On the Relationship between Truth and Liberal Politics
This paper examines the relationship between truth and liberal politics via the work of Bernard Williams and Richard Rorty. I argue that Williams is right to think that there are positive relations between truth, specifically a realist understanding of truth, and liberal politics that Rorty's abandonment of the realist vocabulary of truth undermines. At the heart of this concern is the worry that abandoning the realist vocabulary opens up the possibility that the standards of justification for our true beliefs can be manipulated by those with the power to do so in order to further their own political ends. The political benefit of realism is that it fixes the standards of justification and makes them immune to manipulation by the use of power. However, I suggest that there is a form of realism available that Rorty can accept which would deliver the political benefits of the realist vocabulary without requiring him to accept the thick realist metaphysics that he wants to avoid. My conclusion is that there is a positive and important relationship between truth and liberal politics, a relationship that can be sustained without any necessary commitment to realist metaphysics.
In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument
In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument. Collected essays by Bernard Williams, edited by Geoffrey Hawthorn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. 196p. $29.95. As the editor reminds us, until the early eighties Bernard Williams's very strong reputation was primarily as a moral philosopher (albeit he also contributed valuable work in epistemology). It was clear, however, that his views had important implications for politics and political theory (no more so than in the superb essay “The Idea of Equality,” the one earlier essay reprinted in this collection). And beginning in the eighties, perhaps influenced by his friendship with Isaiah Berlin and the influence of the latter upon his thinking, Williams focused his thinking increasingly both on quite practical politics and on major issues in political theory. His interest in moral questions never waned, but his reflections concerning them almost always made connections to political and/or political theoretical issues.
An Essay on the Nature and Significance of the Normative Nature of Economics
It is conventional in economics to distinguish between the normative and the positive. The normative has to do with goodness and badness, and with what ought and ought not to be done;1 and the positive has to do with objective description and/or explanation, with what is and with what is necessary given some normative end. The normative has to do with desirability; the positive has to do with truth (in the sense of either descriptive accuracy or serviceability of a means to a given end).2