Richard Rorty on man on horse I'm just throwing this one up quickly in case anyone followed the link from Salon's bestiality movie interview. They have a review of some movie about the guy who got killed in Washington, and of course it touched off a debate about bestiality. The reviewer remarks that all the movie does is present the bestiality ranch guys' stories absent any moral condemnation, and this has inflamed people. He suggests you could do a movie like that about Nazi prison guards or child molesters, so why not bestiality? In my letter I answer his question: bestiality enrages liberals because we cannot explain logically exactly what is so terrible about it, although we all agree it is terrible. This drives us nuts, but it shouldn't.

Here's a little philosophical background on my position. Richard Rorty is a liberal philosopher who argues that there can be no philosophical last word, and that our moral and philosophical systems are built out of nothing more substantive or eternally grounded then our consensus favoring them. He is a post-modern. I think he's right. He would be untroubled by our failure to identify a moral or philosophical or political truth to ground our intuition that bestiality cannot be right. He would say that we cannot identify a similar truth grounding our belief that other people have minds, or that liberal democracy is the best form of government, so why should we care that we cannot find one for this? Tomorrow, having failed to ground our rejection of bestiality in philosophical truth, we'll still reject it.

Dan Savage is equally unconcerned. When Rick Santorum uttered his famous decree that if we cannot raise a moral wall against homosexuality, then we will be powerless to raise one against bestiality, Dan Savage felt no need to invoke some kind of moral principle to separate the two. He just said, look, here's a moral wall: I'm gay and proud of it, and anyone who screws animals is a sick bastard.

Works for me.  ¶ 7:57 PM