Notes

Introduction

1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1929), Axi, n.o:.

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 ].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

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.

13 "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.

14 Richard Rorty, "Response to Habermas," in Rorty and His Critics, 60. 15 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.

16 Rorty notes that "one can be a philosopher precisely by being anti­Philosophical." Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xvii.

17 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 373.

18 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.''

19 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xix. 20 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xvi. Rorty deems such a distinction

"logocentric.'' Richard Rorty, "Universality and Truth/' in Rorty and His Critics, 7.

21 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 378. 22 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 378. 23 Rorty, "Response to Williams," 215. 24 Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, xii. 25 Rorty, "Emancipating our Culture," in Debating the State of Philososphy:

Habermas, Rorty, and Kolakowski, ed. J6zef Niznik and John T. Sanders (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996), 25.

26 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 164. 27 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 176. 28 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xxxii. 29 Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 76. 30 Richard Rorty, "Relativism - Finding and Making/' in Debating the State of

Philosophy, 44. 31 Richard Rorty, "Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism," Journal of Philosophy

80 (1983): 583-584.

32 Rorty, "Response to Habermas," 60. 33 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 178 34 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 385. 35 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 9.

Notes 177

36 Richard Rorty, "Is 'Post-Modernism' Relevant to Politics?" Truth, Politics and 'Post-Modernism' (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1997), 36.

37 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 173. 38 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 173. 39 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.

40 Putnam, 21. 41 Rorty, "Putnam and the Relativist Menace," Journal of Philosophy 90 (1983):

450. 42 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.

43 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.

44 Orwell, 219; quoted by Conant, "Freedom, Cruelty, and Truth," 304. 45 Richard Rorty, "Justice as a Larger Loyalty," in Richard Rorty: Critical

Dialogues, ed. Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 225.

46 Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 182.

47 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 182. 48 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 165. 49 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 179. SO Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xlii. 51 Rorty, "Response to Conant," 347. 52 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," SO. 60 Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 39, italics and bold font in original. 61 Rorty, "On Moral Obligation, Truth, and Common Sense," SO. 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 teoria de los derechos humanos natural­izada," Revista del Centro de Estudios Constitucionales S (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 Soren 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 dis­

agreement 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 Gune 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. SO 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 minima/ism. 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 Jiirgen 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

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.

6 ]urgen Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity: Revised Edition, ed. Peter Dews (London: Verso, 1992), 248.

7 Habermas, "Richard Rorty's Pragmatic Turn/' 52. 8 Jtirgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and

the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 307-308.

9 Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1, 302. 10 Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1, 17. 11 ]urgen 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."

12 See, e.g., Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 86ff. 13 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 89. 14 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 91. 15 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 60. 16 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 56. 17 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 76. 18 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."

19 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 61. 20 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 84-86. 21 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 204. 22 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 92-3. 23 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 65. Formulated in this way, (U) is ambigu­

ous 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.

24 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 56. 25 Habermas, "Richard Rorty's Pragmatic Turn/' 52. 26 Thomas McCarthy, "Private Irony and Public Decency: Richard Rorty's

New Pragmatism," Critical Inquiry 10 (1990): 360-361. 27 Habermas, "Richard Rorty's Pragmatic Turn," 50. 28 Jtirgen 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

Notes 181

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.

29 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.

30 McCarthy, 370. 31 Habermas, "Richard Rorty's Pragmatic Turn," 41, italics added. 32 Habermas, "Richard Rorty's Pragmatic Turn," 41. 33 Habermas, "Richard Rorty's Pragmatic Turn," 51. 34 Habermas, "Richard Rorty's Pragmatic Turn," 45. 35 Habermas, "Richard Rorty's Pragmatic Turn," 48. 36 Habermas, "Richard Rorty's Pragmatic Turn," 41. 37 Habermas, "Richard Rorty's Pragmatic Turn," 47-48. 38 Habermas, "Richard Rorty's Pragmatic Turn," 49. 39 McCarthy, 370. 40 Terry Eagleton, The Illusions ofPostmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,

1996), 86. 41 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 125. 42 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.

43 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 123. 44 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?

45 Kohlberg, 411. 46 Kohlberg, 412. 4 7 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 177. 48 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 104. 49 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 109. 50 Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse

Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996), 113. 51 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 201. 52 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 162. 53 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 ]urgen 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 ]urgen 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 ]urgen Habermas, Justification and Application, trans. Ciaran Cronin

(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), 143. 59 Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, 14. 60 ]Urgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence

(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1983), 12. 61 Jtirgen Habermas, "Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in this

World," in Habermas, Modernity, and Public Theology, ed. DonS. Browning and Francis Schussler Fiorenza (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 231.

62 Jtirgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. William Mark Hoben­garten (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 ]ames 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

sions of detente, 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.

70 Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, 7. 71 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.

72 Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, 39. 73 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 67. See footnote 18. 74 Habermas, Justification and Application, 36. 75 Habermas, Justification and Application, 35. 76 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 60. 77 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, val. 28: Law and Political Theory,

trans. Thomas Gilby (Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1966), Q.94, Art. 4. 78 I have benefited greatly from Stanley Cavell's discussion of similar issues.

See Cavell, 264. 79 Plato, Euthyphro, trans. G.M.A. Grube, in Complete Works, Sd. SO Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 60. 81 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 60. 82 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 206. 83 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 205. 84 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 206. 85 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 206. 86 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 206. 87 Habermas, Justification and Application, 38. 88 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 207. 89 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 206-207. 90 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 181. 91 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 207. 92 Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity, 251. 93 Georgia Warnke, "Communicative Rationality and Cultural Values," in The

Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Stephen K. White (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 131.

94 Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 65. 95 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 217. 96 Robert Piercey, "Not Choosing Between Morality and Ethics," The

Philosophical Forum 32, no. 1 (2001): 66-67. 97 Frank I. Michelman, "The Problem of Constitutional Interpretive Disagree­

ment: Can 'Discourses of Application' Help?" in Habermas and Pragmatism, ed. Mitchell Aboulafia, Myra Bookman, and Catherine Kemp (New York: Routledge, 2002), 114.

98 See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §218. 99 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 106.

100 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, lOS.

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: JUrgen 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 virtu­

ous 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 all­could 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, 3 70. 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 every­

thing 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 de­

constructive 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

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.

19 Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff, trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 146.

20 Michel de Montaigne; quoted in Derrida, "Force of Law/' 12. 21 Blaise Pascal; quoted in Derrida, "Force of Law/' 12. 22 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.

23 Derrida, "Force of Law," 13-14. 24 Derrida, "Force of Law," 13. 25 Derrida, "Force of Law," 13. 26 Derrida, "Force of Law," 14. 27 Derrida, Limited Inc, 150. 28 Derrida, Limited Inc, 136. 29 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 158. 30 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."

31 Simon Critchley, "Deconstruction and Pragmatism- Is Derrida a Private Ironist or a Public Liberal?" in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, 37.

32 Derrida, Limited Inc, 152. 33 Derrida, "Force of Law," 21, italics and inverted commas added- see foot-

note 8. 34 Derrida, "Force of Law," 20. 35 Derrida, "Force of Law," 20. 36 Derrida, "Force of Law," 19. 37 Derrida, "Force of Law," 15. 38 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.

39 Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), ix.

40 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 90. 41 Derrida, "Force of Law/' 25.

42 Derrida, "Force of Law," 25. 43 Derrida, "Force of Law," 25.

Notes 187

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, OfGrammatology, 13. 52 Derrida, OfGrammatology, 7. 53 Derrida, OfGrammatology, 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 per­

fectly 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 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Al33/ B 172. 2 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 23. 3 McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 242. 4 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I: §84. 5 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.

6 Carroll, 279. 7 Carroll, 279-280. 8 Glendinning, 102. 9 Glendinning, 104.

10 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I: §84. 11 See Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1982). 12 See Crispin Wright, Wittgenstein on the Foundations of Mathematics

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980). 13 McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 233. 14 Glendinning, 100. 15 Glendinning, 101. 16 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, OfGrammatology, 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 narrowly­i.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, 13 7.

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 distin­

guishes 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 progres-sive 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 author­

ity 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. SO Brandom, Making It Explicit, 173. 51 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 168. 52 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 173. 53 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 17 4. 54 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 17 4. 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 explicitly­may 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.a. 2 Simone Wei!, 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.

31 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §559. 32 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §359. 33 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §167. 34 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §105. 35 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §94.

Notes 193

36 See Peter Winch, "Judgement: Propositions and Practices," Philosophical Investigations 21 Quly 1998): 198.

37 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §152. 38 See Winch, "Judgement: Propositions and Practices," 198. 39 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §476. 40 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §143. 41 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §478. 42 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §411. 43 This is what I take Wittgenstein to mean when he says that "the language­

game 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.

44 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §411. 45 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §402. See also Wittgenstein, Culture and Value,

31. 46 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §110. Cf. §204. 47 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."

48 See D.Z. Phillips, "On Trusting Intellectuals on Trust," Philosophical Investigations 25 (January 2002): 44.

49 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §33 7. SO Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §467. S 1 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.

52 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.

53 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §350. Cf. §423. 54 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 state­

ments, 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 charac­

terizations 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 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §108. 98 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §608. 99 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §609.

100 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §611-§612. 101 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.

102 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.

103 Ludwig Wittgenstein; quoted in Rush Rhees, Discussions of Wittgenstein (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), 101.

104 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 ofWittgenstein, 101.

105 Wittgenstein; quoted in Rhees, Discussions ofWittgenstein, 103. Note that Wittgenstein is simply recognizing moral diversity, not - as is sometimes thought- advocating a relativist position with respect to it.

106 William McNeill, The Rise of the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 717n; quoted in ]ames D. Wallace, Moral Relevance and Moral Conflict (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 128.

107 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.

108 Gaita, 181. 109 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

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."

110 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.

111 Gaita, 183. 112 John H. Whittaker, "'At the End of Reason Comes Persuasion'" in The

Possibilities of Sense, ed. John H. Whittaker (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 141. 113 Whittaker, 141. 114 Whittaker, 143. 115 Whittaker, 146. 116 McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 85. 117 McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 85-86. 118 Jose Medina, The Unity ofWittgenstein's Philosophy: Necessity, Intelligibility,

and Normativity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 191. 119 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 ]. Heyes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 58, 59.

120 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 65, italics added. 121 Derrida, "Force of Law," 25. 122 Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 171. 123 Macintyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, 225. 124 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.

125 Stanley Fish, "Postmodern Warfare: The Ignorance of our Warrior Intellectuals," Harper's Magazine, July 2002, 36.

126 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]. Eberle, Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Michael ]. 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 x 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 Macintyre, After Virtue, 14. Cf. Macintyre, A Short History of Ethics, 257-260. 11 Macintyre, After Virtue, 8. 12 Macintyre, After Virtue, 8. 13 Macintyre, After Virtue, 6. 14 Macintyre, After Virtue, 6. 15 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.

16 Macintyre, A Short History of Ethics, 265. 17 Plato, Euthyphro, 4c-d. 18 Plato, Euthyphro, 4d-e. 19 Plato, Euthyphro, 4b-c. 20 Plato, Euthyphro, Se-d. 21 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.

22 Plato, Euthyphro, Sd. 23 Plato, Euthyphro, 7d. 24 Cavell, 265. 25 It might be argued that the difference between protagonists who assign dif­

ferent 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.

26 If they do feature in the premises, these premises themselves become suit­able topics for debate and discussion.

27 Notice, though, that this is different from Derrida's claim that moral norms always require interpretation.

200 Notes

28 R.W. Beardsmore, Moral Reasoning (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 107. 29 Beardsmore, 107. 30 Beardsmore, 108. 31 Beardsmore, 108-109. 32 ]. 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." ]. Kemp, Reason, Action and Morality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 106-107.

33 Cavell, 261-262. 34 Cavell, 262. 35 Cavell, 262-263. 36 Cavell, 263, italics added. 37 See Cavell, 267. 38 Cavell, 267. 39 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.

40 Cavell, 254-255. 41 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.

42 Peter Winch, "A pel's 'Transcendental Pragmatics'," in Philosophical Disputes in the Social Sciences, ed. S.C. Brown (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), 66.

43 Winch, Trying to Make Sense, 189. 44 Cavell, 268. 45 Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources ofNormativity (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1996), 101. 46 Of course, a participant in a formal debate may as a matter of fact agree with

the position she is asked to defend. 47 Macintyre, After Virtue, 9. 48 ] ohn Kekes, The Art of Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 54. 49 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

SO 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 S, 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 Andre Gide, "Andre 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 argu­

ment, 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 indi­

vidual 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 dicta 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 H20 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 ]iirgen 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.

56 Habermas, "From Kant to Hegel," 332. 57 McDowell, Mind and World, 26. 58 Brandom, "Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts," 358. 59 Brandom, "Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts," 357. 60 Brandom, "Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts," 357. 61 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 331. 62 Habermas, "From Kant to Hegel," 341. 63 Habermas, "From Kant to Hegel," 335. 64 Habermas, "From Kant to Hegel," 339. 65 Habermas, "From Kant to Hegel," 339. 66 Habermas, Truth and Justification, 31. 67 Brandom, "Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts," 358.

Notes 205

68 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.

69 McDowell, 28. 70 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 332. 71 Brandom, "Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts," 357. 72 McDowell, Mind and World, 34. 73 McDowell, Mind and World, 34. 74 McDowell, Mind and World, 34. 75 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 332. 76 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 686, n. 58. Elsewhere he writes, "In an im­

portant sense there is no such boundary, and so nothing outside the realm of the conceptual." Brandom, "Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts," 357.

77 McDowell, "Toward Rehabilitating Objectivity," 112. 78 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 333. 79 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.

80 Orwell, 79. 81 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."

82 McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 215. 83 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 consti­

tute 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.

101 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 182. 102 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 182. 103 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 176. 104 Rorty, "Putnam and the Relativist Menace," 449. lOS Rorty, "Response to Conant," 342. 106 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xxxii. 107 Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 76. 108 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xlii. 109 Rorty, "Consequences of Pragmatism," 164. 110 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 325.

Notes 207

111 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 325. 112 In fact, John Dewey, Rorty's philosophical hero, defined "radical" in pre­

cisely 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 oflohn Dewey: Volume II: The Lived Experience, ed.John]. 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.

S 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 Modem 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 Wei!, "The Iliad or The Poem of Force," in Revisions: Chang­

ing 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 Wei!, 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. ]ames

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

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.

25 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 16e. 26 Christopher Norris, Deconstruction and the 'Unfinished Project of Modernity'

(New York: Routledge, 2000), 181-182. 27 Norris, 182. 28 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 625. 29 M. Jamie Ferreira, "Normativity and Reference in a Wittgensteinian

Philosophy of Religion," Faith and Philosophy 18 (October 2001), 449, bold font in original.

30 Brandom, Articulating Reasons, 30. 31 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

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, SO, 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

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

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 dicta 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, ]Urgen 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

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, 20Sn68

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, Andre, 140 Glendinning, Simon, 56, 69-72, 73,

74-6, 157, 187n58 God,2, 5, 15,32,33,53,114

Habermas, Jurgen, 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, 17 4n3 Horwich, Paul, 179n86 human rights, 13, 15-16,55, 112,

157-8, 178n76,201n64 Hume, David, 92, 100, 158

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 ofphilosophy, 167-70,171,173

interpretation, 35-6, 47, 50, 52, 58, 63, 65-6, 73-4, 78-9, 82-3, 145, 191n42,203n20

Index 211

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, Soren, 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

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

dicta vs. de re ascriptions law, ix-x, xiii, xiv, 22, 38-9, 41-2,

47ff, 57-8, 67, 79, 112, 136 Lilla, Mark, 18Sn18 logic, 67-8, 83-4, 98, 143

as branch of philosophy, 105, 172-3

Lovibond, Sabina, 102-4, 159, 167-68

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, Jose, 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, 12~ 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, 11~ 11~ 135, 13~ 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

ofnorms, 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, 157-6~ 163, 16~ 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, 3 7 P~t~5, 1~2~34, 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, 14~ 14~ 15~ 154-5, 15~ 15~ 16~ 163, 165, 173, 178n53

primacy of, 3, 154-5, 175n11 two senses of, 149, 152, 172

pragmatism, xi, xii, xvi, 3, 4, 7, 11-2, 1~ 37-~ 7~ 141-~ 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

Index 213

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

Wei!, 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, 19Sn82,201n53, 208n18

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xiii-xiv, xvii, xviii-xix, 3, 38, 56, 67, ?Off, 89ff, 142-3, 157, 166-7, 170, 171-2, 17Sn12

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