The Ethics of Richard Rorty

Susan Dieleman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, USA. She is the coeditor of Pragmatism and Justice (2017) and of the Conference Proceedings for the 2017 meeting of the Richard Rorty Society (2019). She is also coeditor of the entry on Richard Rorty for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. David E. McClean is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Business and Professional Ethics at Rutgers University, Newark, USA. He is the editor of The Integrated Ethics Reader: Reconnecting Thought, Emotion, and Reverence in a World on the Brink (2020) and Understanding and Combating Global Corruptions: A Reader (2021). He is the author of Wall Street, Reforming the Unreformable: An Ethical Perspective (Routledge, 2015) and Richard Rorty, Liberalism, and Cosmopolitanism (Routledge, 2014). Paul Showler is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon, USA. His dissertation draws from recent work in pragmatism and philosophical genealogy to develop and defend a new approach for thinking about moral status.

Introduction: Stretched Thin: Rorty’s Ethical Vision 1. Reading Rorty in Tehran 2. Self-Creation and Community 3. Richard Rorty, Ethnocentrism, and Moral Community 4. Rorty's Hope of Achieving a Global Civilization 5. Imagination as a Social Virtue 6. Can Trees Care? 7. Richard Rorty on the "Too Sane" 8. Scientific Method and Moral Virtue 9. Talking with the Better-Looking Animals 10. Rortyan Ethics 11. When is Desire Dangerous? 12. Speaking for Oneself 13. Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Death 14. The Importance of Words 15. The Ironic and Liberal Deficit in Rorty’s Irony