Converging on Culture: Rorty, Rawls, and Dewey on Culture&#39;s Role in Justice

Eric Thomas Weber

In this essay, I review the writings of three philosophers whose work converges on the insight that we must attend to and reconstruct culture for the sake of justice. John Rawls, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty help show some of the ways in which culture can enable or undermine the pursuit of justice. They also offer resources for identifying tools for addressing the cultural impediments to justice. I reveal insights and challenges in Rawls’s philosophy as well as tools and solutions for building on and addressing them in Dewey’s and Rorty’s philosophy.

Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism 22.2 (2014) 231–261 ISSN 1522-7340 (print) ISSN 2052-8388 (online) doi:10.1558/eph.v22i2.26139 Converging on Culture: Rorty, Rawls, and Dewey on Culture’s Role in Justice Eric Thomas Weber he University of Mississippi etweber@olemiss.edu A In this essay, I review the writings of three philosophers whose work converges on the insight that we must attend to and reconstruct culture for the sake of justice. John Rawls, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty help show some of the ways in which culture can enable or undermine the pursuit of justice. hey also ofer resources for identifying tools for addressing the cultural impediments to justice. I reveal insights and challenges in Rawls’s philosophy as well as tools and solutions for building on and addressing them in Dewey’s and Rorty’s philosophy. Keywords Culture, John Dewey, justice, pragmatism, John Rawls, Richard Rorty “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” (Shelley 1909–1914, 377) John Rawls’s theory of justice is often associated with Kantian or rationalist philosophy. Given his “ideal theory” approach to justice and his association with Kant, philosophers who identify with the empiricist tradition are typically thought to be at odds with Rawls’s work. Rawls made an efort, though, to sidestep disagreements between camps or traditions in philosophy, a point which Richard Rorty admired (Rorty 2008). Rawls’s contributions are many and have inluenced a variety of philosophers because in general he sought common ground across philosophical diference (Rawls 1955).1 1. For example, we can see an early version of this tendency in Rawls’s “Two Concepts of Rules” © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015, Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, S1 2BX Eric homas Weber 232 He drew on or conversed with thinkers from the traditions of analytic, Continental, and American philosophy to varying degrees. Among Rawls’s important contributions was his recognition of the crucial role of psychological and cultural conditions and forces in shaping the potential for justice. Critics from the libertarian tradition, whom I address in a separate essay, argue that the level of patterns, such as culture, is not a sphere in which one should look for justice or injustice, instead pointing to the level of individual, free transactions (Nozick 1974, 160–164). Others dismiss claims about culture, such as about political correctness or about ofensive mascots, as petty, unreasonable, or even dangerous.2 In this essay, I review writings from three philosophers whose work overlaps in a way that reveals the cultural roots of justice. hese thinkers help me to illustrate at least initially the reasons why we must attend to culture as a force for justice, not focusing only on the level of individuals. I look to Rawls, John Dewey, and Rorty for beginning an inquiry into the cultural conditions necessary for justice. I aim to show that in the convergence of their philosophies, we see how culture can enable or undermine the pursuit of justice, and that we can identify tools in the Pragmatists’ writings for addressing some of the challenges in theorizing about justice. hrough sometimes unintended conditions but more often by intentional means, culture can either support or undermine: 1) the tolerance versus intolerance of a society; 2) the dehumanization of people; 3) people’s ability to see from others’ perspectives, or empathy; 4) appreciation for the equality and freedom of other people; 5) the environment in which each person can develop a sense of his or her own self-respect, positive power, and worth; 6) eforts to shame unjust societies and regimes; 7) the recognition of areas of overlapping consensus, valuable for cooperative action; and 8) the democratic way of life necessary for genuinely democratic societies to lourish. he present article is an important early step in my overarching project of arguing for the establishment and maintenance of the cultural conditions necessary for justice. he central challengers to this theory claim that the manipulation of culture is inevitably and unacceptably coercive. I will focus on the airmative argument for a culture of justice, setting aside for now the defense against such challenges. Diiculties for what I call a cultural theory of justice stem from tensions inherent in liberalism. I will show how inluential philosoessay, which has inspired the view we call “rule utilitarianism”—an outlook that aims to reconcile the importance of utilitarianism and of deontological ethics as diferent elements in the justiication of rules and of practices followed within such rules (Rawls 1955). 2. One prominent example is Ben Carson, who has called political correctness “dangerous.” See Dana Milbank, “Doctor of Divisiveness,” he Washington Post, May 29, 2014, A2. © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Converging on Culture 233 phers of culture helped to clarify its role in the pursuit of justice. In advancing the present project, we can also see the usefulness of drawing on insights both from Rawls and from the Pragmatists, the latter of which attended extensively to the mechanisms for reconstructing culture in the democratic era, such as education, cultural criticism, and other forms of public philosophical engagement. Bucking the rationalist interpretation of Rawls, Rorty explained his great appreciation for Rawls’s agreement with pragmatism. For example, in A heory of Justice, Rawls’s most Pragmatic position might be his idea of “relective equilibrium.” He writes, Once the whole framework [for the principles of justice] is worked out, deinitions have no distinct status and stand or fall with the theory itself. In any case, it is obviously impossible to develop a substantive theory of justice founded solely on truths of logic and deinition. he analysis of moral concepts and the a priori, however traditionally understood, is too slender a basis. Moral theory must be free to use contingent assumptions and general facts as it pleases. here is no other way to give an account of our considered judgments in relective equilibrium. (Rawls 1999b, 44) Rawls was unafraid of making use of contingent claims, much like Peter Singer’s argument that widespread yet unnecessary famines and sufering are morally unacceptable (Singer 1972). his means that we cannot do otherwise than to draw on the values and assumptions of our culture, at least as a revisable starting point. While there may be philosophically interesting questions to talk about for some who enjoy abstraction, we may not arrive at a universally accepted argument against slavery, simply due to the facts of lingering prejudice or to demands for an ininite list of justiications of our premises. his does not mean that we must take proposals to return to past, inhumane practices seriously.3 Rorty was on the same page with Rawls on this point. He rejected the idea of immutable foundations upon which one might seek universal agreement. Rorty followed Dewey in thinking that it is a mistake to believe that we must justify our moral intuitions to some invented sense of a psychopathic self, which cares only for itself. Rorty cites Dewey, who he says instructed that “it is easy to detect the fallacy which Dewey described as ‘transforming the (truistic) fact of acting as a self into the iction of acting always for self.’”(Rorty 1999, 77) Rawls’s concept of relective equilibrium is based on certain ideas about the nature of human inquiry and justiication. Presenting a highly coherentist view, Rawls writes, 3. I am indebted to David Hildebrand (2006). © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Eric homas Weber 234 A conception of justice cannot be deduced from self-evident premises or conditions on principles; instead, its justiication is a matter of the mutual support of many considerations, of everything itting together into one coherent view… hus what we shall do is to collect together into one conception a number of conditions on principles that we are ready upon due consideration to recognize as reasonable. (Rawls 1999b, 19) Rawls’s relective equilibrium was reminiscent of Dewey’s pragmatic and empirical theory of inquiry.4 Rawls paid some attention to the facts of his surrounding culture, at least as a motivation for altering his direction leading to Political Liberalism (1996).5 his is not to call Rawls’s cultural awareness suicient or rich.6 He certainly was more concerned about it than some approaches to philosophy are, such as those that aim to avoid “application” of philosophy to the real world (Gaus 2005). As his thought progresses, Rawls seems to come closer to his Kantian roots, at least in a number of ways,7 though some see contrary trends depending on the area of emphasis in his work.8 With Rorty, I set aside for now the debates about the early versus the later Rawls to focus instead on whatever resources his work has to ofer for considering culture’s role in justice. 4. Rawls noted explicitly his debt to Nelson Goodman for the theory underlying relective equilibrium (Rawls 1999b, 18). He cited Nelson Goodman (1955, 65-68). Attending to the philosophy of culture, Morton White has recently clariied Goodman’s role in the tradition of a pragmatic philosophy of culture, in which Dewey was a great inspiration (White 2002, chapter 8). 5. On page 36 and elsewhere, Rawls talks about what he calls the “fact of reasonable pluralism,” which presented a challenge for the assumed social homogeneity of outlooks in his earlier opus, A heory of Justice. 6. A number of critics have made this point clear, such as Charles W. Mills, “Retrieving Rawls for Racial Justice? A Critique of Tommie Shelby,” (2013). Mills notes Elizabeth Anderson’s (2010) abandonment of “ideal theory,” a label capturing Rawls’s theory of justice. Both Mills and Anderson see in Rawls and in most scholarship which draws on Rawls a troubling dearth of consideration about issues of race in justice. 7. Here I would refer readers to essays like “Kantian Constructivism in Moral heory” (1980). his is one of many possible examples to ofer. Of course, in that essay, as I will show in what follows, Rawls does note Dewey’s “genius,” (1980, 516). 8. While I show ways to see Rawls’s increasing attention to Kant in my book, Rawls, Dewey, and Constructivism: On the Epistemology of Justice (2010), Robert Taylor presents a contrary outlook. Taylor’s point is that Rawls moves away from Kantian universalism. Insofar as Rawls presents a theory of universal human rights, I would disagree with him, but I understand Taylor since Rawls avoids establishing a universal standard of morality that is the same for all societies. See Robert S. Taylor, Reconstructing Rawls: he Kantian Foundations of Justice as Fairness (2011). © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Converging on Culture 235 Rawls had a great deal to say about culture and therefore appreciated the importance of contingency and social change more than many Kantian moral philosophers before or after him.9 Rorty shows how Rawls’s eforts of this kind followed the spirit of Jeferson’s separation of Church and state (2008, 175), which Rorty sees as Pragmatic and right. Rawls was more attentive to culture and to Pragmatist ways of thinking than is typically recognized, furthermore. He was inspired by the writings of Nelson Goodman and other philosophers who were inluenced by Pragmatism.10 Plus, Rawls explicitly claimed in his essay, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral heory,” that he hoped to do justice to Dewey’s philosophical intentions. In that essay, Rawls writes, I would like to think that John Dewey, in whose honor these lectures are given, would ind their topic hospitable to his concerns. We tend to think of him as the founder of a characteristically American and instrumental naturalism and, thus, to lose sight of the fact that Dewey started his philosophical life, as many did in the late nineteenth century, greatly inluenced by Hegel; and his genius was to adapt much that is valuable in Hegel’s idealism to a form of naturalism congenial to our culture. It was one of Hegel’s aims to overcome the many dualisms which he thought disigured Kant’s transcendental idealism, and Dewey shared this emphasis throughout his work, often stressing the continuity between things that Kant had sharply separated. his theme is present particularly in Dewey’s early writings, where the historical origins of his thought are more in evidence. In elaborating his moral theory along somewhat Hegelian lines, Dewey opposes Kant, sometimes quite explicitly, and often at the same places at which justice as fairness departs from Kant. hus there are a number of ainities between justice as fairness and Dewey’s moral theory which are explained by the common aim of overcoming the dualism in Kant’s doctrine. (Rawls 1980, 516) Rawls is explicit here both in his respect for Dewey and in his recognition of the relationship between overcoming and attending to culture. It is worth considering how it is Dewey came to emphasize culture. 9. A remarkable exception is Christine Korsgaard’s account of Kant, one of the most attractive available on this score. Sounding pragmatic, Korsgaard writes “Realism, I argue, is a reactive position that arises in response to almost every attempt to give a substantive explanation of morality. It results from the realist’s belief that such explanations inevitably reduce moral phenomena to natural phenomena. I trace this belief and the essence of realism to a view about the nature of concepts–that it is the function of all concepts to describe reality. Constructivism [, which she defends,] may be understood as the alternative view that a normative concept refers schematically to the solution to a practical problem.” See Christine M. Korsgaard, “Realism and Constructivism in Twentieth-Century Moral Philosophy” (2003). 10. As I have noted, Rawls cites Goodman. Goodman, Nelson. Fact, Fiction and Forecast. See especially John Rawls, A heory of Justice (1999b, 18n). © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Eric homas Weber 236 One way of thinking about how and why Dewey came so thoroughly to focus on culture concerns his early writings in the ield of psychology. In Dewey’s early days, philosophy and psychology were not treated as separately as they are today. hey were even considered one area. What we know as he Journal of Philosophy today was once he Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientiic Methods.11 he importance of psychology in this context was that Dewey was concerned about the simple “stimulus/response” model in psychology. He studied William James’s he Principles of Psychology (James 1950) with great admiration, but felt dissatisied about the prevalent outlook referred to as the “relex arc” concept. hat theory explains learning as a matter of reactions or changes in the brain’s pathways that are prompted by the results of relexes themselves prompted by external stimuli. he example James used involved the young person in front of a candle, who learns quickly not to return his or her inger into the lame. he matter that troubled Dewey about that picture, which shows stimuli to be the primary source of action yielding response, was the fact that it isolated the child theoretically, not considering for a moment the fact that he or she always lives in an environment in which countless things, forces, or noises could be stimuli. Dewey’s theory of the selectivity of attention is in his view a better way of thinking about initial impulses, and it helps to explain the origin of personality. People are inclined toward certain stimuli over other kinds. In addition, when we watch a new baby kick and reach, there is cause to say that in the beginning was the response, or, for Dewey, the selectivity of attention. Dewey’s inluential essay on this matter (1896) is rarely noted today, yet it sparked the revolutionary idea that we should create stimulating environments for learning that would have been deemed distracting in older, traditional models of education. It is also among the early inspirations for connecting educational subject matter to students’ interests and unique talents. From Dewey’s insight in psychology we see the importance of the social environment—one way of referring to culture—to individual development and education, including in the development of self-respect and of one’s powers. Dewey draws and builds on these ideas extensively in his inluential philosophy of education, his study of one of the central mechanisms with which we aim to intelligently shape culture for the next generation. Dewey has rightly been considered one of the great philosophers of culture.12 Later Rorty takes up the theme of culture in a central way (2007). For 11. his is according to the journal’s Web site, URL: http://www.journalofphilosophy.org/ generalinfo.html. 12. Beyond Rorty, many others have pointed this out. For one example, see Morton White, A Philosophy of Culture: he Scope of Holistic Pragmatism (2005). © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Converging on Culture 237 one of Dewey’s inluential works, Experience and Nature, Dewey began but never completed a revision to the introduction, in which he wrote that in retrospect he would replace the word “experience”—a term he used often— with the word “culture.” Among the reasons why “culture” is a better term for Dewey’s philosophy is that experience sounds solitary, isolating. I can sit in my living room and experience a movie in a way that creates a dichotomy between the ilm viewed and the person viewing. he term “culture” may sound like something that can be consumed, as in visiting a museum on one’s own, but it also brings with it a sense of community or of presence within an environment, as well as the kind of feeling that implies the inseparability of the self from that wider whole. Culture, furthermore, refers to a set of conditions, pre-cognitive as well as post-, which envelop persons in sets of needs, beliefs, practices, tools, and habits. “Culture” is also a term that is biological. We can “culture” cells. We set cells in a certain kind of environment in which they grow, lourish, interact in other ways, or die, based on the conditions that suit or conlict with the organisms’ evolving needs for living. Dewey was fond of biological understandings and metaphors for thinking about human progress as a kind of growth. he separation of experiencer and subject matter of experience seems to break down in the context of culture, furthermore, such as when we think of persons in a room and what makes up the temperature of that room. Spaces can be cold or warm, but it is familiar that large numbers of people can contribute substantially to warming a room. In other words, persons in a culture or in an environment are thereby part of that culture or environment, afecting it even as they are in turn afected as well. In a l947 essay, Dewey sums up his view of the relation between philosophy and culture. He writes, My standpoint is that philosophy deals with cultural problems. he principal task of philosophy is to get below the turmoil that is particularly conspicuous in times of rapid cultural change, to get behind what appears on the surface, to get to the soil in which a given culture has its roots. he business of philosophy is the relation that man has to the world in which he lives, as far as both man and the world are afected by culture, which is very much more than is usually thought. (1990, 467)13 Dewey saw the work of philosophy as cultural critique and participation. his way of thinking was part of his motivation for writing and for speaking 13. John Dewey, “he Future of Philosophy,” an address delivered to the Graduate Department of Philosophy, Columbia University, New York, N.Y., 13 November 1947, in he Collected Works of John Dewey, he Later Works, Volume 17 (1990, 467). © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Eric homas Weber 238 often to wide, general audiences. It is reason why Dewey is thought of as one of America’s great public philosophers (Weber forthcoming). Given the importance Rawls placed on or implied about culture for justice and Dewey’s insights about philosophy’s role in shaping culture, we can look now to Rorty, a follower of both, who wrote often on culture. In particular, Rorty can help us to avoid unnecessary frustrations that arise when dualisms persist in our philosophy, ones which Rawls and Dewey both sought to avoid. To address such challenges, Rorty ofers distinctions between diferent senses of “rationality” and “culture.” His focus on these topics arose out of his background in the philosophy of language. Near the end of his career, Rorty writes explicitly about philosophy “as cultural politics,”14 but his attention to culture arose much earlier in his writings. he connection between Rorty’s training in analytic philosophy and his later work is found in the diicult questions raised for the philosophy of language, especially concerning problems of cultural diference. he analytic tradition struggled with questions of translation across cultures, as in the story about the native who yells “Gavagai!” “Gavagai” might refer to the running rabbit he sees, to one of its parts, to the act of running, or some other element of the experience he means to emphasize.15 In this example drawn from Quine’s Word and Object, we see how language and culture call for testing out meanings in interaction. Rorty and Donald Davidson debated some questions regarding cultural diferences relevant here, including: How radically diferent can conceptual schemes be?16 In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein famously suggested that “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him” (2001, 190e). Consider the idea of family in today’s America, contrasted with the families of Native American tribes from long ago. Are there concepts in either tradition that cannot translate across cultural diferences? Davidson’s answer was famously no. As a fan of Davidson’s work, Rorty was fascinated by the role of culture in shaping meaning. 14. Rorty devoted the fourth collection of essays to this theme. See Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007). 15. his example, famous in the tradition, comes from W.V.O. Quine. See Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object (1960, 29). Quine writes, “he utterances irst and most surely translated in such a case are ones keyed to present events that are conspicuous to the linguist and his informant. A rabbit scurries by, the native says ‘Gavagai’, and the linguist notes down the sentence ‘Rabbit’ (or ‘Lo, a rabbit’) as tentative translation, subject to testing in further cases.” 16. I am thinking, of course, of Donald Davidson’s 1974 essay “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in he Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, reprinted in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984). © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Converging on Culture 239 Rorty’s and Dewey’s attention to culture grow out of the latter’s insights in psychology and his consequent philosophy of education. Among the crucial developments undertaken in education is the task of enculturation, educating students about the best practices, scientiic developments, and social conditions of their communities, broadly deined, for the sake of preparing them for life’s various and changing problems. What troubles many critics of Dewey’s philosophy today is precisely the extent to which public schools shape young people’s culture. he strictest of such critics want their kids to stay away from public schools. hey therefore either send them to private schools of their liking or sometimes put them through a customized curriculum by other means.17 Some do this as a form of cultural protest against public intrusion into their culture and as an airmation of their own values. Of course, there are many other reasons to consider homeschool, some of which scholars have argued Dewey might well have valued (Ralston 2011). Dewey’s advocacy for public education itself can be understood as the recognition of the value of culture and its intelligent presentation and engagement with citizens for the sake of the public good. In political liberalism like Rawls’s, one of the roles of culture in justice is found in the development of persons—in the inculcation of cultural beliefs and attitudes foster self-respect and a sense of individuals power to pursue meaningful life plans as equal citizens. If education is among the mechanisms for shaping culture, it remains to consider diferent conceptions of culture, which Rorty diferentiated. here are many places to look for Rorty’s insights on culture. His essay, “Rationality and Cultural Diference” (1998), helps to identify understandings of rationality and culture that are problematic and outdated and those that ought to be preserved and put to use. He presents three notions each of the terms, rationality and culture.18 He calls rationality1 the name of an ability that squids have more of than amoebas, that languageusing human beings have more of than non-language-using anthropoids, and that human beings armed with modern technology have more of than those not so armed: the ability to cope with the environment by adjusting one’s reactions to environmental stimuli in complex and delicate ways. his is sometimes called “technical reason.” 17. See Henry T. Edmonson, III, John Dewey and the Decline of American Education (2006). For the latter case I have in mind some people’s reasons for home schooling—to avoid public schools’ cultural inluence (Ralston 2011). 18. he piece was originally published in 1992 in Volume 42 of Philosophy East and West. © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Eric homas Weber 240 He diferentiates this form of reasoning from rationality2, which is his name for an extra added ingredient that human beings have and brutes do not. he presence of this ingredient within us is a reason to describe ourselves in diferent terms than those we use to describe nonhuman organisms. his presence cannot be reduced to a diference in degree of our possession of rationality1. It is distinct because it sets goals other than mere survival. Finally, he describes rationality3 as roughly synonymous with tolerance—with the ability not to be overly disconcerted by diferences from oneself, not to respond aggressively to such differences. his ability goes along with a willingness to alter one’s own habits… to reshape oneself. (Rorty 1998b, 186–187) With these three senses of the term rationality, Rorty explains the diference that separates certain groups of thinkers, such as enlightenment Kantians from Deweyan Pragmatists. For, as Rorty rightly interprets him, Dewey would see rationality2 as a fabrication, something that assumes too much and ignores the origins of diferences in rationality. Dewey sees a continuum directly from rationality1 to rationality3. Rorty claims that rationality1 does not necessarily lead to rationality3, though it has done so and could have done otherwise in circumstances diferent from our given contingent history. hese three senses of rationality help Rorty to diferentiate three senses of the word “culture,” presenting a helpful set of distinctions for avoiding Kantian dualisms. He explains that Culture1 is simply a set of shared habits of action, those that enable members of a single human community to get along with one another and with the surrounding environment as well as they do... Many of us belong to a lot of different cultures—to that of our native town, to that of our university, to that of the cosmopolitan intellectuals… In this sense, “culture” is not the name of a virtue, nor is it necessarily the name of something human beings have and other animals do not… culture1 resembles rationality1. Rorty then distinguished culture1 from culture2, describing the latter as the name of a virtue. In this sense, “culture” means something like “high culture” … Good indications of the possession of culture2 are an ability to manipulate abstract ideas for the sheer fun of it, and an ability to discourse at length about the difering values of widely diverse sorts of painting, music, architecture, and writing… It is often associated with rationality3. Finally, Rorty writes, Culture3 is a rough synonym for what is produced by the use of rationality2. It is what supposedly has steadily gained ground, as history has gone along, © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Converging on Culture 241 over “nature”—over what we share with brutes. It is the overcoming of the base and irrational and animal by something universally human, respect. To say that one culture1 is more “advanced” than another is to say that it has come closer to realizing “the essentially human” than another culture1, that it is a better expression of what Hegel called “the self-consciousness of Absolute Spirit,” a better example of culture3. he universal reign of culture3 is the goal of history. (Rorty 1998b, 188–189) hese three deinitions ofer ways of thinking about diferent philosophical traditions and how they have considered issues of culture and rationality— not all of which Rorty would accept. In particular, he would dismiss certain versions of culture3 as also kinds of fabrications, like the idea that Marx thought humanity was progressing inevitably to the Communism. Culture2 is generally a matter of class diference, and for my purposes misses much of the cultural force of culture1. he pragmatists might see a version of culture3 as sensible if it is meant only as empirical observation, whether defensible or not, that societies over time are becoming more humane and attentive to sufering, even when it is far away, such as in ofers of foreign aid. In fact, in Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, he admits belief in the potential for moral progress, which he sees in the growth of human solidarity against cruelty and sufering (Rorty 1989, 192). First, it is important to consider that people often make claims about the inherent value of any culture. As Rorty explains, this is in part an argument motivated by the reasonable guilt Westerners feel about brutal colonialism. But, the “exaltation of the non-Western and the oppressed seems to [Rorty] just as dubious as the Western imperialists’ assurance that all other forms of life are ‘childish’ in comparison with that of modern Europe” (Rorty 1998b, 190). So, when we think about diferent cultures and about evaluating one as better than another, more just than another, it is reasonable to ask Rorty whether there can be genuine comparisons. On the one hand, Rorty believes that there are cultures that “we would be better of without.” Among these, he includes “for example, those of concentration camps, criminal gangs, and international conspiracies of bankers” (Rorty 1998b, 189). On the other hand, Rorty (1998b, 193) is quick to add his controversial interpretation of Dewey, writing of Dewey that He did not think it the function of philosophy to provide argumentative backup, irm foundations, for evaluative hierarchies. He simply took the rhetorics and goals of the social democratic movement of the turn of the century for granted and asked what philosophy might do to further them. © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Eric homas Weber 242 At this point, I see partial value and trouble in Rorty’s thinking not just about Dewey, but mainly about evaluation. Rorty believes that it is time people recognize that the irm foundations we have long believed in are really inventions of reason. Dewey would agree with elements of Rorty’s critique of tradition, but not all. Larry Hickman has explained Dewey’s sense of “foundations” as diferent from the immovable, ixed rock metaphor, choosing instead the idea of a platform, such as we ind on an ocean (see Hickman 1990, 72). he idea of a platform is helpful, since we do stand on foundations of a sort as we experience the world, as we create tools to pursue more complex and reined projects. Whereas Enlightenment thinkers felt that they needed foundations in some abstract idea or divine origin, Hickman explains that Dewey “thought that the moderns had missed the point that naturally occurring ends are the ‘platforms’ from which it is possible to regard other things” (Hickman 1990, 72). In some passages of his work, Rorty seems to agree with the point of the “platform” metaphor, yet he is unwilling to call it a foundation, perhaps given the baggage of the term’s history. he second trouble I have with Rorty’s point is that he denies evaluative foundations, yet uses one as an evaluative tool time and again. When we look for a basic motive for evaluating another culture, Rorty suggests that we look at its response to sufering. He does not explain to the insensitive person why he or she should care about sufering in the world. He simply accepts the norm and presents it much in the way that Peter Singer does in “Famine, Aluence, and Morality.” (Singer 1972).19 What we ind in Rorty’s attention to sufering, however, is a way of thinking about moral progress. It is also an instrument for moral evaluation and differentiation of more and less acceptable cultures. Rorty was right about the need for rationality3 in culture1 and culture2, which concern toleration of diference and control of the knee jerk judgment of others. In my own youth, derogatory remarks about homosexuals were commonplace, yet in the period of one generation, people’s attitudes have changed dramatically in favor of tolerance and respect (Avery et al. 2007). Addressing Dewey’s lessons regarding the need for lexibility in moral thinking, Rorty writes that he very mixed bag of results produced by this new lexibility—this increased ability to alter the environment rather than simply fending of its blows— meant, in Dewey’s eyes, that we typically solve old problems at the cost of 19. In this essay, Singer admits that it may be unfeasible to ofer a universally convincing account of why it is terrible for vast numbers of people to starve to death unnecessarily, but he thinks that assuming it to be a bad thing is not at all unreasonable. © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Converging on Culture 243 creating new problems for ourselves. (For example, we eliminate old forms of cruelty and intolerance only to ind that we have invented new, more insidious forms thereof.) He had no wholesale solution to ofer to the new problems we had created, only the hope that the same experimental daring which had created the new problems as by-products might, if combined with a will to decrease sufering, eventually produce piecemeal solutions to those new problems. (Rorty 1998b, 192–193, emphasis added) So despite all of Rorty’s eforts to avoid presenting foundational values, we ind in a number of his writings the importance of decreasing sufering. An acquaintance at a conference once asked me whether in moral theory Pragmatists are basically utilitarians. he answer is no, but the elimination of sufering where possible is surely a good thing in general. After all, the utilitarian moral theorist believes that moral judgments are right when they follow the demands of a calculus about pains and pleasures. Certainly such a calculus can factor into decision-making for a Pragmatist, but Pragmatists can also be constitutionalists (Ralston 2010), who think that greater happiness in shutting up Bob should probably not trump his right to speak freely in the public square. Sufering is the recurring concern in a number of Rorty’s works, but especially in his writings on human rights (Rorty 1998a). We can see in his and Dewey’s considerations about culture that the diminishment of sufering is central for justice. In addition, we can see the cultural role of rationality3 in shaping the conditions necessary for the moral beneits of tolerance. In that area, he ofers some rich arguments with regard to the forces, aims, and tools for reconstructing justice. Whether at the domestic or international levels, Rorty’s respect for people and their sufering is rooted in his and Dewey’s democratic values. He explains Dewey’s insights about toleration and its beneits, writing that As we became more and more emancipated from custom,—more and more willing to do things diferently than our ancestors for the sake of coping with our environment more eiciently and successfully—we became more and more receptive to the idea that good ideas might come from anywhere, that they are not the prerogative of an elite and not associated with any particular locus of authority. In particular, the rise of technology helped break down the traditional distinction between the “high” wisdom of priests and theorists and the “low” cleverness of artisans—thus contributing to the plausibility of a democratic system of government. (Rorty 1998b, 192.) Now, Rorty will consider the development at play here to be contingent, not necessary developments. his account of contingent features of human © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Eric homas Weber 244 history nevertheless ofers an illustration of reason why democratic values have come to be central to modern outlooks on justice. he platform I see in this last passage concerns the Pragmatists’ ideas about the best ways of seeking knowledge, as well as the origins of coming to value more and more people’s well-being. In Dewey’s ideas about logic and inquiry and in Charles Sanders Peirce’s essay on ixing belief,20 we see clear and strong norms for intelligent inquiry, norms which are irm enough to stand on as we pursue increasing levels of intellectual endeavor. As Peirce noted, we certainly can “ix belief ” by authority alone, but when we do so, we often end up with beliefs that are hard to maintain, such as when an allegedly immortal king dies. Peirce and Dewey both saw that science proceeds through communal inquiry. Not only is science better and stronger, but so are economies when more people of varied backgrounds and ways of thinking engage in conversation and commerce. Why would business, politics, and science do better as a result of increased diversity? he answer to this question shows how I difer from Rorty. I see the answer to this question as revelatory about what forms of inquiry are best at uncovering good ideas and having them win over worse ideas. I feel comfortable calling this a Pragmatic foundational belief, a platform. It may be that the nature of inquiry has been reined through a contingent history and without some ixed or singular facts about human nature. Nevertheless, the limitations of human intelligence suggest that more perspectives weighing in on scientiic study are better than fewer. At the same time, Dewey ofers an outlook about the nature of human beings that is based on Hegelian ideas about psychology and inquiry, fused with Darwinian understandings of animals in cultures. hus, in a sense, while we can let go of certain traditions that hypostatize rationality or that singularize human nature, we can nevertheless learn facts empirically about the initude of human intelligence and the beneits of communal inquiry. In science, as in business, medicine, and politics, greater diversity in the pool of inquirers is better than more homogeneity. he added beneit comes not only from increases in perspectives on ideas, but also from the competition which tests ideas. In these lessons about humanity and about the platforms on which we stand, there are tools available for achieving greater human progress and for evaluating the strengths, weaknesses, virtues, and vices of diferent cultures. We see that appreciating all people as possible sources of insight, happiness, industry, and commerce makes for a stronger, 20. See Charles S. Peirce, “he Fixation of Belief ” (1992). See also John Dewey, Logic: he heory of Inquiry, in he Collected Works of John Dewey, he Later Works, Volume 12. (1986). © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Converging on Culture 245 smarter, and more humane culture, especially when such democratic values are guided with the aim of enhancing people’s well-being and diminishing sufering. Such appreciation may have arisen contingently, but also can be the result of intentional cultural reconstruction, one which aims to promote rationality3. hus, again, we see a key role of culture in justice and human lourishing here. Of course, to those who hold to beliefs in rationality2, these insights are interpreted among natural theorists as evidence of a connection to people’s inherent and ixed human nature. Pragmatists need not accept that inference, yet can concede that these at least historically and contingently developed attributes appear certainly to be highly valued and stable, given the right conditions for their maintenance. he conclusion we can draw from appreciating the value of diversity in inquiry, ethics, and politics, then, is that cultures that are democratic and tolerant will fare better. In he Law of Peoples, Rawls shies away from the claim that cultures must be democratic in order to be legitimate and just, but ultimately that was among the shortfalls of that work, if indeed culture can impede or enable justice. his does not imply that one is justiied to intervene militarily in just any or every undemocratic country, but as Rorty argued in his essay on human rights, it may well be that we ought to intervene culturally, such as in the spread of education and literature—a point which Rawls’s strong liberalism would not permit. In an elegant and metaphorical passage, Rorty ofers an insight about the complexity of cultures, which builds on his distinctions and also connects with his own and (indirectly) Rawls’s coherentist outlooks. Whereas Willard V. O. Quine referred to a web of belief, from which certain peripheral beliefs or strands could be removed while the whole remains one, Rorty uses the imagery of a tapestry. He writes, he real work of building a multicultural global utopia, I suspect, will be done by people who, in the course of the next few centuries, unravel each culture1 into a multiplicity of ine component threads and then weave these threads together with equally ine threads drawn from other cultures1—thus promoting the sort of variety-in-unity characteristic of rationality3. he resulting tapestry will, with luck, be something we can now barely imagine— a culture1 that will ind the cultures1 of contemporary America and contemporary India21 as suitable for benign neglect as we ind those of Harappa or of Carthage. (Rorty 1998b, 201) 21. Rorty composed this essay for presentation at the Indian Institute for Philosophy at Mount Abu, before it was published in Philosophy East and West. his explains his references to America and India here. © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Eric homas Weber 246 Here we see Rorty thinking in broad strokes as he concludes his essay on “Rationality and Cultural Diference.” His point is useful, however, and is akin to a culture-shaping version of Rawls’s concept of relective equilibrium. Rorty’s metaphor suggests a way of visualizing the process of aiming to design or establish a certain cultural picture, one which can remove unacceptable or clashing strands, substituting others—and all while striving for a maximally respectful and empowering cultural picture. Rorty is efectively calling for an intelligent reconstruction of culture, a Deweyan aim as well, which Rawls does not explain how to envision in such explicit language or metaphor. Rorty ofers his most concrete proposals for reconstructing grossly unjust cultures in his essay on human rights (Rorty 1998a). Of course, he would argue for the need for his proposal at the domestic level in the United States as well. Human rights as a term seem to suggest international matters. hey are also commonly associated with something like a norm based on rationality2 and rationality3. After all, they call for tolerance and respect for all people, and they focus on human beings, so they might be said to imply that because of what is distinct in human nature, certain rights correspond with obligations which determine right and wrong forms of government and human interaction. So, in the domain of human rights, a Pragmatist who rejects rationality2 will need to explain on what basis we require rationality3 for all cultures. his is the struggle that Rawls works to address in he Law of Peoples, though he also hoped to avoid some of the Kantian enlightenment thinking that draws on timeless human nature. In “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” Rorty argues that the gross violations of human rights that must be stopped are generally preceded by dehumanization of the oppressed—a decidedly cultural mechanism. When Nazis spoke of Jews as viruses or vermin, they referred to human beings as things that we generally try to kill and exterminate. When Serbs treated Muslims as dogs, they spoke of human beings as animals who could be put down, treated as property and discarded. In this context, one could expect that concern about “dehumanization” must stem from appeals to the static, enlightenment idea of humanity and rationality2. Rorty avoids that approach. Instead, he again focuses on sufering. Dehumanization is a process whereby people prepare themselves through social conditioning to not feel sympathy for certain other people.22 Drawing another lesson here, we see 22. It is worth noting that concern for animals and criticism of factory farming are gaining support, but even with such growing sympathy for animals, they are treated diferently from human beings nonetheless. Whether or not we ought to treat chickens humanely, we do not enter into contracts with them. © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Converging on Culture 247 the power of language, metaphor, and belief in creating the conditions that dehumanize people and both are and foster injustice. Rorty sees sentimentality as a contingent development of biology and history. We sympathize with other people and feel sad when they sufer. If there are any exceptions, the select few who do not feel for others are still entitled to live and be let alone, to a degree, so long as they avoid harming others. he vast majority of people who feel for others, as human beings—as animals with rationality1 and rationality3—can protect themselves as necessary from the few unlike them when they become dangerous, or let them be when they are not harming anyone (Lachs 2004). But, where possible, Rorty believes that it is the responsibility of society to educate people to have the right sentiments. In this sense, a profound moral need is addressed when students read books like To Kill a Mockingbird or he Diary of Anne Frank.(Morrison 2007; Frank 1952). What texts like these do is to put the reader in the perspective of the person who is persecuted, who is afected by hatred or lack of sympathy.23 Rorty explains his point, writing, one will see it as the moral educator’s task not to answer the rational egotist’s question “Why should I be moral?” but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question “Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I ind disgusting?” he traditional answer to the latter question is “Because kinship and custom are morally irrelevant, irrelevant to the obligations imposed by the recognition of membership in the same species.” his has never been very convincing, since it begs the question at issue: whether mere species membership is, in fact, a suicient surrogate for closer kinship. Furthermore, that answer leaves one wide open to Nietzsche’s discomiting rejoinder: that universalistic notion, Nietzsche will sneer, would have crossed the mind of only a slave—or, perhaps, an intellectual, a priest whose self-esteem and livelihood both depend on getting the rest of us to accept a sacred, unarguable, unchallengeable paradox. A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story that begins, 23. Here we have a chance to answer those who ask whether Pragmatist ethics is essentially utilitarian. If utilitarianism in general denies the importance of special relationships, such as in prioritizing a slight increase in my child’s happiness over a larger increase to another person’s happiness, then we can say that Pragmatists are not utilitarian in that way. In at least many versions of utilitarianism, it is important to ight the force of one’s emotional inclinations to prioritize one’s loved ones, denying the moral force of sentiments and relationships. Unlike that feature of utilitarianism or related emphasis on reason in the dismissal of emotion in deontology, pragmatism sees emotions as part of who we are, and elements of ourselves which we can condition. Just as we can condition our reason to function better than it does without education, the same can be said of our emotions. Both are important, as both are part of who and what we are as human beings. © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Eric homas Weber 248 “Because this is what it is like to be in her situation—to be far from home, among strangers,” or “Because she might become your daughter-in-law,” or “Because her mother would grieve for her.” Such stories, repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful people, to tolerate and even to cherish powerless people—people whose appearance and habits or beliefs at irst seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation. (Rorty 1998a, 184–185) Rorty notes the underlying connection between our beliefs about politics and ethics and our sentiments based on stories, histories, and social conditioning. He ofers a way of thinking about the possibilities for philosophy to inluence culture. First, if he’s right, we should disagree with universalists who think that passions and rationality ought to be irmly separated out in thought about ethics. Second, when we think about making a society more just, part of what is needed is a form of education whereby citizens learn to sympathize with others, to see contingent, supericial diferences between themselves and others for what they are: irrelevant to people’s abilities to lourish or sufer. While there will be disagreement about how sentiments ought to be directed, Rorty does point to mechanisms which inluence people. he trouble for Rawls, when he moves to his political conception of justice, is that he has to minimize his demands on culture and to introduce the problematic distinction between what is private and what is public. he initial distinction relevant here is to consider Rawls’s sense of a “public political culture.” It arises in Political Liberalism, where he writes that Since justiication is addressed to others, it proceeds from what is, or can be, held in common; and so we begin from shared fundamental ideas implicit in the public political culture in the hope of developing from them a political conception that can gain free and reasoned agreement in judgment. (Rawls 1996, 100–101) He clariies his conception of the public political culture, writing that he public political culture may be of two minds at a very deep level. Indeed, this must be so with such an enduring controversy as that concerning the most appropriate understanding of liberty and equality. his suggests that if we are to succeed in inding a basis for public agreement, we must ind a way of organizing familiar ideas and principles into a conception of political justice that expresses those ideas and principles in a somewhat diferent way than before. (Rawls 1996, 9) A worry that arises at this point concerns the freedom of people who hold diferent religions or comprehensive doctrines. For, their motivations can © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Converging on Culture 249 well be called private, such as in seeking to live according to what one believes is right due to private religious revelation. It is an overstatement to say that Rawls would not allow religious speech about private reasons in the public domain, but he would argue that any political discussion should include appeals to reasons that are public and not only private. Rawls clariies this, explaining his view that reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious or nonreligious, may be introduced in public political discussion at any time, provided that in due course proper political reasons–and not reasons given solely by comprehensive doctrines–are presented that are suicient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines introduced are said to support. his injunction to present proper political reasons I refer to as the proviso, and it speciies public political culture as distinct from the background culture. (Rawls 1999a, 591–592) For Rawls, in political settings, proper reasons will rest on matters of overlapping consensus and opinion, which are matters of culture, but not just any element of culture. he practical point to be made here is that agreement about conclusions must start with agreement about their premises, at least for systematic public cooperation to function with stability. Rawls’s aim to separate the public and the private with regard to culture is diicult to accept, such as in cases in which one’s private culture sees other people as subhuman. he language we use, our beliefs, and our practices have consequences which permeate other behavior and engagements. When judges must be disinterested, they are expected to pay special attention to their own potential for biasing inluence, and even to step down from judgment when for whatever reason they are not in the right circumstances to ofer the kind of judgment that they should (Frost 2004). he call to limit one’s arguments to public culture, to grounds acceptable to all, requires treating others as worthy of such respect. he implications of Rorty’s and Dewey’s philosophies, by contrast, suggest that some background cultures themselves run counter to the democratic way of life and need to be resisted where possible, and in some way consistent with our other democratic norms—such as through education.24 For instance, Dewey (1939) once argued that intolerance because of politics, race, or color is “treason to the democratic way of life.”25 Rawls appears at times to take a contextualist approach to his understanding of concepts and how they are shaped by culture. Rorty recognizes and 24. he aim described here is the subject I address elsewhere in the overarching project of which this essay is a part. 25. John Dewey, “Creative Democracy—he Task Before Us,” (1939, 12–17). Republished in LW.14, 224-231, 227. © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Eric homas Weber 250 values such moments in Rawls’s work, such as where the latter writes, he constructionist view accepts from the start that a moral conception can establish but a loose framework for deliberation which must rely very considerably on our powers of relection and judgment. hese powers are not ixed once and for all, but are developed by a shared public culture and hence shaped by that culture. …the moral conception is to have a wide social role as a part of public culture and is to enable citizens to appreciate and accept the conception of the person as free and equal. (Rawls 1999a, 347) In each of the passages I have presented so far, the crucial thing I want to highlight is Rawls’s frequent references to culture, even if its nature and reconstruction call for further development. In addition, we see in this passage the vital role of the intelligent and purposeful reconstruction of culture aiming to condition people’s use of language, concepts, and practices for the sake of developing a sense of each citizen as free and equal. Some of these details he does not spell out in so many words, but he is saying that we must develop people’s conceptions about fellow citizens with the help of public cultural forces. With that point, I strongly agree and see demand for further explication. Contrary to what one might call “non-contextualist” views, Rawls was careful to recognize the importance of community agreement based on present sets of beliefs, however conditioned by a past. It was his aim, of course, to consider how diverse societies, like those we ind in the United States of America, can exist with stability despite the many diferences in cultural beliefs we ind. his was among his central tasks as he explained them in Political Liberalism.26 His goal was never to ind truth about ethics or justice independent of what 26. In the introduction, he asks “How is it possible that deeply opposed though reasonable comprehensive doctrines may live together and all airm the political conception of a constitutional regime?” (Rawls 1999a, xx). I must point out a dissatisfaction with how Rawls thought of political philosophy and stability. In Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001a), he points to the Federalist Papers as an example of political conlict leading to political philosophy, the purpose for which, he says, is political stability. Yet as Rawls points out himself, the tension in the Federalist Papers about the issue of slavery, yielding philosophical debate, failed to generate the constitutional stability that would have avoided a Civil War. he end of the war created stability, of course, though as a citizen of the state of Mississippi, I can attest to the lingering animosities that remain over compulsion to remain in the union. What may be political stability today is accompanied by deeply troubling cultural instabilities and divisions, which, I argue elsewhere, are sources of some of the state’s deepest moral diiculties. Most look with reverence on the Federalist Papers, and with much good reason, but the nation’s founding might be worth considering as a failure of philosophy to resolve conlicts that were and remain at the heart of the country’s cultural sources of injustice. © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Converging on Culture 251 people think about these ideas, difering with scholars like Russ Shafer-Landau (2003). Instead, he ofered ways to think about focusing on the areas of cultural overlap across diference—as grounds on which to motivate cooperative action. While I would not sharply diferentiate public and private culture, the idea of overlapping consensus implied in “public culture” is important for fostering unity and sympathy for others who are diferent. he lingering problem with Rawls’s distinction between public and background culture is that it does not recognize the power that background beliefs have. When voting on referenda, people are not asked for justiications. Rawls also misses the force that such background cultural ideas exert in attacking the self-worth or self-respect of people. After all, while we often think of the K.K.K. as a “hate group,” they have long thought of themselves as a religious organization (Ashtari 2014). Of course, Rawls does not defend any which “background culture,” as some can be “unreasonable,” according to his technical sense of the term, and thus not deserving of the same legitimacy as reasonable religious beliefs. Nevertheless, a norm calling for people to draw on reasonable public cultural values does nothing to address the insidious efects on culture of people’s hateful beliefs and practices. Rorty’s solution to such problems is especially long-term, in relation to sentimental education. His understanding of sentimental education bears similarities to Rawls’s idea of what he would classify as “reasonable” and of relective equilibrium. If people had a certain education, they would appreciate the right things in due course. Rorty believes that the best we can do is to tell the stories of sufering, teaching people to feel sympathy for others. An example of Rorty’s point involves the ight for civil rights in the U.S. In segregated communities, outside reporters were despised along with the African American students who wanted to integrate schools like the University of Mississippi. hose outsider journalists were taking pictures and telling stories of shameful violence and cruelty. It certainly took a great deal of shaming to bring about the slow changes that eventually did come. In such instances, however, the mechanism at work was not to convince people about the biological humanity of others, Rorty would point out, but to shame those in power for not caring or feeling for the oppressed groups in the irst place. A version of this argument about the moral force of shame is at work in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s argument about how moral change comes about—and shame is a decidedly cultural mechanism (Appiah 2011). One concern about Rorty’s and Rawls’s approach to this point regarding the proper sentiments or judgments of what is reasonable parallels Dewey’s insights about democracy. Rather than ofering foundational justiications, at © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Eric homas Weber 252 least in some immutable sense of foundations, the three each began by accepting the democratic ideal that every individual matters and is deserving of sympathy, respect, and the chance to develop his or her faculties. Rather than think some universally persuasive argument could be ofered to convince even the psychopath to care about others, the burden of justiication must be seen as on the shoulders of the deviant, psychopathic invention of reason—the fancy imagined character whom some armchair philosophers think we need to persuade to be moral. Our laws against murder and child abuse are not controversial. Challenges to them would be radically controversial. By a move along these lines, Dewey noted the historical convergence of the many diferent modern moral theories on the idea that individuals ought to be respected and valued as having worth. In their 1908 Ethics, Dewey and Tufts wrote that [he] worth and dignity of every human being of moral capacity is fundamental in nearly every moral system of modern times. It is implicit in the Christian doctrine of the worth of the soul, in the Kantian doctrine of personality, in the Benthamic dictum, “every man to count as one.” It is embedded in our democratic theory and institutions. With the leveling and equalizing of physical and mental power brought about by modern inventions and the spread of intelligence, no State is permanently safe except on a foundation of justice. And justice cannot be fundamentally in contradiction with the essence of democracy. (Dewey and Tufts 1978, 466) hose who wish to hold contrary views to these converging moral traditions bear the burden of justiication. In the democratic context, burdens of justiication presume the worthiness of the persons to whom we justify our actions and decisions. he persons who are unreasonable on Rawls’s account, psychopathic or sentimentally deprived on Rorty’s view, or undemocratic on Dewey’s are those who fail to treat others as full individuals deserving of respect, while nevertheless demanding justiication of others’ challenges. Along similar lines, Rawls diferentiated in he Law of Peoples between reasonable societies and “outlaw societies.” Rawls writes that, outlaw societies [discussed earlier in Rawls’s book] were not societies burdened by unfavorable resources, material and technological, or lacking in human capital and know-how; on the contrary, they were among the most politically and socially advanced and economically developed societies of their day. he fault in those societies lay in their political traditions and the background institutions of law, property, and class structure, with their sustaining beliefs and culture. hese things must be changed before a reasonable law of peoples can be accepted and supported. (2001b, 106, emphasis added) © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Converging on Culture 253 In many of Rawls’s arguments dealing with the “basic structures” of society, it seems that he is talking about principles and the mechanisms by which society operates through the use of government, regulation, and property. In fact, it is clear in this passage and others that cultural beliefs, such as those involved in anti-Semitism, racism, or misogyny, can have a devastating efect on justice, and therefore conversely opposites like tolerance and respect for people who are diferent can be highly advantageous for bringing about justice. Rawls’s focus in he Law of Peoples is on international contexts for thinking about the right of one society or a set of societies to intervene in another. He was attentive also to culture at the domestic level, which can be highly problematic for justice. When contemporary scholars think about human rights, a central subject in Rawls’s he Law of Peoples, they commonly think about killings, starvations, violations of freedom of speech, incarcerations, and the like. But, all over the United States of America, there are people who sufer the consequences of prejudice, on grounds of race, gender, sexuality, and more, but in sometimes subtler forms, such as in inadequate school funding27 or in poorly conceived school disciplinary procedures (Kim et al. 2010).28 To be sure, there are those who have pointed out evidence of overt or direct and deep injustices, such as in the cultural and policy conditions which lead to the massively disproportionate incarceration of African Americans in the United States as compared with white citizens (Alexander 2012). hese points highlight the importance of seeing culture as important domestically, rather than as a matter primarily regarding international conlicts. Whether at the international or domestic levels, it is important to recognize the limits to Rorty’s and Rawls’s moral arguments. For instance, Rawls writes the following controversial passage, Of course, fundamentalist religious doctrines and autocratic and dictatorial rulers will reject the ideas of public reason and deliberative democracy. hey will say that democracy leads to a culture contrary to their religion, or denies the values that only autocratic or dictatorial rule can secure. hey assert that the religiously true, or the philosophically true, overrides the politically reasonable. We simply say that such a doctrine is politically unreasonable. Within political liberalism nothing more need be said. (Rawls 1999a, 613) here is internal coherence to Rawls’s position, but this does not mean that the non-liberal society will be able to accept his positions about what is 27. See for example Losen and Welner (2001), “Disabling Discrimination in Our Public Schools: Comprehensive Legal Challenges to Inappropriate and Inadequate Special Education Services for Minority Children.” 28. See especially chapter 6, “Criminalizing School Misconduct.” © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Eric homas Weber 254 reasonable. Of course, Rawls would respond saying that those who are unreasonable are not interested in engaging with others in reasonable deliberation, which must treat all individuals with proper respect and as deserving of justiication for what is done to them. Dewey would be disinclined toward military intervention that is not somehow in self-defense or in defense of others. He would have called the idea of “exporting democracy” through military force a fantasy. In his 1937 essay, “Democracy Is Radical,” he argued that “democratic means and the attainment of democratic ends are one and inseparable” (1987, 299. Trying to achieve democracy by force misses this lesson. At the time, he was thinking about claims like those among the Communists of his day, who thought that true democracy was to be achieved through a dictatorship. He argued over and over that such approaches were wrongheaded. Elsewhere, he advocated strongly against making war, even for outlawing it (Dewey 1923).29 His position against war was still consistent with active forms of intervention, but at the cultural and communicative levels. here is cultural force, for example, in making an international heroine out of the young girl who fought for the chance to get an education—Malala Yousafzai.30 Cultural pressures are powerful and can be applied through public and international attention to problems or to heroes ighting against them. As I have said, it is intuitive to look to Rawls’s international outlook on justice to ind his contributions about culture, but in fact he noted at least in a number of instances in his early work that culture matters profoundly at the domestic level as well. A society and a community fails its youths, he thought, when it regularly raises them to discount their own worth. his happens systematically among the poor, among minority groups, racially or ethnically speaking, as well as among groups that are teased or who come from regions called “backwards,” such as Mississippi.31 Persons with disabilities are pervasively dismissed or ridiculed in our culture. here is still widespread acceptance at least in private settings of reference to bad ideas as “retarded,” for example. Some initiatives are trying to combat such uses of language in public schools.32 It seems that focusing only on society’s “basic structures” 29. Republished in MW.15.53–65. 30. See John D. Sutter, “Malala Is the New Symbol of Hope,” CNN.com, October 13, 2014, URL: http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/10/opinion/sutter-nobel-prize-malala/. 31. See Meg Laughlin, “Polishing Mississippi,” St. Petersburg Times (Florida), December 17, 2006, 1D. See also Patrik Jonsson, “A Bid to Buf Mississippi’s Image,” Christian Science Monitor, December 12, 2006, 2. 32. See Brian Willoughby, “Speak Up at School: How to Respond to Everyday Prejudice, Bias © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Converging on Culture 255 would not be enough for justice, unless we mean also its “culture,” namely the language we use, the beliefs we hold, and the practices and institutions which grow out of these. It is odd to refer to these as “structures,” though in a sense they are. If anything, they are organic and changing structures. Rawls saw the importance especially of self-worth, which is relatable to threats leveled in oppressive conditions. In A heory of Justice, Rawls wrote that the value of education should not be assessed solely in terms of economic eiciency and social welfare. Equally if not more important is the role of education in enabling a person to enjoy the culture of his [or her] society and to take part in its afairs, and in this way to provide for each individual a secure sense of his or her own worth. (Rawls 1999b, 87) Given what he says here, it is easy to appreciate the threat to justice involved in preventing people from pursuing an education or in ensuring support for education will be deeply inadequate for disadvantaged citizens. In the United States, we have compulsory education for all citizens, provided through public schools for those who do not choose to go to private schools or to participate in homeschooling. In places like Mississippi, however, we have school districts accused of creating a “school-to-prison pipeline,”33 as well as 44 school districts that in 2007 were labelled “dropout factories,” the vast majority of which were made up of poor and African American students.34 While empiricists like Rorty and other philosophers who would not consider themselves to be “ideal theorists” certainly have cause to criticize Rawls’s “ideal theory” approach, he had useful resources to ofer for incorporating and addressing some real-life facts and forces of culture, and certainly more than he tapped. In particular, there was one passage that has served as a central inspiration for me in thinking about Rawls, justice, and culture, especially for future research. In A heory of Justice, Rawls ofered the following extended passage, writing, On several occasions I have mentioned that perhaps the most important primary good is that of self-respect. We must make sure that the conception of and Stereotypes—A Guide for Teachers,” [Report] Teaching Tolerance, a Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Montgomery, Alabama, 2012. URL: http://www.tolerance. org/sites/default/iles/general/Speak_Up_at_School.pdf. See also Robin M. Smith and Mara Sapon-Shevin, “Disability Humor, Insults, and Inclusive Practice,” Social Advocacy and Systems Change 1, Issue 2 (2008-2009): 1-18. 33. Terry Frieden, “Mississippi Town Sued over ‘School-to-Prison Pipeline’,” CNN.com, October 26, 2012, URL: http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/24/justice/mississippi-civil-rights-lawsuit/. 34. Johns Hopkins Researchers, “Dropout Factories: Take a Closer Look at Failing Schools Across the Country,” Associated Press, 2007, URL: http://hosted.ap.org/specials/ interactives/wdc/dropout/. © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Eric homas Weber 256 goodness as rationality explains why this should be so. We may deine selfrespect (or self-esteem) as having two aspects. First of all, as we noted earlier, it includes a person’s sense of his [sic.] own value, his secure conviction that his conception of his good, his plan of life, is worth carrying out. And second, self-respect implies a conidence in one’s ability, so far as it is within one’s power, to fulill one’s intentions. When we feel that our plans are of little value, we cannot pursue them with pleasure or take delight in their execution. Nor plagued by failure and self-doubt can we continue in our endeavors. It is clear, then, why self-respect is a primary good. Without it nothing may seem worth doing, or if some things have value for us, we lack the will to strive for them. All desire and activity becomes empty and vain, and we sink into apathy and cynicism. … [hus we must] avoid at almost any cost the social conditions that undermine self-respect. (1999b, 386, emphasis added) While there is in Rawls’s outlook on self-respect a vital issue at the heart of the ight against oppression and anti-democratic social conditions, he falls short of focusing on what his own outlook on this (perhaps) most important primary good implies. As I argue elsewhere, this point turns out to be pivotal in a tension inherent within Rawls’s liberalism. For, if liberalism requires a certain kind of equality of citizenship, such as in mutual respect for each other person implicit in what we mean by democracy, then the further liberal norm of needing to minimize intervention into people’s lives may protect liberties which create an unjust culture. For, people’s lives and culture can include organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and other concerted eforts to subjugate people. he most explicit and overt of these can be targeted for legal reform, to be sure, such as in the rulings against the segregation of public schools and in the present discussions about the football team named the “Redskins” (Vargas 2014), yet culture has subtle ways of creating and cultivating hierarchies of citizenship in our language, beliefs, practices, and institutions. It also has overt and explicit workarounds to surmount policy barriers to how empowered groups seek to maintain themselves, such as in the prevalence of segregated private white academies in the South,35 most of which were created in the 1960’s after the Brown v. Board decision. Such developments led Derrick Bell (2005) to argue that the Brown decision was a failure. Elizabeth Anderson proposes a return to eforts at integration, but recognizes that the general push has been abandoned (Anderson 2010). 35. Sarah Carr, “In Southern Towns, ‘Segregation Academies’ Are Still Going Strong,” he Atlantic, December 13, 2012, URL: www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/ in-southern-towns-segregation-academies-are-still-going-strong/266207/. See also Kenneth T. Andrews, “Movement-Counter Movement Dynamics and the Emergence of New Institutions: he Case of ‘White Flight’ Schools in Mississippi” (2002). © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015 Converging on Culture 257 It is for reasons such as these that John Dewey argued that democracy must not be thought of only as a matter of procedure or of abstract principles. Summing up the central point that Dewey ofered, which ought to be heeded today especially in a social and political philosophy attentive to the power of culture, he wrote that Our original democratic ideas must apply culturally as well as politically... 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