Rorty's challenge 30 years on: Human dignity, speciesism, and a community of rights

In his much-referenced Oxford Amnesty Lecture on human rights, Richard Rorty lays down a challenge to philosophers of human rights theory: Foundationalism, or arguments rooted in claims about human nature or human dignity, he judges to be 'outmoded and irrelevant', not because they are false (though they may be), but because they do not persuade anyone to see the shared humanity in someone they think of as other, and so, human rights foundationalism offers the stigmatised no meaningful rights at all, and no route to recognition within a community of rights bearers. What matters for inclusion or exclusion is who counts as one of us. An abundance of scholarship has highlighted the flaws in Rorty's argument, from the rather glaring errors in some of his sweeping factual claims (see, inter alia, Geras 1995) to the implicit theory of a distinctly human nature that he smuggles in whilst decrying the existence of such a thing as human nature (Woods, 2009), to the ways in which he conflates and distorts claims about 'truth' (Tasioulas 2010). Yet, for all the deficiencies of Rorty's argument, his challenge to human rights philosophy is a compelling one. We have no more agreement now than 25 years ago as to the quintessence of ‘human nature’, and a new set of concerns relating to ‘speciesism’ (which animal rights advocates compare to racism and sexism) to contend with (see, inter alia, Kymlicka and Thomson 2018). Nevertheless, in this paper, I attempt to at least partially rehabilitate human dignity as offering an important resource for the project of justifying human rights, which I take to be a valuable project. Drawing on Suzy Killmister’s (2020) conferralist approach to human rights, I confront Rorty both on the matter of foundationalism’s irrelevance – contra Rorty, I argue foundationalism, of a sort, matters a great deal – and on the matter of claims about dignity and human nature doing no useful work – contra Rorty, I hold that such ideas are in fact politically important, albeit deeply vexed not least for reasons that critics of speciesism point out.