Richard Rorty writes: If we Westerners could get rid of the notion of universal moral obligation created by
membership in the species, and substitute the idea of building a community of trust between ourselves and others, we might be in a better position to persuade non-Westerners of the advantages of joining such a community. We might be better able to construct the kind of global moral community which Rawls describes in ‘The Law
of Peoples’.
In making this suggestion, I am urging, as I have in other writings, that we should peel apart Enlightenment liberalism from Enlightenment
rationalism. I think that discarding the residual rationalism which we inherited from the Enlightenment is advisable for many reasons, some of which are theoretical and of interest only to philosophy professors, for example the apparent incompatibility of the correspondence theory of truth with the naturalistic, Darwinian account of the origin of the human mind.22 But others are more practical. One more practical reason is that getting rid of rationalistic rhetoric would permit the West to approach the non-West in the role of someone with an instructive story to tell, rather
than in the role of someone purporting to make better use of a universal human capacity.
