The Is, The Ought, and The Moral Dialectic of Public Service

It was an irony that surely would not have been lost on Richard Rorty, whose recent passing was being memorialized at time. The crowd that packed a Stanford University auditorium strained to make out just bits and pieces of a speech by Jurgen Habermas, man who gave us very notion of ideal speech situation, but whose speech impediment, issues of electronic amplification, and bit of a German ac cent rendered his speech virtually indecipherable to an audience eager to hear it. Having completed quite a rail and bus excursion to get there, my thoughts were drawn to Robert Burns' well-known remarks to an earth-born companion An' fellow mortal, a mouse, that the best-laid schemes o' Mice an' Men Gang aft agley. The irony is especially rele vant to this forum not only because issues of ideal and real are at heart of what distinguishes work of Habermas and Rorty, but also because is of our actual lives so characteristically fails to con form to ought of ideal. Still, as Burns reminds us, that shared experience of human imperfection can do much to break down barriers that otherwise divide us; to foster a sense of connection that has been variously described in terms of empathy or, such as by Rorty, of solidarity

Aesthetics · Dialectic · Empathy · Epistemology · Ideal (ethics · Irony · Linguistics · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Slogan · Sociology · Solidarity · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Philosophy · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education · Psychology · Social Psychology

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