Author's Keywords: Rorty, Mill, Dewey, James, Fish, Berlin, Cavell, character, pragmatism, liberalism, perfectionism	Convention All Academic Convention makes running your annual conference simple and cost effective. It is your online solution for abstract management, peer review, and scheduling for your annual meeting or convention. Submission - Custom fields, multiple submission types, tracks, audio visual, multiple upload formats, automatic conversion to pdf. Review - Peer Review, Bulk reviewer assignment, bulk emails, ranking, z-score statistics, and multiple worksheets! Reports - Many standard and custom reports generated while you wait. Print programs with participant indexes, event grids, and more! Scheduling - Flexible and convenient grid scheduling within rooms and buildings. Conflict checking and advanced filtering. Communication - Bulk email tools to help your administrators send reminders and responses. Use form letters, a message center, and much more! Management - Search tools, duplicate people management, editing tools, submission transfers, many tools to manage a variety of conference management headaches! Click here for more information.
Association: Name: American Political Science Association URL: http://www.apsanet.org
Citation: URL: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p59167_index.html Direct Link: HTML Code:

Voparil, Christopher. "On Justice and Character: Liberalism and Self-Realization in Rorty and Mill" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Hilton Chicago and the Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, IL, Sep 02, 2004 <Not Available>. 2009-05-26 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p59167_index.html>

Voparil, C. , 2004-09-02 "On Justice and Character: Liberalism and Self-Realization in Rorty and Mill" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Hilton Chicago and the Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, IL Online <.PDF>. 2009-05-26 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p59167_index.html

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript Review Method: Peer Reviewed Abstract: One of democracy's greatest justifications, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, lies in its encouragement of individuality. Yet, as Whitman well knew, the functioning of democratic politics may neither enlist nor require the individual's highest energies, but threaten to crush individuality through the force of the "en masse" instead. This underscores a fundamental tension between the pursuit of justice and the development of individual character inherent in the idea of democratic self-realization: if democratic politics does not require fully developed selves, does a fully realized existence require participation in public life? In this paper I consider the way out of this democratic problematic offered by the pragmatist liberalism of Richard Rorty. Maximal self-development can be combined with an acute concern for social justice, he argues, if individuals divide themselves into "private self-creators" and "public liberals," being in alternate moments "Nietzsche and J.S. Mill." Taking cues from Mill, Rorty claims that the highest goal of liberal societies should be to "optimize the balance between leaving people's private lives alone and preventing suffering." Instituting a public-private divide along these lines will not only enrich liberal individuality, he argues, creating the space necessary for Nietzschean projects of becoming what one is, but at the same time galvanize the public's resolve to diminish suffering by insulating the quest for social justice from the self-regarding pursuit of developing one‚s character. Yet rather than suggesting we "leave people's private lives alone," Mill viewed inner self-reform as crucial to the reform of society and institutions. While Mill offers a public defense of the private, where self-cultivation is understood as a means of strengthening the democratic public, Rorty defends his sharply delineated realms as a way of isolating individual creative energies from public life and the quest for justice. Freely-chosen individual ends are predicated upon seeing the world in one's own way; if these ends are absent from public life, for Mill there is no justice to be pursued. What Mill accomplishes is to bridge public and private by connecting ethics, or the development of one's character, with the public pursuit of justice. Or, to put it another way, he allies what might be called the "ethics of the self" with the "politics of the other." Drawing on a line of argument intimated by Mill and given full expression in the thought of John Dewey, I argue that the quest for social justice requires more than self-interest or an altruistic concern for others if it is to remain more than a hollow invocation of ideals. I defend a conception of perfectionist liberalism, understood as a demand to reform our society and institutions spurred by individual self-realization, that connects rather than divorces the ethics of the self from the politics of the other.

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