Ethics of Principle vs Sensitivity - Richard Rorty (1990)

[@Someone-id3qx]

More Rorty please, thank you!

[@Gabriel-pt3ci]

Magnificent! Even a full-fledge analytic philosopher, which finds postmodernism, relativism and pragmatism unpalatable, must concede that Rorty is a great thinker. His line of reasoning and his mastery of discourse go hand in hand to produce quite a piece. You may not agree, and perhaps resisting agreement with him is the natural instinct, but it is difficult to find argumentative flaws or weak points in his dissertations.

[@Gabriel-pt3ci]

I think I spotted a flaw. Around minute 39 he says that (paraphrase) the adjudication of a moral issue is to not to be evaluated by principles but by looking at who is getting hurt by pre-established principles. But isn't that itself a moral principle? I guess in this case he thinks such "principle" is driven by a kind of biological and cultural evolution, and that what he is against is a 'reasoned' principle (something that can be mined from some realm of pre-existing truths). But suppose biology (understood in the broadest sense) gives you the principle, and the imperfectness of biological implementation makes it to be applied inhomogeneously over society and occasions, then... wouldn't it be reasonable to hold that principle out of choice? I mean, once you recognize that Biology has driven us thus far by systematically (although inhomogeneously) applying such principle, wouldn't it be (rationally) correct to embrace the biological imperative as a conscious decision of single, individual, human beings in front of single, individual occasions? Once you know what is the average evolutionary trend (and empirically understand why), isn't it appropriate to uphold the naturally emergent "principle" as a moral principle in all fours? I think it is. Moreover, I guess it can be called a rational choice, and I guess similar strategies can be used to unearth ethical principles of different kinds. I don't mind if it is self-creation or self-discovery as Rorty does. Even if it is self-creation (not being there in an abstract realm), I think its prescriptions can be spread unbiasedly over the whole of society as the main moral guide.

[@gamerhegel7780]

@@Gabriel-pt3ci What he means is that he wants to discard rule based ethics in favor of something like Anette Baier. Look at the lecture about morality and prudence in the Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism book / lectures for reference. The move you are doing here "by rejecting x you are already doing x" tells us nothing more than that the vocabulary of principles can characterize a vocabulary defined in opposition to principles in terms of that vocabulary of principles. Tautological, not immanent critique.

[@Gabriel-pt3ci]

@@gamerhegel7780 No, no, it actually tell us more than that. Notice that he is not just saying there are no rules. He is introducing a new rule about not hurting. Refraining from saying what is the course of action for adjudicating a moral conundrum, saying that it is something intrinsically dependent on the case (as the concept of wisdom by Barry Schwartz) would be a consistent position to take for a defender of an unprincipled ethics. I am not a priori saying I am against unprincipled ethics because it requires at least a principle (i.e., that of rejecting any ethical principle), that would be a extremely pedantic position to take. I am just saying that, at a point, he is introducing a very specific ethical rule (that of not hurting), which is against his preaching.

[@gamerhegel7780]

@@Gabriel-pt3ci He holds opposition to cruelty as a law i.e. principle like actual legal laws are laws i.e. principles. They are just handy things we take part in for our good, not scientific objects to be discovered. There is a gap between his argumentative style which is more about literature and politics than about science and math and yours, which is the opposite. There may or may not be exceptions on a case by case basis but that is beyond the point of the argument, generalizability is not the goal. To invoke principles or not is beyond the point of moving beyond principles, which doesn't mean to abandom them, just to make them tools for human use, rather than objects of mathematical discovery.

[@jamesbarlow6423]

You gotta love vanilla if you claim to like ice cream.

[@blairhakamies4132]

Absolutely brilliant again... Again... Again🌹 thank you for sharing it.

[@klammer75]

Amazing! Damn do we need more of this kind of discussion than ever!🥳🤓🤩

[@fastinbulvis2223]

@2:20 Haha! Not anymore.

[@JTL2884]

Oh man I love Rorty

[@dionysianapollomarx]

Thank you for this one

[@austintierney4828]

47:25 is crucial for understanding his point regarding how moral progress comes to light in a society

[@ericv7720]

At the 15:25 mark, this is exactly why, in a culture where so few people read novels (or a book of any sort) anymore, we are in such trouble - irreparably divided, looking for a strongman to save us.

[@lonelycubicle]

That was great, thank you for uploading!

[@yp77738yp77739]

His rate of delivery is twice that of my ability to process the information, but superficially I find no errors in his reasoning or logic. Interesting, thank you.

[@raphel5576]

He wrote this lecture particularly well.

[@bzdyo1147]

Thank you.

[@arlieferguson7442]

I have to wonder whether it makes sense to dispense with Platonically conceived principles in the interest of a better society. Common human enterprises need common goals and when people want to know why we have chosen them we ought to have reasons. They need not be regarded as true in all times and places, but they do need to be grounded in a sense that they are guided by an effort to achieve the good as a goal or the truth of what that good amounts to. I fear that Rorty’s ship can sail but lacks a sense of direction or whether it can hold its direction once it has been pragmatically decided upon.

[@sergiosatelite467]

It’s complicated. But it’s hard to point to any absolute which has emerged ahistorically and atemporally. They are always labeled as such by specific humans in specific contexts…so we might as well be honest and dispose of such ceremonies. There is no wizard of USA…

[@michaelstueben2880]

I love Richard Rorty. However I have a question. His talk was morality as principle versus sensitivity. But then he said that moral progress was an expansion of seeing the community as wider and wider (concentric circles). That seems like a principle to me: Morality progresses or increases with greater application to the general population. Comment please.

[@peterg418]

Perhaps Rorty is offering a descriptive, the way someone will say that "Cthulhu swims left." The collector or archivist view of morality, it seems, does not entail the adjudication of moral claims, where one has to be exclusionary and say, "No, not that." It seems perfectly reasonable to be sensitive to a wider community of moral claims, though I myself might not be a participant in some of their moral claims. To use your quote, "Morality progresses or increases with...." does not fill in the substantive quality of morality itself. As Rorty would say...there is no final vocabulary.

[@szelan]

i suspect many critics of rationalism (e.g. myself and Rorty) struggle to avoid reproducing rationalist vocabularies in our critique. we can account for this struggle by pointing to the history of what derrida called "logocentrism" or what heidegger called the western onto-theological tradition. but by pointing to this history, we do not mean to suggest a replacement history. rather we mean to say, if possible, merely that we see it and we are concerned about it. not that we know what to do about it. to say that we know what to do about it would, indeed, suggest a principle to replace a principle, which is exactly what we hope to avoid. i suspect this is why kierkegaard wrote more prose poetry that philosophical treatise and why nietzsche spent much of his time celebrating the artist over the philosopher. to say that moral progress increases the community of cooperative agents is an attempt, i suspect, to make hegel's historicism more descriptive rather than predictive. again to simply say what we think we see without passing judgment or trying to derive a principle. i suspect that we pragmatists have adopted this heuristic because, as derrida pointed out, when one describes the world from several different angles (e.g. by flipping privilege back upon itself), one becomes more open to alternative (and hopefully more creative) solutions to one's problems. indeed much data from the mental health world supports this hypothesis. this is not a matter of a hegelian sublation, but rather a matter of finding a way through the messiness of life, of coping rather than gaining mastery. the Kartvelian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili once observed (echoing kierkegaard and hesse): "in an age where everything seems accessible and diversity a given, the profound depth in shades and singularities, the existence of contrasts and contradictions in a human being seem strangely difficult to perceive...The aim is not to arrive first but to walk together."

[@sergiosatelite467]

The reason this is a work of art is that Dick makes it impossible to simply agree or disagree…

[@narbalfontes5353]

AMazing

[@Alkindus1]

Curious, Interesting, Lively, and disturbing. Literary critic par excellence. Rorty is quintessential example.

[@gerhitchman]

rorty the comedian

[@nancymohass4891]

The witty part is just the only part u understand but badly !

[@gerhitchman]

@@nancymohass4891 The fuck are you talking about? I mean at the beginning when the audience was laughing uproariously at Rorty's comments about academia

[@MC-br1gk]

This guy definitely would be considered woke today, which I don't have a problem with, but many would. lol Here is the test: go ask your crazy MAGA uncle if a literary critic would tend to be woke or not woke. lol

[@ericv7720]

That uncle would ask, "What's a book?"

[@KRYPTOS_K5]

The god father of globalism many years before Fukuyama (and philosophically much stronger than Francis). Nevertheless radical pragmatism is very very difficult to be sustained in the exact and natural sciences -- especially during the last ten years since 2012/2013 after deep mind. Brasil

[@findbridge1790]

what if what the students "formerly believed" ... was right? lol

[@peterg418]

Right. No commencement speaker ever says to go out and preserve what is good.

[@mareksicinski3726]

0:18 that’s not really democratic, that is part of it commercially People don’t just want marketability They often suggest it and the public believe it Times never are quite good in this case 1:58 did they? Also the notion that they were the sole origin or sth That is not really fully true or

[@robertb1138]

Rorty seems to cling to the idea of progress through breadth of sensitivity and inclusion. I also think this is good but he never really tells us why we should think so. He seems to be stating a bare fact of humans recognizing each other gradually through empathetic encounter, which isn't a recommendation as much as a record of the past, but why people should continue this is left untold. We know we shouldn't want to go back to eras where fewer people were accepted into the fold, because we are either embedded in a Western idea of progress he will not question, or because there's a metaphysical reason hanging around somewhere he won't admit. Why shouldn't we go back to a caste or slavery system? Wouldn't that just be a matter of dehumanizing people and convincing others they are no longer included in society as full humans? Obviously this would be very bad. We seem to know this is not acceptable, and so we wonder why at least most, if not all, of us come to prefer not having chattel slavery.

[@tobiaspostma4870]

Although I agree with your question and think it is important, I'm afraid it does not make sense within Rorty's framework of contingency and pragmatism. Asking for a rational justification of the idea of progress through sensitivity and inclusion is exactly where we are going wrong. This is not something you can accomplish, all you can do according to Rorty is to present a new story, ethics of sensitivity for example, and if this story is appealing enough people will adopt this story and thereby the vocabulary that goes along with it. This is the historicism he endorses, rational argumentation alone is never sufficient. This is what makes his position pretty tricky, how can you propose a position but reject the idea that it is possible to give any rational justification for it.

[@robertb1138]

@@tobiaspostma4870 Thanks for the reply. Yes, I see that Rorty is historicist while also opposing teleologies. He's not Hegelian or Christian, etc., etc. or even like the Frankfurt School Marxists who tried to recover some connection between reason and ethics. He's embracing nihilism. I just can't decide if he's reassuring us based on what we tend to do, or explaining what we are likely to do. Hegel's Master / Slave analysis, for example, speaks of opposing forces of power and recognition as intrinsically leading to a far-off state of mutuality. It is presented as a process rooted in something like human nature. Rorty doesn't have any of those kinds of assumptions to work with at all, and I wonder, though if philosophy really had to dispense with every kind of assumption about what people want just to avoid metaphysical explanations. But Rorty still seems bent on hoping for and describing a better world, rather than simply describing phenomena with no overarching purpose.

[@tobiaspostma4870]

@@robertb1138 Yes I agree with you, Rorty’s view is very questionable yet seductive at the same time. Note that there are also some tendencies with him rejecting essences and being a nominalist yet claiming that there is still some common measure for humans that distinguishes them from other animals which is language and thereby our susceptibility to humiliation. So while he indeed won’t claim, like Hegel, Marx or Kant, that there is some human nature or essence, he does believe that humiliation should he avoided and that through natural evolution human beings are cable of empathy and because he rejects Reason and rational argumentation sensitivity is for him the way to go about this. There might be something to it because the position entails less dubious metaphysical commitments but there are ,I agree, definitely some tensions.

[@robertb1138]

@@tobiaspostma4870 Yes, I see. To me the tensions are sort of fatal to hope in his project. If we take Friedrich Nietzsche's method of looking to the man first, and then the philosophy, I'd say Rorty is a nice guy who happens not to have discovered anything to found his niceness on, either logically or empirically. So maybe his view is a light suggestion of what's possible on appeal to other humans, but nothing like a recommendation. It's for nice, sensitive people who want to think they can make other people nicer and more sensitive, perhaps? Because the mean people certainly work hard and succeed at making people mean.

[@manuelmanuel9248]

Is it ethical to force muslims to drop their pre- medieval religion? The issue is not only how many people will die but also where do you get off imposing with violence your set of sensibilities on others who do not share them. Would you like muslims to impose their monstrous religion on you? Maybe the golden rule is the closest thing to a Kantian moral imperative that you can find.

[@richardsmith1799]

Rorty talks about sensitivity. This is a shell game. When we ask what he means by that, isn't there a principle at stake? This strikes me as no cost ethics. It's moral consumerism.

[@TrillCosta]

#genre archive retro laughtrack

[@kvaka009]

There's a problem here. It's complicated. But when RR imagines dialogue and a self correction of norms in the space of reasons through sensitivity to forms of life, such convergence requires shared principles and so requires that people be capable of getting to those principles even prior to already sharing them. How do they get there historically and philosophically speaking? There's a deeper problem here. Appeal to universal truth or essential nature or absolute principles is so persuasive and so worth while to commit to that it overpowers other systems no matter how coherent they are. It's succeeds in practice despite being unjustified and even self destructive. And here emerges the obvious but misdirected objection to RR that nevertheless disguises a fundamental problem with his brand of pragmatism. It's this: "aren't you [RR] committed to universal principles yourself-- that there are no UP, that pluralism is best, inclusiveness, democracy, dialogue, blah blah" And RR cleverly dodges these misguided objections by saying, no, actually he doesn't consider these to be universal truths but simply practices he holds to because they've done better historically. And here's the real problem. They have not done better historically. What does better historically are powerful exclusionary ideologies. Myths and mass self deceptions have been the rule of the land. America is no city on a hill, but just another dying empire with a nuclear arsenal. And the only reason literary critics are tolerated is because they're powerless. We cannot dig ourselves out of this without some powerful principles of our own, more powerful than just some pluralistic appeal to human decency. These principles, the needed ones, RR does not provide unfortunately.

[@ericb9804]

Perhaps RR would reply that yes, history amounts to a series of "exclusionary ideologies," but that doesn't make them "more successful" in any relevant way. After all, which type of society would you choose to live in - RR's pluralist democracy, warts and all, or one of the authoritarian regime's of the past? If your choice here is not evidence enough that RR's option is "better historically," then what is? But alas, as you point out, there is no such evidence, is there? Which seems to be what you are complaining about. Sure, society would be easier to control with appeals to some "universal principles," but willfully inventing them solely for the purpose of some benevolent manipulation seems like a road paved with good intentions.

[@kvaka009]

@@ericb9804 agreed, for the most part, but here i think you are just redescribing the problem rather than replying to it. Throughout history, more or less self isolated, societies has constructed elaborate practices accompanied by powerful self deceptive myths to organize themselves into functional, reproductive and adaptive systems. They "won out" in the sense that these structures came to dominate within the very communities that constructed them. The justifications for them that the people themselves accepted were not transparent to those same communities. But now the issue is that we have lost our capacity to establish such structures or to justify the ones that are in place. In other words, someone may just reject pluralism, solidarity, democracy and so on, and there is no objective common ground for resolving the conflict of values that emerges. All we are left with are personal preferences on the alter of which dies both politics and philosophy. The conundrum seems to be that to ground a unifying ethos and set of norms requires that certain principles are grounded in something beyond the social world, but our own understanding of this seems to preclude just this kind of ground. This is why we are witnessing the desertification of political, existential, and spiritual values. And RR's pluralism only highlights this conundrum, without really resolving or addressing it. Hope that clarifies what I had in mind.

[@ericb9804]

@@kvaka009 I think I agree with everything you say. But it just sounds like a complaint; a lament that humans are not more trustworthy, or likeable, or friendly; that we are not easier to control or placate; that we are so quick to anger and distraction and seduction by easy answers. But no one, including RR, said this would be easy. There is no "resolving" this. And the only way of "addressing" it, is to acknowledge it for what it is: our shared fate. Not to sound trivial, but it is a timely reference, it sounds like you are advocating that we live in the Matrix: Let's just pretend that we have "universal principles," for wouldn't it be easier if we were "grounded" in "something beyond the social world?" We know its "self deceptive" but so, what? At least the trains run on time, right? Thanks anyway, but no. I'd rather cast my lot with nothing more than an appeal to my fellow man and let the chips fall where they may. I, for one, have more faith in humanity than that. History be damned. Bring on the "desertification of...values" for its darkest before dawn, I say. YOUR only responsibility is to advocate for YOUR principles, and your right to do so is predicated only on your sincere acknowledgement of MY principles. This relationship of social trust is the only "truth" we have, and if its not enough, so be it.

[@kvaka009]

@@ericb9804 your interpretation of my criticism is a bit off. I'm not lamenting our untrustworthinesss nor our inability to deceive ourselves. Rather I am saying that the realization that we can no longer deceive ourselves in a systemic, organized way does not help to overcome the degradation of values and it's no help in recovering from such loss. In other words, even if RR is right (per your interpretation), there is something fundamental missing. We cannot simply disenchant the world and then hope to hang our political future on winning over hearts and minds. The fact that we cannot pretend while knowing we are pretending simply means that we're crossed a certain threshold; that is the conundrum: we cannot believe in universal truth, but we cannon live without it either. In practice, which is all politics, this sort of pluralistic humanism is a dominated strategy; there is no way to actually build a just and free society on it. What is needed is a way of grounding our commitments and values outside our present selves without appealing to any absolutes. I think I have a way of doing that, but who knows.

[@ericb9804]

@@kvaka009 "the realization that we can no longer deceive ourselves in a systemic, organized way does not help to overcome the degradation of values" No, it doesn't. And nothing, other than our own will to power, can. "we cannot believe in universal truth, but we cannon live without it either" Says you. This is your "lament." I think we can, or rather, that we have to, like it or not, and we very well may not like it. "I think I have a way of doing that" Ok, lets hear it, then? Seriously, I'm listening but try some white space. It will make it easier to follow your thought.

[@findbridge1790]

talking as though Chomsky's linguistics did not exist [burying it in silence, as it were LOL

[@kvaka009]

Where it belongs. Is there actually a systemic universal grammar on offer from that tradition? Is there any evidence that that grammar is biologically hard wired? If not, then what are we taking about?

[@findbridge1790]

@@kvaka009 They are talking about how small children develop an extremely complex cognitive/formal [and aesthetic] system just automatically. I don't know what you mean by "on offer." It's an on going research project. It's not a buffet.

[@kvaka009]

@@findbridge1790"on offer" as in here's an instance of some grammatical structure that is hard wired in human genetics/brain architecture. Rather than: here's a feature of language that has no exceptions in the many languages we've studied so far. It's the inference from universality to some features inherent brain structure that I don't find convincing. There may be many explanations for why certain structures in language have no exceptions across different languages that does not require that leap. And there may be biological features of cognition that are universal for human beings, but which have to do with the process of learning from others, rather than grammer. Which would then explain the poverty of stimulus problem without committing us to the absurd (to me) idea that linguistic ability appeared as a result of one evolutionary burst. In other words, I think languages are more like a buffet rather than one dish. Chomsky is great btw, but his linguistics project seems a bit tired at this point.

[@YodasPapa]

@@kvaka009 I think you can get something like universal grammar without the single evolutionary burst. That bit always struck me as possible but not necessary. Like you could have some small modification that allows marginally better communication, but that confers such a benefit that it outcompetes all that came before it, and this repeats very quickly in evolutionary time until you get modern linguistic propensity. I'm drunk. I may not be making sense.

[@findbridge1790]

"...novels like A Farewell to Arms and Three Soldiers showed what war and conscription have been doing to young men." Oh wait, he didn't really say this too??? I wonder why. LOL

[@findbridge1790]

@@billherd9695 I think anyone who has read Rorty -- a classic "male feminist" of that vintage (90s) -- would know nothing of the kind. And if he HAD said things like that to any degree, he would not have continued to be promoted by what C.Wright Mills called "the power elite," ie the DOD/CIA/NATO etc.

[@kvaka009]

@@findbridge1790 any evidence for the claim that RR was supported by the power elite?

[@findbridge1790]

@@kvaka009 The evidence is his being turned into a star in a degraded start system.

[@kvaka009]

@@findbridge1790 huh?!

[@NathanWHill]

His approach to moral progress is entirely octroyal. Surely racism, sexism, etc. were dealt with at least as much by strugglle by the opressed as by the privileged happening to read the right novels.

[@AP-yx1mm]

First :)

[@TrillCosta]

Did the current sos approve if the iraq war

[@andyayala9119]

Woke

[@joeruf6526]

LOL! Poor Rorty. I doubt he'd be pleased with his children. He's likewise in a bit of a contradiction given that many of those novels were written based on principles that he claims he wants to get rid of and all the novels based on his own philosophy lack the social power he needs them to have. I've always enjoyed Rortys mind. There are many ideas one can piggy back on and jump off to find fruit. Perhaps that's what he wanted. A Virgil who runs in circles around hell instead of attempting to ascend.

[@findbridge1790]

"She" ?

[@findbridge1790]

"flea markets of ideas" LOL. [yeah, right -- and the "ideas' came mostly from Tavistock, Chatham House, and GCHQ, along with Langley]

[@nononouh]

55agent

[@ozzy5146]

I'll take time-shaped tradition over RR's blah blah blah relativistic "pragmatism" anytime, anywhere.

[@kvaka009]

It is time shaped tradition. And time shaped traditions are relativistic.

[@ozzy5146]

@@kvaka009 Is the difference between mammals and reptiles relativistic?

[@kvaka009]

@@ozzy5146 difference is always a relation. So in that sense every difference is "relativistic". If you mean something else by relativistic, then you've got to explain better what you mean. My suspicion is that you don't have a very clear sense of what it means.

[@kvaka009]

@@ozzy5146 the fact that you have pragmatism in quotes suggests that you're out of your element here.

[@ozzy5146]

@@kvaka009 It means that there are no universal truths for human conduct.

[@knowsutrue]

The whole culture values manipulation of behavior. It’s interesting that is condemned when it (purportedly)happens in an education sector. As if every sector is not manipulating. This guy and Bloom have their agenda and it is overly simplistic which is the essential issue at hand. They don’t really want people thinking.

[@findbridge1790]

PO why don't you pick someone who's not CIA/MI6/RAND etc once in a while?

[@dirtycelinefrenchman]

This is how you do thinking