printable versionPrinceton scholar Appiah explores moral obligation and the ethics of identity
BY BARBARA PALMER
Appiah discusses the ethics of identity at the Stanford Humanities Center on Tuesday afternoon. He also delivered a Presidential Lecture on Monday.
Identities easily can be conjured into being and "the 'Other' may not be very other at all," observed Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy at Princeton University, who described the experiment while presenting the first Presidential Lecture in the Humanities and Arts of the year on Monday evening. Even so, the contours of identity are profoundly real and no less powerful as a social force because they are sometimes arbitrary, he asserted.
In an hour-long, densely woven argument, Appiah drew on such diverse sources as philosopher Ronald Dworkin, Russian cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, sociologist Crag Calhoun, Charles Dickens and his own father, an independence leader in Ghana, to explore the ethics of identity and whether identities might impose obligations on individuals.
Appiah argued for what he called "ethical partiality," a mixed theory of value that has "space for obligations that are moral and universal and for obligations that are ethical and relative to our identities."
He agreed that identities could be constructed around values as arbitrary as "People Who Say They Hate Television But Admit to Watching It Now and Then," as has been suggested by writer George Saunders. However, "actual, full-blooded" identities, such as national identities, create genuine forms of solidarity, he said.
"If I think of myself as an X, then, sometimes, the mere fact that somebody else is an X, too, may incline me to do something with or for them, where X might be 'woman,' 'black' or 'American,'" he said.
"We must take seriously the value of human life and the value of particular human lives—the lives people have made for themselves—within the communities that help lend significance to those lives."
Appiah rejected the notion that individuals are bound to impartiality by an idea of universal moral equality. He quoted the philosopher William Godwin, who famously asked, "What magic is there in the pronoun 'my' that should justify us in overturning the decisions of impartial truth?" Godwin contemplated, with equanimity, the prospect of rescuing a venerable archbishop from a fire while leaving another—his valet, or father, or brother—to burn, Appiah said. "A few people seem to find heroism in this kind of moral austerity, but most of us find the smell of burning friends and relations distinctly off-putting.
"Social justice may require impartiality—but social justice is not an attribute of individuals," he said. "What is a virtue in a referee is not a virtue in a prizefighter's wife."
Appiah made a distinction between moral and ethical obligation. "Even if defection from what morality requires were rampant in some society, the requirements of morality would be undiminished. Societies ought not to engage in genocide, but avidly do so. What's right and wrong, morally, doesn't depend upon the vagaries of our motivations."
Ethical obligation, by contrast, is internal to identity. For instance, in Ghana, families make no distinction in familial bonds between siblings and maternal cousins. "If this ceased to be so, the ethical obligations would cease to be what they were," he said.
Appiah also discussed the construction of national identity. "It's important to remember how abstract a thing the nation really is. ... The partiality of the nationalist may be thicker than water, but it is a lot thinner than blood."
It is tempting to represent conflict in the terms of nationalism as "a clash of civilizations," he said. But diversity and disagreement are hardly twins, he said. Arguments tend to be the most intense and numerous among people who share many of the same tenets, he said. "You will have many disagreements with colleagues. You will have few disagreements with your cat," he said. (Appiah admitted he has no cat.)
Nor does geopolitical tension track with moral or metaphysical differences, he said. "For the most part, conflict between national powers doesn't arise from clashing conceptions of the good. On the contrary, conflict arises when both have identified the same thing as good; and where it is, to loosely enlist the economic argot, a 'rivalrous good'—something that cannot be shared by two parties at the same time, like an oil field or a piece of fertile territory."
Taking individual lives seriously means taking seriously the loyalties, allegiances and identifications that structure them, he said. "But these aren't the only things that count.
"My father, in a final testament, told his children that we were 'citizens of the world,' but he went on to tell us that we should work, for that reason, for the good of the places where—whether for the moment or for a lifetime—we had pitched our tents."
The next Presidential Lecture in the Humanities and Arts is scheduled for March 9, 2005, and will present choreographer Merce Cunningham at Dinkelspiel Auditorium.
The Presidential and Endowed Lectures in the Humanities and Arts are organized by the Humanities Center.