Complaints about the social irresponsibility of the intellectual typically concern the intellectual’s tendency to marginalize herself, to move out fr… - Richard Rorty

When the individual finds in her conscience beliefs that are relevant to public policy but incapable of the defense on the basis of beliefs common to her fellow citizens, she must sacrifice her conscience on the altar of public expediency.

Kripke tries to sober us up by denying that meaning determines reference. Rather, we name things by confronting them and baptising them, not by creating them out of a list of qualities. Names are not, pace Russell, shorthand for such lists. They are not abbreviations for descriptions, but (in Kripke’s coinage) ‘rigid designators’ – that is, they would name the same things in any possible world, including worlds in which their bearers did not have the properties we, in this world, use to identify them.

Rather, we heirs of Enlightenment think of enemies of liberal democracy like Nietzsche or Loyola as, to use Rawls’s word, “mad.” We do so because there is no way to see them as fellow citizens of our constitutional democracy, people whose life plans might, given ingenuity and good will, be fitted in with those of other citizens. They are crazy because the limits of sanity are set by what we can take seriously. This, in turn, is determined by our upbringing, our historical situation.