ABSTRACT
While working through the last chapter, some readers might have been left with a feeling of unease and frustration: the answers Rorty gave to standard critiques may have felt unsatisfyingly incomplete. Though I indicated and developed ways in which Rorty’s use of Sellarsian themes amounts in some ways to an advance on the abstract formalism of Sellars’s account, these changes came at a cost. Without the Sellarsian endeavor to find more validity for our moral claims beyond reasonableness to a narrowly-delimited community, what Rorty gives us may seem unfortunately limited. At worst, Rortian moral commitment can appear arbitrary, the result of only one’s cultural situation or personal prejudices. If moral commitment winds up unmasked in this way, then it is perhaps insufficient to guide action. Through his refusal to give a compelling answer to the problem of moral justification, Rorty may have also made impossible an answer to the problem of moral motivation. Accusations like these hounded Rorty throughout his career, and the responses he offered to defuse them rarely satisfied critics. It is unlikely that what I offer in this chapter will do much better, though it should provide a different perspective on Rorty’s thought. For while Rorty usually took himself to be following the pragmatist John Dewey on matters of ethics, broadly speaking, driving home the ways in which Rorty’s project was also consonant with that of Royce can serve to highlight valuable elements that are sometimes missed. Thus, toward this chapter’s end, I intend to engage in a basically Rortian project by pointing to the possibilities of “redescribing Rorty Roycely.”
