Disagreeing About Cruelty: A Problem for Rorty’s Ironist

Abstract I will argue that disagreements about what counts as cruelty, the resolution of which is required for a determinate picture of how to proceed in a project towards moral or political progress, pose a problem for Rorty’s liberal ironism. Rortian irony lacks the resources to provide us with a satisfactory way of resolving such disagreements in a way that itself avoids the risks of cruelty, and therefore Rortian irony is incompatible with genuine liberal hope. The most pressing problem with Rorty’s liberal ironist is not so much that she lacks the resources to justify her position against the anti-liberal, but rather that her irony undermines the very hope she claims to pursue by emptying that hope of determinate content.