[7.2.4.] Human Happiness is the Only Standard.

 

Rorty—and on his interpretation, Dewey—want us to move beyond the traditional religious, metaphysical and epistemological theories that “add nothing to our ordinary, workaday, fallible ways of telling right from wrong, and truth from falsity.” (660)

 

But Rorty (and, he says, Dewey) is not simply saying that these old theories are pointless. He seems to be saying that they are deleterious, that it is bad for us to hold on to them:

 

What Dewey most disliked about both traditional “realist” epistemology and about traditional religious beliefs is that they discourage us by telling us that somebody or something has authority over us. Both tell us that there is Something Inscrutable [“inscrutable” means not readily understood], something toward which we have duties, duties which have precedence over our cooperative attempts to avoid pain and obtain pleasure. (660)

 

Rorty approves of the moral theory adopted by both James and Dewey...

 

utilitarianism (df.): the right thing to do in any situation is whatever will increase the overall amount of happiness in the world and decrease the amount of suffering; the names mostly closely associated with this theory of morality are Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873).

 

...as well as of their belief that moral inquiry will never reach its conclusion so long as there are human beings who continue to have experiences and to face the inevitable problems of life.

 

Dewey, like James, was a utilitarian: he thought that in the end the only moral or epistemological criteria we have or need is whether performing an action, or holding a belief, will, in the long run, make for greater human happiness. He saw progress as produced by increasing willingness to experiment, to get out from under the past. So he hoped we should learn to view current scientific, religious, philosophical and moral beliefs with the skepticism with which Bentham viewed the laws of England: he hoped each new generation would try to cobble together some more useful beliefs—beliefs which would help them make human life richer, fuller and happier. (660, emphasis added)

 

At this point, Rorty might have quoted from James’s “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” (1891):

 

...there is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance. We all help to determine the content of ethical philosophy so far as we contribute to the race’s moral life. In other words, there can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say. In the one case as in the other, however, the hypotheses which we now make while waiting, and the acts to which they prompt us, are among the indispensable conditions which determine what that ‘say’ shall be. (248, emphasis added)

 

And he might have quoted from Dewey’s “The Construction of Good” (from The Quest for Certainty, 1929)

 

A psychological theory of desire and liking is supposed to cover the whole ground of the theory of values ...

I shall not object to this empirical theory as far as it connects the theory of values with concrete experiences of desire and satisfaction. … The objection is that the theory in question holds down value to objects antecedently enjoyed, apart from reference to the method by which they come into existence; it takes enjoyments which are casual because unregulated by intelligent operations to be values in and of themselves. Operational thinking needs to be applied to the judgment of values just as it has now finally been applied in conceptions of physical objects. Experimental empiricism in the field of ideas of good and bad is demanded to meet the conditions of the present situation. (399, emphasis added)

 

All three thinkers—James, Dewey, and Rorty—emphasize understanding the moral value of actions in terms of the happiness that results from those actions, but they also emphasize the idea that there will never be any final and complete understanding of what it is that makes human beings the happiest.

 

Ethics, like the physical sciences, will continue its work into the indefinite future, with each new generation making new discoveries about what practices will increase human happiness and decrease human suffering the most. We can think of Rorty, Dewey and James as utilitarians with an experimentalist streak.

 

 

[7.2.4.] The Reconciliation of Science and Religion.

 

Rorty praises James and Dewey for their attempts to reconcile science and religion, and he criticizes Peirce for not doing enough to reconcile the two:

 

Whether or not Dewey is the most useful of the three classical pragmatists, Peirce seems to me the least useful. My main reason for thinking Peirce relatively unimportant is that he does not become engaged, in the way in which James and Dewey did become engaged, with the problem which dominated Kant’s thought and which was at the center of 19th century thought in every Western country: the problem of how to reconcile science and religion, how to be faithful both to Newton and Darwin and to the spirit of Christ. That problem is the paradigm of the sort of conflict between old ways of speaking and new cultural developments which Dewey took it to be the philosopher’s task to resolve. (664)

 

Rorty attributes James’s pragmatist theory of truth to his desire to resolve this conflict.

 

... the underlying motive of that theory is to give us a way to reconcile science and religion by viewing them not as two competing ways of representing reality, but rather as two non-competing ways of producing happiness. I take the anti-representationalist view of thought and language to have been motivated, in James’s case, by the realization that the need for choice between competing representations can be replaced by tolerance for a plurality of non-competing descriptions, descriptions which serve different purposes and which are to be evaluated by reference to their utility in fulfilling these purposes rather than by their “fit” with the objects being described. (665-66, emphasis added)

 

[Rorty here alludes to an idea that Putnam also seeks to take from him: description pluralism—although unlike Putnam, Rorty might hesitate to say that there are multiple “true” descriptions of the world.]

 

But Rorty’s own view of the “reconciliation” of science and religion is much more like Dewey’s than like James’s. It seeks to locate the significance and meaning of religious belief and worship in something traditionally held to be much more mundane: cooperation among human beings in the here-and-now to improve life on earth.

 

This is how Dewey’s reconciliation amounts to what Rorty earlier called anti-authoritarianism:

·         “human beings should regulate their actions and beliefs by the need to join with other human beings in cooperative projects, rather than by the need to stand in the correct relation to something non-human.” (666)

 

This is yet another symptom of Dewey’s desire to dissolve the traditional dualism between theory and practice.

 

[Dewey’s] stories about history as the story of increasing freedom are stories about how we lost our sense of sin, and also our hope of another world, and gradually acquired the ability to find the same spiritual significance in cooperation between finite mortals that our ancestors had found in

their relation to an immortal being. His way of clarifying “men’s ideas as to the social and moral strifes of their own day” was to ask his contemporaries to consider the possibility that weekday cooperation in building democratic communities could provide everything “higher”—everything which had once been reserved for weekends. His way of making practice prior to theory was to say that both philosophy and religion were of value only insofar as they put the traditionally “higher” to everyday use. (666-67, emphasis added)

 

 

[7.2.4] “Realism” vs. “Pragmatism.”

 

At the beginning of section 3, Rorty describes the difference between “realists” and “pragmatists” in a number of different ways, some of which incorporate the ideas of Austrian psychologist and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (1856-1939):

 

	realism	pragmatism
in terms of their highest hope	“union with something beyond the human—something which is the source of one’s superego*, and which has the authority to free one of guilt and shame” (667)   inquiry will “put us in touch with, if not the eternal, at least with something  which … ‘is there anyway’—something non-perspectival, something which is what it is apart from human needs and interests.” (667-68)	“a better human future, to be attained by more fraternal cooperation between human beings.” (667)       “the only question is: will human life be better in the future if we adopt this belief, this practice, or that institution?” (668)
in terms of authority and freedom	“people who think subjection to an authority-figure is necessary to lead a properly human life”	“those who see such a life as requiring freedom from any such subjection”
in ethical terms	in order for morality not to be an illusion, it must consist in something entirely independent of human beings, i.e., moral realism must be true**	in order for morality not to be an illusion, all that’s needed are “the empirical, environmental conditions which shape a human being’s moral identity” (674 n.10)

 

* Freud’s concept of the super-ego is as follows:

latest developing of three agencies (with the id and ego) of the human personality. The superego is the ethical component of the personality and provides the moral standards by which the ego operates. The superego’s criticisms, prohibitions, and inhibitions form a person’s conscience, and its positive aspirations and ideals represent one’s idealized self-image, or “ego ideal.”

The superego develops during the first five years of life in response to parental punishment and approval. This development occurs as a result of the child’s internalization of his parents’ moral standards, a process greatly aided by a tendency to identify with the parents. The developing superego absorbs the traditions of the family and the surrounding society and serves to control aggressive or other socially unacceptable impulses. Violation of the superego’s standards results in feelings of guilt or anxiety and a need to atone for one’s actions. The superego continues to develop into young adulthood as a person encounters other admired role models and copes with the rules and regulations of the larger society. [1]

 

**As an example of a defender of moral realism (the view that there are moral truths independent of what humans think or feel about morality), Rorty cites Thomas Nagel (b.1937, professor of philosophy and law at NYU, Ph.D. from Harvard, directed by John Rawls):

 

... a self-description, a sense of one’s own moral identity—a sense that one could not live with oneself if one performed a certain action—is not a sufficient account of the reason why one should not perform that action. “The real reason,” Nagel says, “is whatever would make it impossible for him to live with himself. . . .” Nagel goes on to say that unless there is some non-empirical Kant-style, universalistic, account of what moral identity one should have, then “morality is an illusion.” (673 n.10)

 

The reference is to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who maintained that there is a single universally-applicable idea from which all of our moral obligations can be derived:

 

The Categorical Imperative:  “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”[2]

 

 

 

Stopping point for Monday November 28. No new reading for next time. Your term paper is due today. I will accept late papers without penalty up until noon on Friday December 2.