3.1 OUR OWN VALUES

Is skepticism, subjectivism, or even nihilism a sensible response to plu­ralism? I believe not. They are overreactions to pluralism, reactions based on the unrealistic expectation that there should be a single set of concepts to which all people should adhere.

I begin with the following suggestion from Richard Rorty:

Deweyan pragmatists urge us to think of ourselves as part of a pageant of historical progress which will gradually encompass all of the human race, and are willing to argue that the vocabulary which 20th century Western social democrats use is the best vocabulary the race has come up with so far (by, e.g., arguing that the vocabu­lary of the Cashinahua cannot be combined with modern technol­ogy, and that abandoning that technology is too high a price to pay for the benefits the Cashinahuas enjoy).... Pragmatists hope, but have no metaphysical justification for believing, that future univer­sal histories of humanity will describe 20th century Western social democrats in favorable terms. But they admit that we have no very clear idea what those terms will be. [Rorty 1991, p. 219]

Rorty describes the beginnings of an argument that a twentieth-century Western social democrat like himself might make to explain why he was committed to his moral vocabulary and values instead of to those of the Cashinahua.¹ It is a local justificatory story, since it only applies to a potential choice between Rorty’s values and those of one alternative.

In another essay, Rorty recommends that we “see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal meta­vocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one’s way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the old off against the new” [Rorty 1989, p. 73]. Rorty maintains that good liberals should “regard the justification of liberal society simply as a matter of historical comparison with other attempts at social organization - those of the past and those imag­ined by utopians” [ibid., p. 53]. According to Rorty, such justifications should be like “choices of friends or heroes. Such choices are not made by reference to criteria. They cannot be preceded by presuppositionless critical reflection, conducted in no particular language and outside any particular context” [ibid., p. 54].

There is much to what Rorty says: Historical comparison is important and “presuppositionless critical reflection” is not. Still, these ways of articulating the sense in which evaluative arguments are not general present us with a false dichotomy. It is true that stressing modern technology, for example, appeals to the values and costs recognized by Western social democrats themselves. It may well be that Rorty’s argu­ment would get no grip on current members of the Cashinahua people. Be this as it may, it is crucial that there is more that we can say to ourselves about why we are committed to our own values, which may or not be the case for friends and heroes, depending on what we take friendship or hero worship to entail.

First of all, it is clear that the moral values we embrace bear relations to one another and to a variety of non-moral matters. Rorty himself, for instance, finds cruelty to be “the worst thing we do” [1989, p.

Rorty might agree with my argument in the previous paragraph, but he will still insist that there is no answer to “Why not be cruel?” I do not believe that there is a single context-, community-, and tradition­independent answer, but Allan Gibbard has shown that reasoning about moral and other norms often depends on appeals to what he calls “epis- temic norms.” Epistemic norms are the standards we use for evaluating what to believe: When should we give credence to another’s claims? When are we willing to grant authority to another’s commitments, such that we can inherit entitlement to those same commitments? In one example, Gibbard imagines himself arguing with an “ideally coherent anorexic” who believes that it “makes sense to starve herself to death for the sake of a trim figure” [Gibbard 1990, p. 192]. Now suppose the anorexic were to challenge Gibbard: “How do you know that I’m being irrational? What’s your justification?” Gibbard writes that

I of course can issue the same challenge to her, and the mutual chal­lenges may do nothing to advance the conversation.

How might the dispute be resolved? If Gibbard comes to realize that the anorexic has a convincing story she can tell explaining how she knows that she’s being reasonable, and he has no such story for himself, he might give in. Not to give in would be dogmatic, since it would mean refusing to grant the anorexic epistemic legitimacy, despite the fact that she meets all the requirements of his own epistemic norms.

This is not to imply that dogma has no legitimate place in cross- cultural moral encounters. In general, I can imagine as many as three different reactions to other communities’ epistemic norms. The first is that we either share their norms or at least see theirs as plausible; in either case, we choose to treat them as competent normative judges, to borrow Gibbard’s terminology. This means that we expect them to be moved by the same issues that move us, and also that we expect to find considerations they offer coherent and sometimes convincing. I say “sometimes” because granting others competence is not the same as deeming them infallible: Just as we make mistakes and change our minds about normative issues, which can after all be very complex, so they, too, may not have thought things through as clearly as we - or they - might desire. Granting normative competence lays the groundwork for sub­stantive engagement between our morality and theirs, in ways that I will discuss later.

A second type of reaction, still not dogmatic, would be to have rea­sons for thinking someone else’s epistemic standards to be inferior to one’s own. Call this a clash of epistemologies. For example, Alasdair MacIntyre has imagined an encounter between adherents of ancient Confucian ethics, with its focus on “ritual propriety (li),” and classical Aristotelian ethics [MacIntyre 1991]. What might happen if MacIntyre’s Aristotelians tried to convince the Confucians to abandon judging things in terms of li?

The epistemic norms to which the Confucians might appeal in order to justify or explain the importance of li would include giving authority to the words of sages, both as recorded in the various classics and as con­firmed by the spontaneous reactions of properly trained contemporary Confucians. Aristotelians might insist on reasoning from certain first principles which are necessary for objectivity, an objectivity which, MacIntyre says, “is already itself understood in a specifically Aristotelian way as both presupposing and employing formal and teleological princi­ples alien to many rival modes of thought” [1991, pp. 108-9]. We can see that Confucians would very likely be unmoved by the Aristotelians’ appeal to objectivity. The epistemic norms that the two groups recognize as governing their ethical discourses are different enough to provide no push toward mutual accommodation. As far as the Confucians are con­cerned, the Aristotelians abide by inferior standards, and vice versa. Such an inconclusive result to a debate over proper epistemic norms would tend to lessen or even sever mutual interaction, just like a thoroughly dogmatic response.

What, then, of plain dogma? Can we simply refuse to grant others normative authority even if we lack a story about why they judge poorly? This brings us back to the case of the anorexic: what if she says she is applying the same sort of epistemic norms that I endorse? Can I nonetheless reject her conclusions? Gibbard argues convincingly that there is a coherent way in which I can do this, though it has significant consequences.

Parochialism can be coherent - though it does seem morally noxious from where I sit - so long as it is not relied on to make demands on those to whom one is denying competence. To continue my example, Americans can coherently explain to one another why they are refusing to heed the moral judgments of the Japanese-Americans whom they have interned by saying that “they are not competent judges of these things, because they are not real Americans.” It might well be immoral by these Americans’ own lights to act this way, but it is not incoherent. What they cannot do is make demands on the Japanese-Americans themselves. Gibbard explains that such demands “have an air of brow­beating. [We would be asking them] to accept what [we] say, but for no reason [they] could accept in the same terms. We are inhibited, normally, from making such demands. We are embarrassed if we are shown to have made them” [1990, p. 207]. In short, to treat others parochially cuts us off from ordinary normative discussion with them.

We can respond dogmatically to Gibbard’s anorexic, if we have no other means to resist her claims, but doing so brings with it the costs just outlined for parochialism. Returning to the main theme of this section,

1 see no reason why an encounter such as Gibbard has described might lead us to become “normative skeptics.” In a spirit similar to that of Rorty’s imaginary dialogue with members of the Cashinahua, we can readily come up with reasons why our beliefs and values about eating, nutrition, and self-image are superior to those of the anorexic, even if these are not reasons that convince her - even if, in a very extreme case, we have no recourse but parochialism. So long as we are consistent in applying our own moral and epistemic standards, the simple knowledge that other moralities - and other epistemologies - exist should not undermine our own commitments. Still, if we engage with these alterna­tive moralities, it is possible that we will come to view them as at least in part superior to our own. Such possibilities are part of granting nor­mative competence to others.

Local justifications, while adequate to ground continued commitment to our values, do nonetheless lead to some limits on that commitment. Rorty writes: “Pragmatists hope, but have no metaphysical justification for believing, that future universal histories of humanity will describe 20th century Western social democrats in favorable terms.” Why can’t pragmatists be more certain? Rorty argues that the limited commitment he describes is the best we can achieve while at the same time recogniz­ing that how we got here is the result of a contingent historical process. Social changes and other processes over which we have little control can greatly influence the morality to which future people and even our future selves will be committed. I’ll call this attitude long-term fallibilism. We don’t know how things are going to turn out in the long term. We could turn out to be a moral dead end. We may be very confident that we have improved on those who preceded us, by recognizing the immorality of slavery, for instance. We nonetheless feel that the presence of other groups with other moralities, many of them with histories equal to or longer than our own and to whom we cannot give reasons to give up their way of judging the world, requires that we remain open to the pos­sibility that in the long term our morality will be abandoned.

Long-term fallibilism is a familiar attitude in many fields of human endeavor. The histories of science and medicine, for instance, should make it very clear that the particular theories or treatments upon which current practitioners rely could well turn out to be mistaken. Currently used cancer therapies might turn out to be doing more harm than good; the latest “discoveries” in subatomic physics might be relying on funda­mental misconceptions. This does not lead to abandoning medicine or physics, though: Theorists do well to be open-minded, but are nonethe­less committed to their current ways of thinking and acting. Reflecting on morality in the face of pluralism - and indeed, our own moral tradi­tion’s complex history - should lead us to a similar attitude.

One reason to be still more sanguine about our values derives from qualifying Rorty’s assumption that the world’s many different moralities are segregated from one another, each representing a choice of language, culture, life. In the preceding chapter I have described a broader range of conceptual differences according to which some moralities overlap more and some less. As we move through the Chinese rights tradition in the chapters that follow, we will also see how dynamic moralities can be, as well as how complex their interrelations with other moralities can become. Because of overlaps and interactions, it becomes less easy to see distinct moralities as belonging to an “us” and a “them.” It is at least possible, in many cases, to argue that we and they compose a single community, at least on some issues. Instead of Rorty’s local, bilateral jus­tifications, overlap and interaction thus push us toward more general justifications as we think about one another as belonging, partly and con­tingently, to overlapping communities. I will pursue some of the impli­cations of this thought further in this chapter’s final section.