Pragmatism, religion, and ethics. A reminder from Rorty

Abstract

Richard Rorty argues that concerns of democracy, so questions of politics and ethics, should take precedence over those of philosophy. Worries about the social good should precede metaphysical concerns and arguments about conceptions of the self. If we first come up with a theory of the self and then use this theory as our base for taking on ethical and political questions, we are doing things backwards, says Rorty. The argument of this paper is that, nearly 25 years later, Rorty's insight is one we need to take seriously and one useful for taking on questions about the relationship between psychology and ethics. In subtle ways, especially in the study of religion and related work in ethics, we tend to slip back onto a conception of the self, justifying ethical claims based on those conceptions, forgetting the important pragmatist insight about the priority of politics and ethics. The paper focuses on Rorty's essay, "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy", and some evidence of this tendency in current uses of the work of the pragmatist philosopher Robert Brandom. From this, I assess some of the prospects and limits to the use of cognitive science in the study of religion and ethics.