Taking Other Human Beings Seriously: Rorty's Ethics of Choice and Responsibility

Abstract

This article gives an account of the underlying moral concerns animating Rorty's thought via his earliest published essays, rather than reading his later sociopolitical work back into his episte-mological critiques. Bringing these neglected moral concerns into view introduces ethical issues of choice and responsibility into the social practice of justification and sheds new light on his positions on warranted answerability, truth as the goal of inquiry, and the possibility of rational criticism that have been deemed inadequate by analytic philosophers, Deweyan, and "new" pragmatists alike.