A RESPONSE TO RORTY

Daryl Koehn

n his SBE address, Richard Rorty argues against any attempt to validate objective truths or norms. He makes no claim that his account of the nature and scope
of the discipline of philosophical business ethics is true. From his perspective, no
account is objectively true because the world we experience is always mediated by
narratives contingently shaped by culture and history. The standard for assessing
an account should not be whether it is true but whether it efficaciously enables us
to achieve social justice and to ameliorate suffering. Like Michel Foucault, Rorty
sees himself as undermining institutions and controlling narratives in order to free
us to imagine new ways to reduce the injustice and human pain resulting from the
spread of global capitahsm.
Rorty makes three major claims:
1. Philosophy has played an important historical role in curtailing the power
of religion and allowing science to advance. Now that science has triumphed over
religion, that role (along with its attendant truth claims) ought to be abandoned. Language^be it ordinary, literary, poetic, historical, or philosophicalonly provides
us with a description of an ever-changing world. Every description is irreducibly
historical and contingent in nature. Therefore, we should give up the illusion that
there is some Archimedean point we can use to ground our theories.
2. Since philosophy has no special or unique access to the truth, we should
not think of it as the universal arbiter of values or norms and should not look to
philosophers to discover or to build a foundation for ethics. But if ethical theory
catmot provide us with an objective, solid foundation for norms, what should business ethicists be doing? Must they settle for critiquing the work of foundationalists?
Rorty denies us even this option because he insists there is no non-historical, noncontingent language for adjudicating among competing claims or theories. We have
no objective place on which to stand when making the case that our critique is more
grounded or correct than someone else's.
To understand what Rorty is arguing, it is helpful to situate these claims in the
context of his larger body of work. Elsewhere Rorty argues that philosophy, like
poetry, is a language game, and the proper function of human linguistic activity is
to articulate imagined worlds, not to reflect an unmediated reality, which does not
exist in any case. The lover of wisdom must settle for re-describing human activity
and the world. The appeal of any such re-description is, ultimately, not rational, for
Rorty denies reason an adjudicating role. Instead, we embrace values because they
appeal to us. ff we philosophers succeed in re-describing a host of things, events, and
2006. Business Ethics Quarterly, Volume 16, Issue 3. ISSN 1052-150X.

pp. 391-399

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issues, then perhaps others will begin to see the world as we do and will embrace
it. If a paradigm shift does occur, it will not be because we have reasoned things
through but because we have started seeing them afresh:
The method is to re-describe lots and lots of things in new ways, until you have
created a pattern of linguistic behavior which will tempt the rising generation
to adopt i t . . . . This sort of philosophy does not work piece by piece, analyzing
concept after concept, or testing thesis after thesis. Rather it works holistically and pragmatically. It says things like "try thinking of it this way"or
more specifically, "try to ignore the apparently futile traditional questions by
substituting the following new and possibly interesting questions." It does
not pretend to have a better candidate for doing the same old things which
we did when we spoke in the old w a y . . . . Conforming to my own precepts,
I am not going to offer arguments against the vocabulary I want to replace.
Instead, I am going to try to make the vocabulary I favor look more attractive
by showing how it may be used to describe a variety of topics.'

3. What kind of world does Rorty think is especially "attractive"? In other writings, he has devoted his considerable linguistic skills to portraying an ideal world,
a tolerant place where we all, as the British say, "rub along and muddle through":
What is needed is a sort of intellectual analogue of civic virtuetolerance,
irony, and a willingness to let spheres of culture flourish without worrying too
much about their "common ground," their unification, the "intrinsic ideals"
they suggest, or what picture of man they "presuppose."^

We business ethicists should be telling stories of exemplaryfigureswith a view

to inspiring our students to act. From Rorty's pragmatic point of view, there is no
point in trying to articulate and justify moral principles since there can be no objective foundation for any morality. As he confided in an interview:
It's hard to keep moral philosophy as an academic sub-discipline going if
you're a pragmatist. The name of the game in moral philosophy is fmding
principles and then fmding counter-examples to the other guy's principles.
Pragmatists aren't very big on principles. There isn't much to do in moral
philosophy if you're a pragmatist.^

As Other commentators have noted, Rorty is not a relativist if one takes a relativist to be someone who believes all values are equally good. Rorty unequivocally
commits himself to hberal values of sohdarity and autonomy. Moreover, he favors
descriptions emphasizing (or even celebrating) irony and the contingency of every
narrative, all the while conceding that his own ironic portrayals of the world lack
objectivity and cannot be proven. The most we can hope for is that our fellow human beings try on Rorty's way of viewing the world and find that doing so opens
up new vistas. Having once imagined a better world, we will be in a position to set
about realizing that world.
Much of Rorty's analysis takes the negative form of arguing against other peoples' foundational morahties or interpretations. Such negativity has prompted critics
to charge that "Rorty is only one step away from Baudrillard, the self-proclaimed

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'intellectual terrorist' who prefers simply to blow up ideas with unsubstantiated

claims and outrageous exaggerations rather than attending to matters of evaluating
tmth or falsehood, or patient empirical demonstration of his claims.'"* This charge
may have some merit, but for purposes of this discussion, I will assume that Rorty's
agenda is a positive one: by focusing on the importance of creating ourselves anew
through the imagination, he seeks to liberate us from an unnecessary obsession with
foundations and ever more convoluted refinements of moral principles and maxims.
Once freed, we will perhaps be able to think more imaginatively and to leave behind
stultifying inherited worldviews. To paraphrase Shakespeare: there are more things
in heaven and earth that are dreamt of in ethicists' philosophy.
Rorty's three claims are interdependent and, by his own admission, stand or
fall as a whole picture or description. Either we see the world as mediated via
contingent, historical narratives, or we don't. If we don't find this portrayal to be
emotionally compelling, we won't be persuaded to show solidarity with Rorty and
to join forces with him in reforming the world. Separating Rorty's portrayal into
three strands ("claims" may be too strong, given that we are supposedly dealing
only with "re-descriptions") may somewhat misrepresent his project, but one has to
begin somewhere. Eurthermore, for all of his talk about literature andfiction,Rorty
is not writing novels or lyric poetry. He is advancing reasoned considerations for
his position and, to that extent, his position can be rationally dissected.
This last observation leads me to myfirstconcem. Rorty is not merely committed to certain values: he is equally devoted to presenting his portrayal in a coherent
way. He takes pains to ensure that what he says at the opening of his address is not
contradicted by what he says in middle or at the end. Why, though, does he bother
with coherence? Why not, say, along with the poet Wah Whitman, "Do I contradict
myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself? Why behave in a way that reveals he
is committed to the law of non-contradiction? Kant and Plato have an answer: we are
essentially the sort of beings who do not wish to assert both A and not-A. For Kant,
we are rational beings who (if our consciences are not utterly cormpted) experience
self-respect rooted in regard for the moral law. To put the point slightly differently:
reason has its own interests and, consequently, has motivating force in our lives. For
Plato, our souls are constituted in such a way as to be more satisfyingly ordered when
reason gives orders to desire rather than the reverse. It seems to me that Rorty also
shows himself to be the kind of being for whom reason has motivating interestsif
his self-respect did not demand coherence, he would not be so concemed to maintain
it in his writings. So, although Rorty explicitly rejects essences, he certainly acts
and speaks as if he believes we are essentially rational beings.'
In his SBE address, Rorty speaks about coherence in general. In other works, he
has argued that we must settle for "local" coherence: what we say and do should
accord with a limited subset of beliefs because we cannot hope to bring all of our
beliefs into harmony with each other. Thus, Rorty would likely argue that the Sullivan Principles played a useful role in weakening apartheid, even though we might
not be able to show that these principles were part of some globally coherent system

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of moral principles.^ Two points need to be made about this idea of local coherence:
first, what gives Rorty's recommendation its normative force? That is, why should
we settle for local coherence? Since settling for local coherence is equivalent to
saying that we are perfectly content to live in contradiction with ourselves; and
since the latter course is exactly what rational beings reject, it could be argued
that Rorty's recommendation does not have any normative force. Thrasymachus's
position has a kind of local coherence. Yet, when Socrates shows that the position
is not coherent with a host of other beliefs, Thrasymachus has the good grace to
blush. Plato and Kant can account for why Thrasymachus blusheshe feels shame
at being caught in contradiction. As far as I can see, Rorty has no way to explain
Thrasymachus's blush.
Nor does the example of the Sullivan Principles support Rorty's notion of a
merely local coherence. Leon Sullivan was a Christian minister who understood
these principles to be grounded in the objective nature of God's creation. He
maintained, "There is no greater moral issue in the world today than apartheid.
. .. Apartheid is against the will of God and humanity."^ The Sullivan Principles
garnered widespread support among other clergy who also believed in a complex,
elaborated moral system of objective rights, duties, and principles that generations of
Judeo-Christian theologians have taken care to make as consistent and persuasive as
possible. Without sustained pressure from church leaders who believed in the global
coherence of the underlying moral system, the Sullivan Principles, I would argue,
would never have gained widespread acceptance among Western executives.
Second, to aim at even a local coherence means granting reason's rule in this
narrower domain. Consequently, this refinement does not deny the force of the
above objection. In fact, talk of local coherence raises another set of issues: just
how small could this set of local beliefs be? One or two beliefs? If a speaker were
to present a position with miniscule local coherence, we would accuse him or her
of sloppy thinking and suspect the speaker of trying to pull the wool over our eyes.
Why is the speaker focusing on only these beliefs and not other aspects and facts?
Catching a whiff of the arbitrary, we would be on our guard against sophistry. Elsewhere Rorty concedes that any account will have to be able to encompass many
things if it is to have any hope of producing a paradigm shift. Thinkers like Kant
and Plato have an explanation of this drive toward comprehensiveness. Since we
are constituted such that we do not want to live in contradiction with ourselves,
every belief in which we are invested needs, in principle, to be reconciled with the
other claims in which we have put our trust. Our essence or psychological makeup
prevents us from being persuaded by half-baked theories that fail to harmonize with
the whole of our experience. And it is, as Plato would say, the reasoning part of our
psyche, not emotions or feelings, that imposes this harmonizing demand and points
the way to ordering our beliefs accordingly. (Neither Plato nor I would deny that a
felt unease and/or inspiration also play a part in driving this process of integration
forward. So this process does have a subjective component. But it is reason that

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sorts through the contradictions and comes up with better formulations intended to
overcome identified inconsistencies).
I come now to my second objection to Rorty's position. Part of what reason
considers when deciding whether to alter previously held positions is "the fact of
the matter." According to Rorty, though, there are no facts that do not depend on
contingent historical narratives. Everything we see and do is mediated by our beliefs
or worldview, which may be more or less rational. As Anais Nin writes, "We see
the world not as it is, but as we are." I readily concede that many of our beliefs,
and even our perceptions, are, to some extent, a function of other things we've encountered or been taught. Several years ago I heard an interview on National Public
Radio with children from a "primitive" part of the world who, upon arriving in a
modem city, saw their first bus. They thought it must be large animal of some sort
with large white eyes. Familiar with animals, they assimilated this machine to that
which they already knewwith what fit into their framing narrative, a narrative
contingent upon their previous experiences in the jungle.
At first glance, this example would seem to support Rorty's position. However,
I think we must be exceedingly careful. This example equally suggests that the
process of assimilation is not arbitrary. These children thought of animals in a matter akin to that of Aristotle. In De Anima, Aristotle defines animals as organisms
able to initiate self-motion. The children did not think the bus was a huge coconut
tree or a star or the number three. They saw that it moved and so they reasonably
theorized that the bus was a huge, lumbering animal. The division between plants
and animals itself seems to be a non-arbitrary division, given that peoples all over
the world distinguish between self-moving and stationary organisms. In his fascinating essay "A Quahog Is a Quahog," the biologist Stephen Jay Gould argues that
peoples from around the world characterize birds into roughly the same species.*
Grouping birds using characteristics we employ (color, form, beak type), they arrive
at divisions almost identical to those we make:
The literature on non-Western taxonomies is not extensive, but it is persuasive. We usually find a remarkable correspondence between Linnaean species
and non-Western plant and animal names. In short, the same packages are
recognized by independent cultures. . . . Several biologists have noted these
remarkable correspondences.... Ernst Mayr himself describes his experience
in New Guinea: "Forty years ago, I lived all alone with a tribe of Papuans in
the mountains of new Guinea. These superb woodsmen had 136 names for
the 137 species of birds I distinguished. . . . That Stone Age man recognizes
the same entities of nature as Western university-trained scientists refutes
rather decisively the claim that species are nothing but a product of the human imagination." (italics mine)'

Working with other populations, Jared Diamond, Ralph Bulmer, Brent Berlin, Dennis
Breedlove, Peter Raven, and other biologists have confirmed Mayr's finding.'"
Here, then, is some evidence that Rorty is wrong. Human beings do not imaginatively generate distinctions willy-nilly. Our divisions are non-arbitrary: "We live
in a world of structure and legitimate distinctions" (italics mine)." Gould argues

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that this striking empirical similarity of division implies either 1) that human beings
possess similar hardwired species-distinguishing frameworks and, consequently, our
divisions reflect this natural human essence; 2) that there are natural kinds in the
world and we are, in Socratic language, all cutting at the same natural joints; or 3)
that both possibilities hold true. I take no position here on which of these possibilities is the correct one. I simply note that each option represents a kind of factan
objective feature of the natural self and/or the natural world that controls how we
organize our experience. Under all three scenarios sketched by Gould, objective
nature produces the distinctions; distinctions do not contingently produce nature.
Indeed, Gould relates how three biological anthropologists who initially contended
that how various peoples organize the world depends contingently upon their local
social narratives subsequently repudiated theirfindings.When the anthropologists
returned and interviewed the tribes more carefully with a more competent translator, they discovered significant convergence or overlap between how Westerners
and non-Westerners divvy up bird and plant species.
To summarize: Although we assimilate new things we encounter to those that
we already know; and although our experiences (or, at least, some of them) have
a contingent dimension, it does not follow that our narratives, distinctions, and
theories merely reflect a particular historical outlook. If, as Gould, Aristotle, Plato
and others argue, our past experiences have been organized objectively (or, at a
minimum, admit of being so organized), then the assimilated present will also have
an objective foundation.
A related point: yes, reason interprets what we experienceit gives meaning
to that which we experience. However, reason is always interpreting something.
This something is the experienced facts, which possess an integrity all their own.
Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and flooded much ofthe city. The space shuttles
Challenger and Columbia blew up. What these events mean is open to debate; that
they occurred is not. As Hannah Arendt has argued, it will always be true that
Germany invaded Belgium, not the reverse. Holocaust deniers may try to re-write
history, but that does not alter the fact that they are deniers. Those who experienced
Hurricane Katrina or who witnessed mass murder know a truth that cannot be gainsaid, even though this experiential truth cannot be proven by reason.
In my view, Rorty makes two inter-related mistakes. Eirst, he treats existence
as a predicative quality. Yet, as Richard McKeon has argued, there are four senses
of the verb "to be": there is 1) that which is or the "is" of entities; 2) what is or the
"is" of being/nature/essence; 3) the set of conditions under which an entity is what
it is or the "is" of existence; and 4) the question of whether these conditions obtain
for us personally or the "is" of experience.^^ Existence is not a predicate. It is a
determination ofthe conditions under which an entity is what it is. Do unicorns exist? The unicorn exists as an animal to be encountered in certain types of narratives
known as myths or fairy tales. This same unicorn does not exist as an animal in the
wild or in zoos. To say that something "exists" means to make a determination of
the conditions under which that which is is what it is. It is not to perceive a quality

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of a thing. Existence properly understood is necessarily mediated by reason specifying conditions. If so, then Rorty's claim that what exists is relative to a situated
language user is true but almost trivially so.
His second mistake consists in conflating the existential "is" with the experiential
"is." Determining the existential conditions under which a substance is what it is
says nothing about whether those conditions have actually obtained in the past or
are applying in the present. Just as essence does not determine existence, so existence does not determine experience. Concrete or particular facts are given to us by
personal experience, not by reason or theories. The victims of Hurricane Katrina
felt the lash of the wind and knew the terror of rising waters. The storm came upon
them with a character that Charles Sanders Peirce terms "secondness"a brute
quality of one subject or substance acting upon another." When a passing workman hits us in the back of the head with a ladder, we stagger and wonder what has
happened. Interpretation or narratives do not give us that startling experience. On
the contrary, it is our experience that sets the interpretive machinery going: what
struck us? Something organic or inorganic? Was a human being responsible? If so,
was the blow intentional, accidental, or the result of negligence?
Having treated existence as a predicate and then mistaken the existential "is"
for the experiential "is," Rorty tends to overlook facts given by experience.'" This
neglect of experience means, in turn, that Rorty cannot ground ethics. Foundational
ethicists ground ethics in some objective fact(s) of immediate experiencee.g.,
our awareness that we are free (Kant; Hegel); that we can and do originate actions
(Aristotle); that we are frequently conflicted and so the soul (understood as the
organizing and organized energy of a purposeful life) must have two or more parts
(Plato). We do not choose to be free or conflicted. On the contrary, human choice
presupposes these experiences. These experiences function as objective bases for
ethics, enabling philosophers to argue for the superiority of a particular way of life.
Plato, Aristotle, and Kant are not just painting pretty pictures of the world. As I
argued above, whether we find their analyses to be persuasive depends, in part, on
the general coherence of their reasoning. But it also depends ultimately and crucially
upon whether we have had the experiences presupposed by their accounts. Those
who have never felt pulled in one direction by reason and in another by desire cannot
know the peace, satisfaction and joy that arise when the soul has harmonized itself.
Those who have never experienced the pain of living in self-contradiction will never
know what true self-respect is. If these human experiences are, indeed, universal,
then the foundational projects of these philosophers become more promising, while
Rorty's anti-foundational stance becomes less plausible.
I want to end by returning to Rorty's positive agenda and exploring a bit how
his approach will translate into teaching. If he is right, then most of our students
are condemned to live in the cave. All they can and will ever see and "know" are
shadows cast by an inherited worldview transmitted to them by their famihes and the
larger culture. The teacher merely functions as yet anotherfigureholding up various
images (in this case, constructed narratives) that cast moving shadows thrown upon

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the wall of the cave. A few bright students might succeed in becoming politicians,
artists, or members of the chattering class. Still, this success does not mean much.
The only difference between those chained to the wall gazing at images and those
producing the images (e.g., philosophers like Rorty) is that the latter understand
that opinion-makers are responsible for fostering and sustaining the beliefs held by
those chained in the cave. Education reduces to indoctrination.
Even if we inspire/indoctrinate our students to seek solidarity, in what sense is
their new, committed life "better" than before? Unless there is some objectively
good life, they can hardly be said to have progressed. Even if they feel they are
better off, perhaps this feeling is an illusion engendered by some spin doctor's
image. The liberal arts have traditionally been thought of as an initiation into a
freer life; the truly educated are liberated not only from illusion and but also from
instrumental activities:
Now the original conception of the Liberal Arts was a wayone wayof
establishing a space apart from immediately pragmatic and political concerns,
insofar as the Liberal Arts initiated studies that were pure ends in themselves,
not means to anything else. These arts were activities of reason in its various
guises (arithmetic, geometry, music, logic, grammar, etc.)."
If I understand Rorty correctly, then this promise of liberation is false. Teaching
the liberal arts loses its nobility and becomes just another politically instmmental
game. If that is all that teaching is, I find it hard to conceive why one would bother
to get up in the moming and prepare for class.

Notes
1.
Richard Rorty, quoted in Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner, "Richard Rorty and Postmodern Theory," at www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/dchardrortypostmodemtheory.pdf.
2.
Ibid.
3.
Joshua Knobe, "A Talent for Bricolage: An Interview with Richard Rorty," The Dualist
2 (1995): 56-71.
4.
Best and Kellner, "Rorty and Postmodern Theory."
5.
It might be objected that, while reason is essential to us in some sense, reason plays no
role in effecting the paradigm shift. However, Rorty himself insists that the shift occurs because
a new way of looking at things makes global or holistic sense. It would seem to be reason, not
the emotions or feelings, that requires us to come up with a new picture "hangs together" as a
whole.
6.
I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for the example of the Sullivan principles.
7.
Leon Sullivan, quoted in Chris Herlinger, "Leon Sullivan Dies," Christianity Today
(April 30, 2001).
8.
Stephen Jay Gould, "A Quahog Is a Quahog," in The Panda's Thumb (New York: W.
W. Norton & Company, 1980), 204-13.
9.
Ibid., 207-08.
10. Ibid., 208-13.

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11. Ibid., 213.

12. Richard McKeon, "Being, Existence, and That Which Is," Review of Metaphysics 13
(June 1960): 537-54.
13. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 1 and 2
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), passim.
14. Rorty does recognize one fact, "the fact that our sense of possibilities open for human
beings has changed as history has rolled along, and will go right on changing in unpredictable
ways." But this "fact" is simply another way of stating his theory of subjective pragmatism, and
it is this theory that, I contend, leads him to neglect the reality of facts given in and by personal
experiences.
15. John Cornell, Commencement Address for St. John's Graduate Institute, Santa Fe, New
Mexico, August 2005.