104 SOCIAL SCIENTIST race, customs and the like) as unimportant when compared to similarities with respect to pain and humiliation*, (p.192) Nor do the compromises end here. The goal of moral progress comes into conflict with the very nature of the ironist's perspective and practice: Ironism ... results from awareness of the power of redescription. But most people do not want to be redescribed. They want to be taken on their own terms—taken seriously just as they are and just as they talk. The ironist tells them that the language they speak is up for grabs by her and her kind. There is something potentially very cruel about that claim. For the best way to cause people long-lasting pain is to humiliate them by making the things that seemed most important to them look futile, obsolete, and powerless, (p.89) The compromise Rorty now makes involves drawing a distinction between redescription for private and for public purposes. The former has nothing to do with one's attitude to another's suffering, actual or possible. But because one is a liberal (with the 'final' private vocabulary identified above is such a claim possible at all?) one's vocabulary relevant to public redescription requires one 'to become aware of all the various ways in which human beings whom I might act upon can be humiliated.' (p.92) The intolerable tension this sets up within Rorty's redescription of liberalism can be illustrated by the fact that this results only in the ironist's ability to 'notice' suffering, not in providing a 'reason to care' about suffering. The former ability, as Rorty himself recognises in his account of Orwell's treatment of cruelty, is characteristic of the torturer as much as of the liberal. What distinguishes the two is the latter 'caring*. Perhaps Rorty's concluding remark that dilemmas such as these we will always have with us suggests his own sense of being caught up in a vicious circle requiring to recall, without reason, all the conceptual aids utilised by the early liberals for reasons which later intellectual trends have found inadequate and misdirected. However, Rorty has focussed on a problem that is important. Dissatisfaction with traditional answers cuts across theoretical and ideological distinctions. The difficulties that Rorty comes up against are themselves illuminating and to that extent the book's contribution to contemporary discourse is assured.