Prospects for a Project-Based Turn in Comparative Religious Ethics

This paper describes the short shrift historical injustices like slavery receive in Rorty’s philosophy of social hope. Rorty’s narrative arc of the United States turns on the notion that philosophers migrated from the revolutionary vanguard to the academy. No longer the primary drivers of social change, twentieth (and twenty-first) century philosophers have to build coalitions in order to achieve their long-term vision of “a classless and casteless society”. However, Rorty’s brand of obstinate liberalism does not consider the potential and proven value of theologically-minded social reformers. Slave redress is not a bygone concern if we seriously range the threat to the social order posed by anarchists, postliberals, and “technofeudalists” like Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin. A sudden and rapid infusion to the American middle-class is the kind of stabilizing project that should interest heirs of Enlightenment principles. And yet that kind of backward-looking reflection does not sit well with Rorty’s conditional utopianism. Bringing our peers in philosophy departments to bear on the material turn among Black Theologians is itself a worthwhile goal for the comparative religious ethicist. This paper thus bridges theorists of social hope with the kinds of community-minded practitioners that place a similar premium on political stability.