Rorty, Objectivism, and Moral Progress

Three positions, cleanly separated

Note on the word. “Objectivism” here means moral realism. It is not Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, which is a specific ethical egoism plus a metaphysics and a politics. Cowen means the first. Acemoglu answers the first.

What Rorty actually argued

The article Cowen links is “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy” (1988). Its claim is deliberately deflationary:

• Liberal democracy does not need a philosophical foundation. It does not need a theory of human nature, of rights, or of moral truth.
• Attempts to provide one are not just unnecessary but harmful — they make the polity hostage to a philosophical argument that can be lost.
• What we have instead is a historically contingent set of practices and a widening circle of who counts as “us.” Rorty calls this solidarity, not objectivity.
• Moral progress is real but it is not progress toward anything. It is getting better at including people and reducing cruelty.

The famous formulation from Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989): a liberal is someone who thinks cruelty is the worst thing we do — and the ironist knows that this commitment has no grounding deeper than her own contingent formation.

Where Acemoglu sits, and why Cowen pokes

His actual words: “in the same way that many people would agree science makes gradual and sometimes uncertain progress toward some better understanding, I think morally, philosophically, we also have to have gradual uncertain evolution toward what we agree on.”

Read that carefully. He offers a science analogy — and the science analogy is exactly what a realist uses. Science converges because there is a world constraining it. If moral inquiry converges the same way, something is doing the constraining, and that something is an external standard.

Then Cowen asks directly what the standard is and he says: “I don’t have one.”

So there are two readings:

• Rorty-compatible reading. “Progress” just means “increasing agreement,” full stop. No target. Consistent, but then “progress” is doing no work — you cannot say a society that agreed more about something terrible had progressed.
• Quietly realist reading. He does think some moral views are better, and the evolution is toward them, and he simply declines to name the standard. Honest about his uncertainty, but not a stable position — it is realism with the metaphysics unpaid for.

The tell is his next answer: he does name something after all — meaningful individual freedom, as the “only starting point that we need to have.” That is a foundation, offered one exchange after denying he has one. It is thin, and he presents it instrumentally (freedom is required for human improvement), but it is doing foundational work.

“Objectivism, in some sense, is too strict” is his own gloss: he is not denying moral facts exist. He is denying we can ever have a clear map of them at any given time. That is an epistemic claim, not a metaphysical one — and epistemic humility about moral facts is fully compatible with believing they exist. Which is why the Rorty comparison doesn’t quite land, and why Cowen keeps pushing.

Is objectivism live? — the honest answer

Yes, and more so now than when Rorty was writing. Worth knowing:

• Derek Parfit, On What Matters (2011) — the most ambitious modern defense, arguing Kantian, contractualist and consequentialist ethics “climb the same mountain from different sides.” If he’s right, convergence is evidence for realism.
• Companions in guilt arguments — if you accept mathematical or logical facts as mind-independent, the standard arguments against moral facts apply to those too.
• The evolutionary debunking challenge (Sharon Street) — the strongest live attack: our moral intuitions were selected for fitness, not truth, so why think they track moral facts?
• Quasi-realism (Simon Blackburn) — you can earn the right to talk like a realist without the metaphysics. Arguably where Acemoglu actually is.

From the book

Rorty is not in it. Neither is Sidgwick, neither is Parfit, and there is no chapter, section or passage on moral realism, moral progress, or the standing of ethical claims. The comparison is Cowen’s, supplied live, and Acemoglu accepted the frame without having worked in it. That absence is the finding, and it is more interesting than a quotation would have been: the exchange Cowen forces is one Acemoglu has not had in print.

What the book has instead, in the place where a foundation would go, is an epistemic premise:

“Premise 1. Fallibility. Every belief, proposition, or piece of knowledge we hold could be wrong, even spectacularly wrong. This humility should be the starting point for any discussion of knowledge, given the tendency of human communities to hold beliefs and follow practices that later turn out to be only partially true, incorrect, or even downright misguided.”

The lineage he claims for it is Mill on the fallibility of ages, and Peirce: “we cannot in any way reach perfect certitude or exactitude. We can never be absolutely sure of anything.” Peirce is the founder of the tradition Rorty belongs to — so Cowen’s instinct that there is a pragmatist here was right, and he named the wrong pragmatist. Peirce is also, unlike Rorty, a convergence theorist: the whole point of Peircean fallibilism is that inquiry gets somewhere in the long run, which is exactly the science analogy Acemoglu reaches for and exactly the thing Rorty denied.

And the book has a third premise that is the real answer to Cowen’s question, though it is about beliefs rather than about values:

“Premise 3. Gentle Epistemic Improvement. Incorrect beliefs can spread and may sometimes become dominant. Nevertheless, there is a sometimes weak tendency for incorrect beliefs to fade over time, often under the influence of what David Hume called a gentle force. This is especially the case when there is room for debate and open exchange of information, and when the cage of norms is not too suffocating… Incorrect beliefs either have logical flaws or contradict observed empirical patterns, and these contradictions open the door for sceptics to challenge the system.”

That is a substantive claim about why the drift is toward better rather than merely elsewhere: wrong beliefs are eventually embarrassed by logic or by the world. It is stated as a premise, not defended — he grants immediately that it is “a slow, laborious, and hazardous process” — and it is doing exactly the work Cowen is asking him to account for. It also does not obviously extend to values, which is where the argument on this page actually lives, and the book never asks whether it does.

The instrumental move, confirmed. Draft 1 read Acemoglu as offering individual freedom as a thin, instrumentally-justified foundation rather than as a moral fact. The book is unambiguous on this, and states it most clearly about property rights:

“This supports property rights not because of a notion of natural rights or some principle that one’s holdings of goods and assets are sacred. Rather, they are instrumental, a vehicle for effective experimentation and knowledge building.”

Whether that dissolves Cowen’s question or relocates it is the live issue. Nothing in the book explains why “effective experimentation and knowledge building” is the thing worth having, and Premise 4 simply asserts it: “Knowledge is not an end in itself. It is an instrument for achieving society’s diverse objectives.” Whose objectives, chosen how, is where the regress lands — one step further back than Cowen pushed him, and unaddressed on either side.