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PARTISAN REVIEW
Rorty places himself in a community of anti-foundationalist philoso–
phers (Isaiah Berlin, Bernard Williams, Wilfred Sellars, among others) and
cites them repeatedly for support, creating the impression of the self–
evidency of his views. But "anti-foundationalism" is a large covering term
that may conceal significant differences - for instance, the efforts of cer–
tain anti-foundational philosophers to find common ground among
perspectives and their belief in the possibility of finding it. The following
passage from
Moral Luck
by one of Rorty's colleagues, Bernard Williams,
is a good example of how they differ:
There is a further proposition which some of these will believe
(among them, I believe, Berlin): that there is no common currency in
which these gains and losses of value can be computed, that values, or
at least the most basic values, are not only plural but in a real sense in–
commensurable. Some other people, however, sympathetic to the
general drift of the argument so far, may at this point protest. To say
that values necessarily conflict, and that the affirmation of some nec–
essarily involves losses with regard to others, does not entail that they
are incommensurable. The reference to
losses
does not in itself entail,
on the other hand, that they are commensurable: one could register a
loss in one dimension of value without comparing the amount of that
loss with another dimension of value. But unless some comparison can
be made, then nothing rational can be said at all about what overall
outcome is to be preferred, nor about which side of a conflict is to be
chosen - and that is certainly a despairing conclusion. Some overall
comparisons can be made, and if they can, then to some degree, it will
be said, these values must be commensurable.
Unlike Rorty, Williams remains attached to the term "rational," be–
cause he cannot imagine an alternative basis for making intelligent
discriminations between possible outcomes. What would be for Williams
an occasion for despair, however, is for Rorty an occasion for compla–
cency. Even the most difficult case leaves Rorty, writing in his volume,
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity,
unfazed: "This would mean giving up
the idea that liberalism could be justified, and Nazi or Marxist enemies of
liberalism refuted, by driving the latter up against an argumentative wall -
forcing them to admit that liberal freedom has a 'moral privilege' which
their own values lacked. From the point of view I have been recom–
mending, any attempt to drive one's opponent up against the wall in this
way (the way of justification) fails when the wall against which he is
driven comes to be seen as one more vocabulary, one more way of de–
scribing things."
