Rorty and Addams
Despite Rorty’s oeuvre containing limited commentary on Jane Addams, this chapter illuminates their distinctive shared contribution to pragmatist ethics: They merge epistemic and ethical priorities to unite sympathetic understanding with the cultivation of social ethical responsibility and orient their ethical projects explicitly toward responsiveness to marginalized or excluded others. Its chief claims are: first, that Rorty can be read as extending Addams’s project of creating a democratic moral community; and second, that a constructive dialogue between Rorty and Addams reveals key points of complementarity that, when taken together, generate a more robust conception of democratic social ethics than Addams’s alone. Reading Rorty alongside Addams elucidates the ethical commitments implicit in his more familiar epistemological critiques, including how Rorty’s understanding of the social practice of justification can be understood as a philosophical defense of Addams’s notion of a “social test.”