Review and Discuss Part 1 of 2: "The Ethics of Identity"

Review and discuss chapters 1 through 4 of:

The Ethics of Identity
2005
by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Princeton University Press
272 pages plus endnotes
https://www.amazon.com/Ethics-Identity-Princeton-Classics-131/dp/0691254079/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0

book preview:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Ethics_of_Identity/853T-hj-TKMC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=The+Ethics+of+Identity

"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."

-- from the Publisher

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NOTE:
In fairness to everyone attending who expects a meaningful discussion and a productive learning experience, you must have read Chapters 1 through 4 (to page 154) in order to attend this meeting.

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About the Author

Kwame Anthony Appiah 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 taught philosophy on three continents and is currently Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. Professor Appiah writes the “Ethicist” column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. He maintains a website at www.appiah.net.

Book Reviews

"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 witty, 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