possibilities of human solidarity and on human rights.^39 Although he explicitly
rejects pinning any definitive account to any kind of concept of intrinsic human
nature, Rorty sees the changing dance across time and space between our cruel
infliction of suffering and our aversion to pain as a key site for our understandings
of what might constitute social progress.^40
Rorty does not explicitly engage with humanitarianism as such, but his
account of liberalism as the view that cruelty is the worst thing we do, and his
description of a “human rights culture”, arguably speak to our discussion of
humanitarianism rather more clearly than to conventional debates on liberalism or
human rights as such.^41 Rorty’s focus on the concept of a solidarity fuelled by a
hatred of cruelty fits the character of the social interactions at stake here, and is
particularly valuable for reviving the often neglected idea of “solidarity”. Indeed we
might want to modify the Shklar/Rorty formulation to identify humanitarians as
those who put cruelty first. Christopher Coker explicitly characterises Rorty’s work
as a “humanitarian project” based “on a rejection of metaphysics”.^42
A key issue, however, is this rejection of metaphysics, and the presumption
of Rorty’s work to be ungroundable. Norman Geras, another important writer on
our reactions to suffering, has cast doubt on Rorty’s success in avoiding an implicit
account of human nature.^43 Perhaps Geras is right that we can never fully become
liberal ironists. But it is not clear how important this qualification really is. If we see
39
Most importantly in Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989). Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and
Sentimentality", in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers Volume 3 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998). 40
Though they are engaged in very different projects, there is an interesting parallel here
with Andrew Linklater’s recent work on a transhistorical category of “harm”. Andrew
Linklater, "The Harm Principle and Global Ethics", 41 Global Society 20, no. 3 (2006).
Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown correctly identify that, in writing about
human rights, Rorty’s “observations apply more convincingly to humanitarianism”. Richard
Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown, "Introduction", in Humanitarianism and Suffering: The
Mobilization of Empathy , ed. Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 21. 42
43 Christopher Coker, Humane Warfare (London: Routledge, 2001), 133.
This critique is presented in Norman Geras, Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind:
The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty (London: Verso, 1995). Geras’ key statement
on the reaction to suffering is Norman Geras, The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political
Philosophy after the Holocaust (London: Verso, 1998).