I appreciate the depth and range of your reflections. Where I find common ground is in the idea that ethics has to be grounded in something more than language or convention - in something apodictic, as you say. For me, suffering provides that ground. The experience of pain, joy, fear, compassion, etc., is not reducible to definitions or analyses - it is lived and felt.

That’s why I don’t think we need to invoke divinity to account for ethics. The “otherness” you describe, which religion often clothes in the figure of God, can also be understood simply as the givenness of being - the fact that suffering is bad in itself and joy is good in itself. This “absolute reality” is accessible to all of us, without appeal to metaphysical theology.

So I would put it this way: suffering and well-being are not just contingencies of language, but the shared, universal ground of our moral experience. Whether one interprets that as divine or not, I think we agree it is where ethics takes its root.

How so? — frank

Theodicy issues from a deficit in the world. Put God and all that tradition aside. Religion is essentially redemptive and consummatory, reflecting the "open endedness" of metaethics. Put plainly, screaming children in burning cars in the delimitations of its acceptedness for what it is in a society, in a set of identifying interpretations, has a metaphysical residuum in its existence, and this residuum is the ethical: that suffering "should not" exist. This notion is not born out of a principle, but out of the existence of the suffering as such.

So the answer to your question: a determination of any kind at all leads inquiry to being in the world. The reason we don't take God seriously in its traditional anthropomorphic depiction is this simply doesn' turn up in observation. But what DOES turn up is ethics, and ethics is value-in-being played out in the chaos of entangled living. It is discovered in screaming children in burning cars and the like. Metaethics is an indeterminacy of our ethics that trails off, if you will, in the openness of the question: what is the non-contingent good and the bad of our throwness into a world?

So I would put it this way: suffering and well-being are not just contingencies of language, but the shared, universal ground of our moral experience. Whether one interprets that as divine or not, I think we agree it is where ethics takes its root. — Truth Seeker

I agree with this, almost; there always is a "but": Divinity is an odd word. Has anyone every experienced divinity, divine grace? Or is this an entirely empty concept? One can be knocked out by my strudels and pies, but we don't call this a discovery of divinity in the religious sense of this term. Even if we admit that the 'good' of the strudel has its actuality outside of language's finitude and issue from "the fabric of the world," so to speak, the manifest quality of something being delicious hardly qualifies as having a divine nature.

I qualify food, fun and sex as finite experiences, meaning they really don't have a "calling" beyond what they are. An appetitive desideratum will come, go, but the "divine" desideratum seeks a consummation, as in the intimacy of "I will love you forever!" How does anyone make any sense out of "divine desideratum"?

Christians, some, talk about being reborn, and I usually ignore them jsut because it is embedded in a lot of nonsense talk, so I dismiss them out of hand. But I do not deny that they experience this something that has depth and importance, just that when they talk about it, they wander into Christian dogma. Let's say saints actually DID experience "God's grace," "divinity," but no care is taken in interpreting this (and how could analytic care be taken in ancient thinking?). They speak sincerely, sacrifice, throw themselves into suffering all for ...a descriptive error??

One can only look within the depths of one's subjectivity to see if there is anything to this. I think, as the epistemologists put it, that "there is a presumption in favor" of affirmation, simple because I find a certain corresponding "unknown X" within when I look into myself. (Again, my thinking is borrowed --then qualifiedly adopted-- from others. Here, it is Emanuel Levinas, Michel Henry, Meister Eckhart). I also think this buried "sentiment" is in all of us, arguably; it IS what we are. To show this objectively is not possible. It is in "insight" or intuition" where it is found. Words do not argue so much as "lead" to.

Put God and all that tradition aside — Constance

Ok. I say you forgive by the grace of God because I don't know any other way to explain it. You can't do it by your own power. I don't believe in God.

I like the way you frame suffering and well-being as the shared ground of our moral experience - I agree that this is where ethics takes root. Where I hesitate is when the language of “divinity” comes in. To me, that seems like a metaphor that some people use to capture the depth and seriousness of these experiences, but not something that adds explanatory power.

People may well have experiences of awe, transcendence, or radical transformation that they interpret in religious language, but it seems more parsimonious to call these profound human experiences rather than “divine” ones. The risk, as you noted, is that once divinity is invoked, interpretation tends to drift into dogma.

That said, I don’t think the sincerity or transformative depth of those experiences should be dismissed. What matters is how they connect us back to the ethical fact you began with: the reality of suffering and the reality of well-being. For me, that is grounding enough without having to posit an “unknown X” within us - though I understand why others feel drawn to that language. Your "unknown X" reminds me of what Richard Dawkins called the "God of the gaps".

Or take a blow gun and shoot less than three darts in the general direction of what you think? — frank

If that helps to make things clear, let's go for it.

The Count is known for his magniloquence. He expresses himself, when he wishes to express himself, wherever he wishes to express himself, exactly as he expresses himself. His wisdom shall not be guided, nay, limited, by a mere questioner. His time is very valuable. You should be lucky to even have a chance to glean wisdom from him. — Outlander

I wouldn't think it fair to call him verbose. My request for a few pointers was based on the fact that we had already been engaged in a lengthy, wordy discussion so I was trying to save him some time.

Only on a particularly deflationary view of "science." At any rate, those who embrace such a view, and who stick to a "hard" empiricism and naturalism also often tend towards denying causality. But in such contexts, consciousness itself, reference, intentionality, etc. are every bit as "queer" as "evaluative judgement."

Might I suggest though that this is an unhelpful starting point for framing a metaphysics of goodness, given that camp largely tends to deny goodness, or else to put forth some sort of reductive, mechanistic view of it as reducible to "brain states?" I mean, your earlier point about kerosene (or presumably also one's own beloved, or anything else) being reducible to empirical data seems to already have assumed an answer about ethics. Yet it can hardly be one that it is "good" to affirm. — Count Timothy von Icarus

A scientist denying the primacy of causality in discussing science? I have heard of this. But the "intuition" of causality, is apodictic, and you will not find scientists denying this (mostly because they don't think about this kind of thing). But then again, causality's apodicticity is just as fragile as anything else that is taken up in language, for while the intuition that tells me that this cup cannot not throw itself off the table, but must be caused by something else to move at all, I am still faced with the authority of the language in which this idea is given. What we cll apodictic is not what it IS simply because language has conferred its being upon it; it is not piece of fiction like 'General Motors' (though this is still a question, for though people literally once declared GM to exist, and there it began its existence, the fiction lies in what was "intended" but the actuality of declaring is no fiction at all). I don't know what it IS apart from its appearance, and the appearance as such IS apodictic.

Mechanistic views and brain states: this line of thinking is preanalytical. Take a brain state and ask the basic question: what is a brain, and how is it that acknowledging a brain to be what it is is is somehow not a brain state itself? Now you have gotten to a basic question. Prior to this, just question begging. Take this inquiry down to the wire, and you will find that a brain is discoverable ONLY in a brain state, and its therefore a brain state itself, and this puts the question as to what is PRIOR to brain states such that affirmation is lost in the analytic primordiality of someting being a brain state can be reestablished. Obviously, we drop brains and their states altogether, for this belongs to a second order, a derivative order, of knowledge claims found in empirical science and its theories. Presupposed by this is the foundation of phenomenality. What is prior to brain talk is the essential appearing out of which brain talk has it genesis.

Phenomenality is foundational for ontology and epistemology (which are really the same thing). At this FIRST order of inquiry, we encounter value, not in the contexts of an entangled and derivative world, but in itself. This is the metaethical/ metaaesthetic ground for ethics. It stands outside the spoken idea, yet is irrevocably bound to it for its ontology, that is, for its essence, the saying "what it is". The good is no more or less that the actuality that is the presuppositional (logical) ground for an ethical situation's ethicality: If this value dimension of our existence were absent, ethics would simply vanish.

Ok. I say you forgive by the grace of God because I don't know any other way to explain it. You can't do it by your own power. I don't believe in God. — frank

Yeah, but you first have say what God is before you say you don't believe in it. It is a slippery term.

Yeah, but you first have say what God is before you say you don't believe in it. It is a slippery term. — Constance

I could talk about what it means all day. Probably be off topic though, wouldn't it?

What God and ethics? God IS ethics.

God IS ethics. — Constance

Is it?

No, I don't see this either. — Philosophim

Well, you could just move forward and say why you don't see this. But then, I gather from your comments you don't want to talk about it if I don't read the entirety of the pages of this other thread. I never do that. I just say what I think and be done with it.

Is it? — frank

Why, yes. Once you banish the atheist's straw person thinking about god being an old man in a cloud and the like from conversation, and ask about what it is in the world that religion addresses, then you move into a very different thematic content. Who cares, I say, about the way the ancient mind came up with its myths and legends; these are scattered across the world, and are mostly just fiction (though, fictions do exist, and it is hard to find something that is NOT a fiction. Rorty argued that science was essentially a social concept, and social structures of ancient belief were not objectively less true than what science had to say, and he thought this because he held that thre is nothing outside of the believing and its practices and its culture against which an idea can be judged. If it is pragmatically efficacious, then it has status as "truth"; and Rorty may be right, mostly). But what ARE these about essentially? This is the question. And god does endure this scrutiny, if in a qualified and reduced way.

Once you banish the atheist's straw person thinking about god being an old man in a cloud and the like from conversation — Constance

:roll: Typical apologist's strawman.

What God and ethics? God IS ethics. — Constance

If God is ethics, as you claim, why are at least 99.9% of all the species that have existed on Earth already extinct? Why do non-vegans cause pain and death to 80 billion sentient land organisms and 3 trillion aquatic organisms per year? Why do humans cause harm and death to other humans? Why do living things have to consume other living things to live? Why didn't the God, who is allegedly ethics, prevent all harm, injustice, and death and make all living things forever happy? I posit that God, if it is real, is the source of all evil.

No, I don't see this either.
— Philosophim

Well, you could just move forward and say why you don't see this. — Constance

My point is I don't understand how you conclude this if you read the whole thing. Again, your comment doesn't point to what I argued in the paper, so I'm not sure how you concluded what you did.

I don't read the entirety of the pages of this other thread. I never do that. I just say what I think and be done with it. — Constance

Sure, I'm not asking you to read all the other replies in that thread, just the full argument. You can understand why making a conclusion about the argument based on the intro alone would be shallow right?

Typical apologist's strawman. — 180 Proof

Suggesting you really do think religion is reducible to something like this, whic is, I suppose, just a bunch of imaginative story telling, which it is, of course, in the telling of a religious story; but the same thing might be said of the theory of the four humours, yellow and black biles, blood and phlegm, which was just a fiction, believed for centuries. But because a story is fiction, this doesn't mean psychology as we know it today is a fiction. The question about religion (and its god, gods, whatever) has its ground just as any science does, and this can only be discovered by asking basic questions, putting aside traditional thinking.

I guess what I'm curious about is what motivates you to look for a moral foundation. Once you have the foundation, then what? What will be different?

Sure, let me lay out the three main objections here:

1. You say the theory doesn't allow that "anything goes," and this is because: "constraints" determine what we find useful and how human practices and beliefs develop. Is that a fair characterization?

Now either the italicized statement is true outside current human belief and practice (i.e., it is always true of all practices, regardless of what they currently affirm) or else it is only conditionally true, i.e., it is true just in case current belief and practice affirms this statement.

Here are the two horns of the dilemma. If the statement is always true of all beliefs and practices, then it is true regardless of (or outside the context of) current beliefs and practices. But this contradicts the claim that truth is just what is affirmed by current beliefs and practices.

If we grab the other horn and say that the statement is itself only conditionally true, then it is true just so long as current belief and practice affirms it. This means it can "become" false if belief and practice change such that it is no longer affirmed. Thus, the assertion we are relying on to prevent "anything" goes, turns out to be overturned just in case we all stop believing it, in which case it seems that "anything goes."

2. It is self-refuting. It is not a theory of truth that is currently widely accepted. Hence, if truth just is what is widely accepted vis-á-vis common practices, then the theory is false by its own definition. If we affirm the theory as true, we are forced to affirm that it is false, and so we contradict ourselves. To use Rorty's framing, if truth is "what our peers let us get away with," then Rorty's theory is false because it was harshly criticized from a number of different directions. His peers didn't let him get away with saying this, therefore his theory is false.

It leads to: "if A, then not-A" while asserting A essentially (the same problem with 1).

3. It seems to equivocate on common understandings of truth. It uses the word "truth" but then seems to describe something quite different. That is, it seems to deny that truth as traditionally understood, or anything like it, exists. Arguably then, this is epistemic nihilism that is papered over by the equivocation.

I will allow though that the force of 3 is probably significantly lessened if the second horn of 1 can somehow be overcome, or if we grab the first horn of the dilemma in 1. But if we grab the first horn, we seem to be either contradicting ourselves or defaulting on the claim that truth is always posterior to current practices and beliefs.

Like I said, I am sympathetic to the criticism of the analytic "view-from nowhere," "objectivity approaches truth at the limit" schema that this sort of view emerged to correct. Yet this solution seems to me to have even greater difficulties. More broadly, I think the impetus for such a view stems from failing to reject some of the bad epistemic axioms of empiricism, and from a particular metaphysics of language and the reality/appearance distinction that I would reject, but that's a whole different can of worms.

I suppose a final option is to refuse to grab the dilemma by the horns and to simply be gored by it, allowing that the theory is both true and false, and that it itself implies contradictions, and so this is no worry. But I think that's exactly the sort of thing that is generally meant by "anything goes relativism."

If God is ethics, as you claim, why are at least 99.9% of all the species that have existed on Earth already extinct? Why do non-vegans cause pain and death to 80 billion sentient land organisms and 3 trillion aquatic organisms per year? Why do humans cause harm and death to other humans? Why do living things have to consume other living things to live? Why didn't the God, who is allegedly ethics, prevent all harm, injustice, and death and make all living things forever happy? I posit that God, if it is real, is the source of all evil. — Truth Seeker

I think these are very good questions, but have nothing to do with God being ethics. What I mean by this is that when one withdraws from incidentals of ethics' problems and issues, and pulls back and asks what God IS, and one wants to get the bottom of it, that is, think philosophically, and put aside dogma of ay shape and kind, as well as religious narratives, fixed theological themes and errors grandfathered into the conversation, one then faces the world as it is. This reduction to the world is not empirical, of course, because religion is not about empirical inquiry, and so empirical science has been suspended as well. Where one finds the in-the-world ground for religion is ethics, and value and aesthetics. God is born out of ethics, which is the struggle to resolve the way the value dimension of our existence runs through our lives. This struggle reaches into metaphysics in the discovery of the question: Is ethical nihilism, the affirmation that this struggle is exhaustively delimited in our finitude, a justifiable claim? God, once the concept is cleansed of nonsense, is a response in the negative. God-as-ethics means really God-as-metaethics. This begins the argument.

If it is pragmatically efficacious, then it has status as "truth"; and Rorty may be right, mostly). But what ARE these about essentially? This is the question. And god does endure this scrutiny, if in a qualified and reduced way. — Constance

As noted above, I think Rorty's view is self-refuting (in multiple ways). It also would seem to make "usefulness" into a sort of volanturist metaphysical primitive (something like Calvinism with man in God's place). Plus, either there is a truth about what is actually useful or there isn't. If there isn't, and what is "useful" is just whatever is currently believed to be useful, I don't see how we avoid slipping into Protagorean relativism. The move to fix this by democratizing truth does not seem to me to fix the essential issue, and it itself seems arbitrary and ad hoc. Why not, "true is just whatever we currently believe to be useful, the community be damned?" Indeed, if a community came to affirm this, wouldn't it be true even under the democratic version of the theory?

But Plato's response to this same theory in the Theaetetus seems to still cut just as well as it did millennia ago. If we can never be wrong (either as a civilization, or as individuals) the philosophers and teachers (and philosophy itself) are the most useless sorts of things. Yet, to allow that we can be wrong about things—wrong about what is truly "useful"—seems to presuppose a truth of the matter that is prior, not posterior, to our beliefs about usefulness. And at any rate, the ubiquitous experience of regret seems to show that we can certainly be wrong about what is useful.

I know something is bad/wrong when I am terrified by the possibility that bad things will happen. I am having one of those moments now and would love to be wrong about really things happening.

Trump is tearing families apart, just as the Civil War tore families apart.

I appreciate the clarification, but it seems to me your reply doesn’t really answer the questions I raised. If “God” is simply another name for “the inescapability of ethics” or “the ground of value,” then my challenge about extinction, predation, and mass suffering still stands.

Because if God = metaethics, then this God is not protecting anyone, not reducing harm, not preventing injustice, and not promoting well-being. It seems indistinguishable from saying “ethics exists,” which is true, but doesn’t explain why harm, cruelty, and death dominate so much of life on Earth.

So I’m left wondering: does calling the ethical dimension “God” actually add anything beyond rebranding metaethics? And if so, what work is the word “God” doing that “ethics” or “value” cannot? Also, no dictionary defines the word "God" the way you have defined it. I don't think your definition is correct.

Trump is tearing families apart, just as the Civil War tore families apart. — Athena

Though there may be blood and guts and grand purposes all around you, you can just sit and stare at the sky if you want to.

Though there may be blood and guts and grand purposes all around you, you can just sit and stare at the sky if you want to. — frank

:grin: Thanks, I really needed that. It is perfect for this moment in my life.

Thanks, I really needed that. It is perfect for this moment in my life. — Athena

I learned that from a guy who was stationed in the Pacific during WW2. Glad to honor Wild Bill. :smile:

The question about religion (and its god, gods, whatever) has its ground... — Constance

Yes, fear of death.

just as any science does

Re: curiosity about unexplained changes.

You say the theory doesn't allow that "anything goes," and this is because: "constraints" determine what we find useful and how human practices and beliefs develop. Is that a fair characterization?

Now either the italicized statement is true outside current human belief and practice (i.e., it is always true of all practices, regardless of what they currently affirm) or else it is only conditionally true, i.e., it is true just in case current belief and practice affirms this statement.

Here are the two horns of the dilemma. If the statement is always true of all beliefs and practices, then it is true regardless of (or outside the context of) current beliefs and practices. But this contradicts the claim that truth is just what is affirmed by current beliefs and practices.

If we grab the other horn and say that the statement is itself only conditionally true, then it is true just so long as current belief and practice affirms it. This means it can "become" false if belief and practice change such that it is no longer affirmed. Thus, the assertion we are relying on to prevent "anything" goes, turns out to be overturned just in case we all stop believing it, in which case it seems that "anything goes." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think this passage assumes a false choice: that any statement about constraints must be either universally fixed or entirely contingent on current beliefs. I think that misunderstands how the world works. Constraints aren’t absolute facts waiting out there; they emerge through the practices and conceptual frameworks we use to engage with reality. Once we see truth and constraints as part of this ongoing process of structuring the world, the whole dilemma about “anything goes” disappears.

It is self-refuting. It is not a theory of truth that is currently widely accepted. Hence, if truth just is what is widely accepted vis-á-vis common practices, then the theory is false by its own definition. If we affirm the theory as true, we are forced to affirm that it is false, and so we contradict ourselves. To use Rorty's framing, if truth is "what our peers let us get away with," then Rorty's theory is false because it was harshly criticized from a number of different directions. His peers didn't let him get away with saying this, therefore his theory is false.

It leads to: "if A, then not-A" while asserting A essentially (the same problem with 1). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Doesn't this objection misunderstands what Rorty means by truth? He is not saying that popularity or peer approval automatically makes something true; rather, truth emerges through ongoing practices, dialogue, and testing. Criticism of his ideas does not make them false, this is part of the very process through which we evaluate and refine our beliefs. The Conversation. In this sense, the theory is not self-refuting; it simply describes how truth is negotiated and maintained within human communities. The fact that Rorty often said snide things doesn't mean these should stand for his entire philosophy.

t seems to equivocate on common understandings of truth. It uses the word "truth" but then seems to describe something quite different. That is, it seems to deny that truth as traditionally understood, or anything like it, exists. Arguably then, this is epistemic nihilism that is papered over by the equivocation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don’t think it’s really equivocating. I don’t think Rorty is trying to trick anyone with the word “truth”; he’s just using it in a different way. He rejects the traditional idea of truth as matching some reality out there (his famous Mirror of Nature idea), but that doesn’t make him a nihilist. For him, truth is about what works, what helps us make sense of things, and what guides our practices, so it’s still meaningful, just in a different way. I find this reasonably compelling.

Anyway, perhaps we should leave it there, since we’re both committed to different perspectives that seem fixed for now. I may change my view on this in due course. I’m not a philosopher and don’t really think about these matters outside of this site.

1. You say the theory doesn't allow that "anything goes," and this is because: "constraints" determine what we find useful and how human practices and beliefs develop. Is that a fair characterization?

Now either the italicized statement is true outside current human belief and practice (i.e., it is always true of all practices, regardless of what they currently affirm) or else it is only conditionally true, i.e., it is true just in case current belief and practice affirms this statement.

Here are the two horns of the dilemma. If the statement is always true of all beliefs and practices, then it is true regardless of (or outside the context of) current beliefs and practices. But this contradicts the claim that truth is just what is affirmed by current beliefs and practices.

If we grab the other horn and say that the statement is itself only conditionally true, then it is true just so long as current belief and practice affirms it. This means it can "become" false if belief and practice change such that it is no longer affirmed. Thus, the assertion we are relying on to prevent "anything" goes, turns out to be overturned just in case we all stop believing it, in which case it seems that "anything goes." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not quite. The reason pragmatists like Rorty, a post modern language philosopher, hold truth to be pragmatically variable is because language is contingent. Language evolved out of problem solving, and problem solving has a temporal structure, and truth is thus a forward looking event conceived out of the hypothetical deductive method. He is aligned with Heidegger to a degree: what is a chair? It IS the end result what would happen if one approaches the chair, uses the chair in an an "environment of a certain instrumentality where, perhaps there are desks, lecterns, whiteboards, etc. Uses vary, change: this paper weight is now a weapon, now an aesthetic object or a family heirloom. In postmodern thought, there is nothing beyond the context, no "absolute conext" to which all things must conform. Sure, things are constrained and it is not "anything goes" but to talk about some "final vocabulary" to which all things are answerable and which serves as a foundation for truth is simply bad metaphysics. All we know is contextually bound, but again, this doesn't mean things are not grounded in a social matrix of meanings. We have established rules in every facet of our our existence. But yes, it does mean that if I take this can opener and hold the door open with it, it isn't a can opener in the "doing" this. (See Stanley Fish's Is There a Text in this Class?)

2. It is self-refuting. It is not a theory of truth that is currently widely accepted. Hence, if truth just is what is widely accepted vis-á-vis common practices, then the theory is false by its own definition. If we affirm the theory as true, we are forced to affirm that it is false, and so we contradict ourselves. To use Rorty's framing, if truth is "what our peers let us get away with," then Rorty's theory is false because it was harshly criticized from a number of different directions. His peers didn't let him get away with saying this, therefore his theory is false.

It leads to: "if A, then not-A" while asserting A essentially (the same problem with 1). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Widely accepted...by whom?
Such self refutations are in everything! This is because language is variable, flexible, useful in different situations, not something you find in a truth table in a logic class. You treat truth as if it were an absolute, but this is to understand it purely a logical concept, and not the way truth "works" at all. Of course, our "peers" differ, according to the context. In literature there is use of language where peers actually seek out novel usage with metaphor, irony, imagery, exaggeration, and other literary devices. But science is less malleable in its language use though. consider this science lab: Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions reveals how paradigms have historically yielded suddenly, if stubbornly, to new thinking in the evolvement of its ideas.

Nothing sustains for ever, that is, unless by divine decree, and Rorty and philosophers generally will have no truck with this.

3. It seems to equivocate on common understandings of truth. It uses the word "truth" but then seems to describe something quite different. That is, it seems to deny that truth as traditionally understood, or anything like it, exists. Arguably then, this is epistemic nihilism that is papered over by the equivocation.

I will allow though that the force of 3 is probably significantly lessened if the second horn of 1 can somehow be overcome, or if we grab the first horn of the dilemma in 1. But if we grab the first horn, we seem to be either contradicting ourselves or defaulting on the claim that truth is always posterior to current practices and beliefs.

Like I said, I am sympathetic to the criticism of the analytic "view-from nowhere," "objectivity approaches truth at the limit" schema that this sort of view emerged to correct. Yet this solution seems to me to have even greater difficulties. More broadly, I think the impetus for such a view stems from failing to reject some of the bad epistemic axioms of empiricism, and from a particular metaphysics of language and the reality/appearance distinction that I would reject, but that's a whole different can of worms.

I suppose a final option is to refuse to grab the dilemma by the horns and to simply be gored by it, allowing that the theory is both true and false, and that it itself implies contradictions, and so this is no worry. But I think that's exactly the sort of thing that is generally meant by "anything goes relativism." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Your final option seems close to right. One needs a Copernican Revolution to overcome the traditional, and frankly disastrous, views of truth. Truth traditionally understood is untenable, for traditionally, the object is conceived apart from the perceptual act, and this is impossible. One would literally have to stand outside of experience to affirm it. Rather, the object is an event; this coffee cup is an event, a temporal object, recalled and anticipated in what it IS.

What does this have to do with ethics? Thoughts about ethics are properly about the world. Are they IN the world, or simply In moods, attitudes, feelings (Mackie)? Rorty is just wrong on ethics, because he is doesn't understand the world. Like most philosophers, he understands arguments better than he understands the world.