicative quality. Yet, as Richard McKeon has argued, there are four senses of the verb "to be": there is 1) that which is or the "is" of entities; 2) what is or the "is" of being/nature/essence; 3) the set of conditions under which an entity is what it is or the "is" of existence; and 4) the question of whether these conditions obtain for us personally or the "is" of experience.l2 Existence is not a predicate. It is a determination of the conditions under which an entity is what it is. Do unicorns exist? The unicorn exists as an animal to be encountered in certain types of narratives known as myths or fairy tales. This same unicorn does not exist as an animal in the wild or in zoos. To say that something "exists" means to make a determination of the conditions under which that which is is what it is. It is not to perceive a quality



of a thing. Existence properly understood is necessarily mediated by reason speci- fying conditions. If so, then Rorty's claim that what exists is relative to a situated language user is true but almost trivially so.

His second mistake consists in conflating the existential "is" with the experiential "is." Determining the existential conditions under which a substance is what it is says nothing about whether those conditions have actually obtained in the past or are applying in the present. Just as essence does not determine existence, so existence does not determine experience. Concrete or particular facts are given to us by personal experience not by reason or theories. The victims of Hurricane Katrina felt the lash of the wind and knew the terror of rising waters. The storm came upon them with a character that Charles Sanders Peirce terms '4secondness" a brute quality of one subject or substance acting upon another.l3 When a passing work- man hits us in the back of the head with a ladder, we stagger and wonder what has happened. Interpretation or narratives do not give us that startling experience. On the contrary, it is our experience that sets the interpretive machinery going: what struck us? Something organic or inorganic? Was a human being responsible? If so, was the blow intentional, accidental, or the result of negligence?

Having treated existence as a predicate and then mistaken the existential "is" for the expenential "is," Rorty tends to overlook facts given by experience.l4 This neglect of experience means, in turn, that Rorty cannot ground ethics. Foundational ethicists ground ethics in some objective fact(s) of immediate experience-e.g., our awareness that we are free (Kant; Hegel); that we can and do originate actions (Aristotle); that we are frequently conflicted and so the soul (understood as the organizing and organized energy of a purposeful life) must have two or more parts (Plato). We do not choose to be free or conflicted. On the contrary, human choice presupposes these experiences. These expenences function as objective bases for ethics enabling philosophers to argue for the superionty of a particular way of life. Plato, Aristotle, and Kant are not just painting pretty pictures of the world. As I argued above, whether we find their analyses to be persuasive depends, in part, on the general coherence of their reasoning. But it also depends ultimately and crucially upon whether we have had the experiences presupposed by their accounts. Those who have never felt pulled in one direction by reason and in another by desire cannot know the peace satisfaction and joy that arise when the soul has harmonized itself. Those who have never expenenced the pain of living in self-contradiction will never know what true self-respect is. If these human experiences are, indeed, universal, then the foundational projects of these philosophers become more promising, while Rorty's anti-foundational stance becomes less plausible.

I want to end by returning to Rorty's positive agenda and explonng a bit how his approach will translate into teaching. If he is right, then most of our students are condemned to live in the cave. All they can and will ever see and "know" are shadows cast by an inherited worldview transmitted to them by their families and the larger culture. The teacher merely functions as yet another figure holding up vanous images (in this case, constructed narratives) that cast moving shadows thrown upon


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the wall of the cave. A few bright students might succeed in becoming politicians, artists, or members of the chattering class. Still, this success does not mean much. The only difference between those chained to the wall gazing at images and those producing the images (e.g., philosophers like Rorty) is that the latter understand that opinion-makers are responsible for fostering and sustaining the beliefs held by those chained in the cave. Education reduces to indoctrination.

Even if we inspire/indoctrinate our students to seek solidarity, in what sense is their new, committed life "better" than before? Unless there is some objectively good life, they can hardly be said to have progressed. Even if they feel they are better off, perhaps this feeling is an illusion engendered by some spin doctor's image. The liberal arts have traditionally been thought of as an initiation into a freer life; the truly educated are liberated not only from illusion and but also from instrumental activities:

Now the original conception of the Liberal Arts was a way one way of establishing a space apart from immediately pragmatic and political concerns, insofar as the Liberal Arts initiated studies that were pure ends in themselves, not means to anything else. These arts were activities of reason in its various guises (arithmetic, geometry, music, logic, grammar, etc.).'5

If I understand Rorty correctly, then this promise of liberation is false. Teaching the liberal arts loses its nobility and becomes just another politically instrumental game. If that is all that teaching is, I find it hard to conceive why one would bother to get up in the morning and prepare for class.

Notes

1. Richard Rorty, quoted in Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner, "Richard Rorty and Postmod- ern Theory," at www.gSeis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/richardrortypostmoderntheory.pdf.

2. Ibid. 3. Joshua Knobe, "A Talent for Bricolage: An Interview with Richard Rorty," The Dualist

2 (1995): 56-71. 4. Best and Kellner, "Rorty and Postmodern Theory." 5. It might be objected that, while reason is essential to us in some sense, reason plays no

role in effecting the paradigm shift. However, Rorty himself insists that the shift occurs because a new way of looking at things makes global or holistic sense. It would seem to be reason, not the emotions or feelings, that requires us to come up with a new picture "hangs together" as a whole.

6. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for the example of the Sullivan principles. 7. Leon Sullivan, quoted in Chris Herlinger, "Leon Sullivan Dies," Christianity Today

(April 30, 2001). 8. Stephen Jay Gould, "A Quahog Is a Quahog," in The Panda's Thumb (New York: W.

W. Norton & Company, 1980), 20>13. 9. Ibid., 207-08. 10. Ibid.,208-13.



11. Ibid., 213. 12. Richard McKeon, "Being, Existence, and That Which Is," Review of Metaphysics 13

(June 1960): 537-54. 13. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 1 and 2

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), passim. 14. Rorty does recognize one fact, "the fact that our sense of possibilities open for human

beings has changed as history has rolled along, and will go right on changing in unpredictable ways." But this "fact" is simply another way of stating his theory of subjective pragmatism, and it is this theory that, I contend, leads him to neglect the reality of facts given in and by personal experiences.

15. John Cornell, CommencementAddress for St. John's Graduate Institute, SantaFe, New Mexico, August 2005.


Article Contentsp. [391]p. 392p. 393p. 394p. 395p. 396p. 397p. 398p. 399

Issue Table of ContentsBusiness Ethics Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Jul., 2006), pp. 313-443Front MatterSpecial Forum: Marketing and TechnologyMarketing, Consumers and Technology: Perspectives for Enhancing Ethical Transactions [pp. 313-321]Privacy Rights on the Internet: Self-Regulation or Government Regulation? [pp. 323-342]Online Brands and Trademark Conflicts: A Hegelian Perspective [pp. 343-367]

Philosophy's Role vis--vis Business EthicsIs Philosophy Relevant to Applied Ethics? Invited Address to the Society of Business Ethics Annual Meeting, August 2005 [pp. 369-380]The Relevance of Philosophy to Business Ethics: A Response to Rorty's "Is Philosophy Relevant to Applied Ethics? [pp. 381-389]A Response to Rorty [pp. 391-399]A Place for Philosophers in Applied Ethics and the Role of Moral Reasoning in Moral Imagination: A Response to Richard Rorty [pp. 401-408]Replies to Koehn, De George, and Werhane [pp. 409-413]

Review ArticlesReview: The Rights of Employees [pp. 415-418]Review: The Morality of Markets [pp. 419-425]Review: Developments in Marketing Ethics [pp. 427-439]

Book NotesReview: untitled [p. 441]Review: untitled [p. 442]Review: untitled [p. 443]

Back Matter

a response to rorty

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