The Ethics of Identity

Overview

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 clich�s 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.

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Author Information

Bio of Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah was born in 1954 in London and raised in Ghana. After graduating with a degree in philosophy from Cambridge University, he taught at Yale, Duke, and Cornell universities. He is currently a professor of Philosophy and African American Studies at Harvard University. Appiah has written on such topics as language in Assertion and Conditional and For Truth in Semantics, and racial philosophy and identities in Color Conscious and In My Father's House. In addition to his scholarly publications, Appiah is the author of the popular Sir Patrick Scott Series of mysteries. In this series, which includes Avenging Angel and Another Death in Venice, Barrister Patrick Scott uses his intellectual skills to solve murders in a most British fashion. 030

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Additional Info

Imprint

Princeton University Press

Filesize

3.29 MB

Number of Pages

384

eBook ISBN

9781400826193