Rorty as Virtue Liberal

"Because Richard Rorty is the Thomas Aquinas of liberal modernity." This was the answer I heard myself give to a radical democratic theorist who asked why (she didn't actually say, "on earth" but it was implied by her tone) I would want to recast Rorty as a virtue liberal. What did I mean by this response? What does a thirteenth-century Aristotelian Catholic theologian have in common with a twentieth-century postmodern pragmatic liberal? Posed this way, the question must be answered: "Not much." But what I was getting at is that Aquinas attempts to provide a big, coherent view of how the most important cultural and intellectual facets of the medieval Christian world - theology, metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, and politics - all "hang together," in Sellars's phrase. Similarly, Rorty attempts to do the same for liberal modernity, which is why his work touches on everything from philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and modern science to history, art, literature, and poetry. The over-arching goal of Rorty's multifarious body of work is to articulate and recommend a particular ideal of liberal culture and politics, which he famously dubs: "liberal utopia" (Rorty 1989, xv). At the heart of this ideal is the attempt to balance the alleviation of societal cruelty with the cultivation of a romantic ethic of free and creative individuality. I argue that this social ideal presumes a set of liberal virtues that must widely be possessed by a liberal democratic citizenry. Rorty is thus best understood as a proponent of a liberal virtue ethics, whose practical conception of liberalism resembles those of other liberal virtue theorists, like Stephen Macedo, Amy Gutmann, Thomas A. Spragens, Eamonn Callan, and (at least at one time) William A. Galston.1According to the virtue liberal conception of liberalism, the success of liberal politics and society depends on citizens possessing the right set of habits or ethical character traits, as opposed to merely having a correct theory of politics and justice or simply the right institutions and procedures. A standard list of liberal virtues typically includes things like: toleration of pluralism, openmindedness, individual autonomy, experimentalism, a liberally-educated moral imagination, a capacity for rational deliberation and a willingness to engage in it to resolve disputes, a practical understanding (phronesis) of equal individual rights, a respect for democratic processes, an active commitment to liberal justice (i.e., to the "equality and freedom of all citizens," the meaning of which is perpetually debated as the substance of liberal politics), liberal patriotism, political courage, democratic humility, and the like. Rorty's unique contribution to this list is the addition of a civic virtue of irony, which is distinct from the irony of intellectuals that he also praises.The interpretation of Rorty as a virtue liberal, however, faces some immediate challenges. Rorty never identifies himself as a virtue liberal and fails to systematically list and analyze a set of liberal virtues. Even more damning to my case is that Rorty claims to accept Rawls's theory of political liberalism (Rorty 1991, 175-196), and at one point even identifies himself as a liberal "minimalist" (Rorty 1998a). The raison d'etre of Rawlsian political liberalism, and of the influential trend toward liberal minimalism more generally, is to oppose ethically demanding conceptions of liberalism, like virtue liberalism, for the sake of tolerating and accommodating a greater range of ethical pluralism. Indeed, theorists of minimalist liberalism, especially those who theorize "modus vivendi liberalism," appear to be engaged in a competition to see who can most rid liberalism of controversial ethical substance, rendering it ethically "thin" and hyper-tolerant (see, e.g., Gray 2000; Kukathas 2003; McCabe 2010). With regard to Rorty, however, all is not as it appears: in spite of his claims, Rorty is not truly a Rawlsian political liberal, nor is he a liberal minimalist in the pertinent sense. …