Anti-relativists fear that accepting too many values will lead to a kind of entropy of values, or as Clifford Geertz has put it: a “heat death of the mind”. To anti-relativists, an equal appreciation and accommodation of values means it will be impossible to tell right from wrong and the significant from the insignificant. To critics, relativism is the annihilation of judgment itself.

For some of them, it is even the annihilation of humanity. Philosopher Ian Jarvie writes that “by limiting critical assessment of human works, [relativism] disarms us, dehumanises us, leaves us unable to enter into communicative interaction; that is to say, unable to criticize cross-culturally, cross-sub-culturally”. Alan Bloom, in his famous bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, also writes that “to live, to have any inner substance, a man must have values, must be committed, or engagé.” This engagement is often belligerent in nature, but for Bloom, a conflict of hard-minded values is more “natural”, more “human”, and more likely to lead to progress than the spiritless and superficial tolerance professed by relativists.

Relativism understands everything, and with understanding comes acceptance. The result will be moral stagnation, or even regression. The pluralism of values that represents freedom for Rorty is the pinnacle of self-indulgence to some of his critics. Relativism is the doctrine of “anything goes.”

“Anything goes” can mean excessive tolerance and openness. To someone like Alan Bloom, this can paradoxically end up narrowing down our intellectual capabilities. An excess of moral and cultural values and an absolute understanding of all cultures undermines critical thinking. For Bloom, a “culture” is, by its very definition, aggressive. A culture is “a war against chaos, and a war against other cultures.” This tension is to be accepted and celebrated, as it sparks fruitful, if contradictory discussions. But such fire can only be maintained if we keep pursuing hard notions of truth. For Bloom, intercultural communication is a myth: “Cultures fight wars with one another. They must do so because values can only be asserted or posited by overcoming others, not by reasoning with them. Cultures have different perceptions, which determine what the world is. They cannot come to terms. There is no communication about the highest things.”

Rorty, on the other hand, would like to do away with the “highest things” altogether. Anti-relativists fear an excess of moral values might annihilate our “judgement” and even our “humanity”, but Rorty finds these notions dangerous to begin with. Critics worry that the same relativist arguments can be brought to support contradictory views, but Rorty thinks arguments should be jettisoned as well. What, then, should be put in their stead?

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One of the great challenges for Rorty is to describe how individuals can be given complete freedom to become who they want to be without infringing on other people’s well-being. And how having a seemingly endless plurality of values is good for progress.

In Rorty’s “liberal utopia,” private projects of self-creation should not be extrapolated to the public sphere. In fact, they should be kept completely separate, as translating such individual utopias into public policies is what has historically brought about the horrific projects of ethnic cleansing or forceful deprivations of property and human rights. Such projects have led to violent and disastrous attempts to implement “Hitlerlike and Maolike fantasies of ‘creating a new kind of human being.’”

Rorty’s “liberal utopia” must give each individual the right and freedom to follow their own goals of individual self-creation, while simultaneously understanding that the worst thing anyone could do is be cruel to others. Rather than imposing our epistemic views and values on others, Rorty thinks that “if we promote freedom, truth will take care of itself.”

Rorty’s ideal citizen is what he calls “the liberal ironist,” whom he opposes to the liberal metaphysician. As opposed to the latter, the former does not try to accede to some transcendental Truth. For the liberal ironist, truth cannot be separated from language. It is a property that defines our sentences about the world, but not the world itself. Our sentences and our entire language is contingent. One of the crucial premises for Rorty’s argument is that the human mind cannot think outside of language. Therefore, truth cannot exist outside of our contingent selves, even though the world does. As a consequence knowledge, or truth, and its justification cannot be representational.

If we cannot justify our convictions based on how well they represent reality, then the only thing we can test our beliefs against is each other. What gives validity to our claims about the world (be they epistemological or moral) is the social practice of conversation. The social justification of belief is not a matter of a special relation between ideas and objects, but as Rorty claimed in Philosophy and The Mirror Of Nature “of conversation, of social practice.”

Whereas someone like Bloom saw inter-cultural communication as somewhat of a toxic myth, Rorty sees it as our life support: our only moral concern should be to extend our notion of “we”.