Jane Addams and Richard Rorty: The Philosophy and Practice of Pragmatist Social Ethics

This chapter places the ideas of Jane Addams and Richard Rorty into constructive dialogue revealing common appeals to sentiment, sympathetic knowledge, and meliorism in their ethics. When read together a distinctive contribution to pragmatist social ethics emerges. Specifically, they merge the epistemic and ethical, holding that knowledge of others is predicated on a sympathetic affective orientation, and focus their melioristic practices toward the marginalized. They align in advocating a suite of melioristic practices that remains attentive to the limits and barriers all projects of social ethics face: forging democratic relations with those who have been marginalized or excluded from our community, mitigating egotism and its attendant self-certitude, and advancing mechanisms for deprivileging those at the top of undemocratic relational hierarchies. Taken together, Addams and Rorty help us better orient the practice of social justice to overcome the ethical and epistemic obstacles faced in this quest. For them, social justice is unattainable without both extending ethical ties via sympathy and fostering epistemic resources of shared knowledge and understanding. Putting Addams and Rorty into constructive dialogue also offers crucial remedies for problems of echo chambers and the fragmentation of communities that currently beset democratic communities in our “post-truth” condition.