>
>As far as I can tell, Justin's response amounts to this: "So what?" My
>suspicion is, rhetoric aside, that Justin is a closet Rorty fan - one rule,
>hurting people is bad, after that, anything goes, just fight the good
>fight.
Not exactly. I am a former Rorty student, and I am a pragmatist, but I am not as big a fan of banality as Rorty. My response hasn't been "so what" to philosophy, but to the Habermas you have laid out. (As I say, I don't pretend to know whether it represents his actual views.) I think there's a lot of interesting things to be said about social and moral theory, etc., a lot more than "don't hurt people," but your Habermas hasn't said any of those things, far as I can see. I like Rawls and Scanlon better, or J.S. Mill.
Rorty tries to cut through a lot of bullshit, and pretty much
>sees
>most of what goes on in philosophy as a colossal waste of time and effort.
Probably I do to, but I just think it's a waste of time for me. I don';t mind if other people do it. Since I just do this as a hobby nowadays, I am free to ignore stuff I don't care about. I used to do philosophy of mind, but now it bores me.
But Rorty implicitly
>draws on
>a rather Kantian testing mechanism: does it hurt or doesn't it?
Whay is that Kantian rather than utilitarian?
>
>So I'll outline a formal pragmatic argument and Justin will say, "So what?"
>- all the while going along with the outline: "Yes, I'm into this
>argumentation stuff." The posturing we've both been engaged in is comical
>precisely because we're not really disagreeing about anything.
Look, I don't dispute that argument is valuable, I just don't think this fact has the significance your Habermas attributes to it. If we want to know the truth anout things, and be jutified in believing less obvious ones, we need arguments. (And now the Rortyan shrug:) So what?
Rorty doesn't think the left needs ethical
>foundations,
>everybody avoids pain. I've been pushing the question of foundations via
>Habermas because it is the most sustained defense of ethical foundations
>that doesn't lapse into metaphysics or theology.
That's Rorty, not me. I don't know if we "need" ethical "foundations," but I have spent a lot of time elaborating moral justifications for left political views in a way I hope is consistent with a credible version of historical materialism. Most people, and most on the left, won't care, but that's OK; for those of us that do, it's worth doing this work as long as it doesn't detract too much from actually fighting oppression. I am Rortyan enough to think that we don't need to agonize too much about whether oppression ought to be fought, even if it's important to some us to be able to say just what oppression is and why it bad.
Habermas argues
>that 'the
>ought' cannot be derived from the is because in the determination of the
>is, there is already a de facto logical ought that we must pass through on
>the way to reaching an agreement.
I don't find this way of talking illuminating. I am not interested in deriving oughts from is's; that only concerns people who are bothered by the fact that the world might contain irreducible oughts, which doesn't bother me in the least.
Here'a nother ide taht just occurred to be based on your formulation: it seems that Habermas wants to reduce ethical oughts to logical oughts, and that doesn't seem too likely a prospect to me.
Habermas simply makes the 'rules'
>on what >counts as an argument explicit. I guess I think If these
>conditions are not met, >then an >argument cannot be said to have taken
>place. Rorty doesn't disagree >with >this in practice, he just disagrees
>with it in theory.
No, Rorty thinks that we can state the local rules for what counts as ana rgument. He just thinks taht for praxctical purposes, it's not very important to do so, or indeed to make arguments for things taht he things we all agree on. Me, I think there is little that we all agree on. But as an historical materialist, I doubt that argument is an effective tool for changing minds.
>
>I don't mean to be pedantic here. I take it that Justin's point is that the
>left doesn't need ethical foundations, which is why he hasn't engaged my
>point directly,
Yeah, well, read my paper on Reflective Equilibrium. I wouldn't describe it as providing ethical "foundations," but as an ethical justification.
he keeps sliding off into pragmatic concerns: it
>doesn't
>work that way, we learn from art, there is more than one way to settle an
>argument, we can reach agreement without theory, what about global
>warming...
No, that's Rorty, not me. Rorty thuinks we have agreement without theory. I don't think we have agreement, and that theory won't help us get it.
>
>But, in the end, this isn't social theory, its politics - and there can be
>little doubt that politics needs some sort of philosophical foundation.
Amen to that. Thsi is were I started out with Luke: politics is prior. Social theory is part of it. Philosophical foundations or justifications aren't outside politics. They are political interventions. Philosophy is optional. I happen to like doing it.
>Pragmatism does not have a social theoretical basis, it is not a scientific
>inquiry, it is probably more like a worldview.
I have no idea what this means. Pragmatism is not scientific inquiry, it is a way of approaching philosophy. As to having a social theoretical bassi, maybe it doesn't. My won social theoretical basis is historical materialism, a view I think is consistent with pragmatism.
--jks
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