The Ethics of Identity [Paperback]

Kwame Anthony Appiah (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0691130280 | ISBN-13: 978-0691130286

Race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality: in the past couple of decades, a great deal of attention has been paid to such collective identities. They clamor for recognition and respect, sometimes at the expense of other things we value. But to what extent do "identities" constrain our freedom, our ability to make an individual life, and to what extent do they enable our individuality? In this beautifully written work, renowned philosopher and African Studies scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah draws on thinkers through the ages and across the globe to explore such questions.

The Ethics of Identity takes seriously both the claims of individuality--the task of making a life---and the claims of identity, these large and often abstract social categories through which we define ourselves.

What sort of life one should lead is a subject that has preoccupied moral and political thinkers from Aristotle to Mill. Here, Appiah develops an account of ethics, in just this venerable sense--but an account that connects moral obligations with collective allegiances, our individuality with our identities. As he observes, the question who we are has always been linked to the question what we are.

Adopting a broadly interdisciplinary perspective, Appiah takes aim at the clichés and received ideas amid which talk of identity so often founders. Is "culture" a good? For that matter, does the concept of culture really explain anything? Is diversity of value in itself? Are moral obligations the only kind there are? Has the rhetoric of "human rights" been overstretched? In the end, Appiah's arguments make it harder to think of the world as divided between the West and the Rest; between locals and cosmopolitans; between Us and Them. The result is a new vision of liberal humanism--one that can accommodate the vagaries and variety that make us human.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The Ethics of Identity is wonderfully straightforward. It does just what it proposes to do. It explores the demands of 'individuality,' and rejects extreme understandings of what autonomy requires. It considers the relation of personal and group identity to morals and ethics. . . . It moves on to the links between identity and culture. . . . Appiah has some very wise and original things to say about the inevitability of a liberal state affecting the inner life of its citizens. He ends with a defense of rooted cosmopolitanism. Not only is the argument direct; it is untechnical, transparent, and unaggressive. . . . Appiah concentrates on a double question: how we acquire an individual identity by acquiring a social identity, and how we find--and make--an identity that is not a straitjacket. In pursuing this question, Appiah begins to explore one of the most fascinating and difficult questions in moral philosophy, the relationship between general principles and particular attachments. . . . [He] shows just how to write about the intimate, formative relations that are central to a life, most strikingly in his epilogue, but as you realize when you reach that ending, he has been doing it, as well as a great deal else, throughout The Ethics of Identity. (Alan Ryan The New York Review of Books )

Suave and discerning. . . . Appiah seeks to reorient political philosophy by returning to the example set by John Stuart Mill. . . . For all of Appiah's philosophic precision, his writing often resembles not Mill's but that of Oscar Wilde--to my mind, the finest prose stylist of the 19th century. . . . [T]he superb rhetorical performance of this book offers the most persuasive evidence for his case. . . . To read The Ethics of Identity is to enter into the world it describes; it is also to imagine what it might be like to live in so urbane and expansive a place. (Jonathan Freedman New York Times Book Review )

Kwame Anthony Appiah undertakes to combine a form of liberalism that aspires to universal validity with a full recognition and substantial acceptance of the important cultural and ethical diversity that characterizes our world. (Thomas Nagel New Republic )

[An] impressive book. . . . [A] thorough exploration of moral concepts such as authenticity, tolerance, individuality, and dignity, and how they are all connected to the task of making a life. . . . It is hard to know what to admire most about this book: the urbane elegance of Appiah's prose, the reach of his knowledge, or the sheer philosophical sharpness of his analysis. (Carl Elliott The American Prospect )

This book, with its fluid, inviting phrasing, is exceptionally well written. . . . It is effective, insightful, and thought-provoking. . . . Appiah clears the way for a justification of a narrative, pragmatic, particular relations-based cosmopolitanism, which is universal without the necessity of theoretical agreement. (Choice )

This new book aims to lay the groundwork for a new version of liberal theory adequate to the challenges of our time. . . . I find Appiah's overall conception of liberalism very congenial. . . . If Appiah succeeds in attenuating the force of such claims by undermining the theoretical conceptualizations and arguments supporting them, and integrating the valid claims of identity into liberal theory, he will have contributed very significantly to the reconstruction of liberalism. (Leonard J. Waks Education and Culture )

The conclusion Appiah eloquently affirms is spot on: the key to living a moral life is clearly not to seek to forego identity. On the contrary, it is to put identity in the service of becoming ethical human beings. (Joshua Jelly-Schapiro Tikkun )

Kwame Anthony Appiah, a man of multiple cultures and languages who is able to question culture itself, leaves us better able to contemplate how to lead life well and to relate ethically to others in the process. (E. James Lieberman PsycCritiques )

Kwame Anthony Appiah's The Ethics of Identity is a wonderful book. It is as rigorous as one expects the best philosophy to be, yet it is whitty, humane, and engaging in ways that academic philosophy is only rarely. It is the best account of the ethics of liberal society that we possess. (Daniel Weinstock Ethics )

Appiah, . . . an elegant writer, observes that we are not simply members of groups or products of culture. Individuality and autonomy, he argues, are fundamental to personhood in all social and cultural contexts. (David Moshman Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology )

[This is] a book that does [a] thorough and original a job of exposing the deep paradoxes within identity and confronting the serious ethical dilemmas to which they give rise. (John E. Joseph Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development )

Review

Appiah has written a remarkably impressive book, one that makes a number of important advances on the existing literature and stands as an important contribution to political and moral philosophy and moral psychology. It will be very widely read.
(Jacob Levy, University of Chicago ) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (January 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691130280
• ISBN-13: 978-0691130286
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #132,765 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kwame Anthony Appiah, the president of the PEN American Center, is the author of The Ethics of Identity, Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy, The Honor Code and the prize-winning Cosmopolitanism. Raised in Ghana and educated in England, he has taught philosophy on three continents and is currently a professor at Princeton University. He maintains a website at www.appiah.net.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 44 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Medusa Syndrome June 14, 2005

By Sarah Cohen

Format:Hardcover

There have been various attempts, in the past couple of decades, to carve out a case for group rights; the argument has been that old-school liberalism, with its emphasis on the individualism, is inadequate, because it can't accommodate "difference." Appiah's book politely and subtly demolishes this line of argument. For one thing, he calls into question the assumption that diversity (as opposed to the freedoms that make it possible) is a value in itself. He challenges what he calls the "preservationist ethic," which would preserve dying ways of life in formaldehyde. He reminds us that Locke and the other founding theorists of liberal individualism were writing after a long period of religious factionalism and bloodshed spawned by a fixation with differences; that there is something to be said for the affirmation of Sameness, of a shared humanity. And he further reminds us that not all identity groups are deserving of respect: in the case of what he terms "abhorrent identities," we should be quite content for those identities (e.g., a Nazi identity or, in a case he discusses, the Christian Identity Movement) to disappear. In a critique of what has been called the politics of recognition, Appiah raises concerns about what he terms "the Medusa Syndrome" - in which official recognition (of a tribe, an ethnic community) ends up turning the object of its concern into a fixed and freeze-dried state. This book is a major contribution to political theory, but it would be hard to parse its arguments in partisan-political terms. As Appiah says in the book's preface, he writes "neither as identity's friend nor as its foe." What he does succeed in demonstrating is that the precepts of pre-postmodern liberalism - a creed that takes the individual as the ultimate unit of concern - have been widely underestimated. The book is also a pleasure to read; characters from Stendhal, George Eliot, Tolstoy, and Dickens weave in and out of the pages; he has a gift for illustrating points with a pertinent bit of poetry - Horace, Donne, Philip Larkin (and, new to me, the contemporary poet Carl Dennis). All of which sets the book apart from the sometimes horribly mechanistic language of contemporary political philosophy. Finally, he has an admirable impatience with cliché and cant. Parts of the book can be a little dense (including a long discussion of Kant's "two standpoints"); I wouldn't recommend even academics to take this book to the bench. And I find some of his discussions -- particularly those having to do with education -- frustratingly unburdened by a sense of the real-world challenges. But this is one of the most rewarding books on liberalism (small-l liberalism) I've read in years.

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars In Defense of Sane Liberalism October 31, 2005

By Dr. D. E. McClean

Format:Hardcover

Kwame Anthony Appiah has always sought to take seriously both the individual and the context in which she is embedded. In this book, Appiah takes a hard look at the ways we shape ourselves as distinct individuals, and he continues to defend the right of the individual to forge a plan of life over and against her community's tug of conformity - but, he insists, not with indifference to the community's influences and interests. For we are always embedded in sets of social relations. However, those relations do not preclude the freedom to become who we are. They shape us; they do not determine us. And, for Appiah, even when we take-up the obligation before us to shape ourselves, to shape our own identities and plans of life, we must take heed not to so over-determine them as to preclude meaningful and fluid engagements with others whose identities are very different. Appiah calls for each of us to have a healthy identity, but to attenuate it enough to permit the Other to engage with us fully, as a fellow human being. This he calls "identity lite" - for better or worse.

The Ethics of Identity should be one of the final words in the old liberal/communitarian debate - a debate that has been, largely, between straw men. Its call for a "rooted cosmopolitanism" speaks directly to the deficiencies in both utopian versions of cosmopolitanism and dystopian versions of Volkish communitarianism.

Appiah's call for the liberal state to engage in soul-making is likely to be one of the controversial proposals in the book (in fact, I already know it is in certain academic circles). For Appiah argues that a state, any state, has an interest in the cultivation of such virtues in its citizens as are harmonious with the values and moral commitments upon which it rests. To some, this will sound like a call for a program of state propaganda and coercion. To others, it will be merely an acknowledgment of the truth of any configuration of power in or through the state apparatus. Since we are stuck with such configurations, why not give the liberal, democratic state a role to play in the production (education) of liberal, pluralistic, tolerant citizens, just as illiberal, undemocratic states go about doing the opposite? A good question. It is worth reading the book to find out where Appiah takes us on this point, and many others. As soul-making has been something that certain conservatives, such as George Will, have called for (See Will's Statecraft as Soulcraft) it will be interesting to see if, oddly, Appiah has "gone conservative." I think not, however. I think that he has simply found some common ground in the interminable culture wars. Whatever the case, the discussions and debates will be interesting.

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The blade of analysis June 13, 2005

By Chandra P.

Format:Hardcover

"The Ethics of Identity" is an ambitious attempt to make liberal political theory safe for the discourse of identity, and vice-versa. As a graduate student in political science, I was impressed by the way it grappled with current political philosophy while cutting a path very much its own. Appiah's voice is so inviting and level sounding that one is not always aware how deep the blade has been drawn. On the other hand, those hoping for a real engagement with the work of Continent thinkers like Levinas will be disappointed. Despite a qualified endorsement of cosmopolitanism, the book is definitely oriented toward the Anglo-American philosophic tradition. At the same time, the book's rigor and originality will make it worth reading by those interested in the future of political philosophy.