James Gilray's "New Morality," first published in 1798 as a commentary on the French Revolution and Louis Marie de La Révellière-Lépeaux.
AB: And the reason that people care so much about sexuality, that it's become such a contentious issue, is that everybody cares about sexuality – period?

AA: I think that they care about their own sexuality, obviously – and they tend to care about other people's sexualities. I myself don't actually care a bit about other people's sex lives. I think what motivates a lot of people who think about sexuality is that they have ideas about purity and impurity. They think of certain sex acts as impure and they think that those impure acts ought not to be carried out. Many people think like that about masturbation, cunnilingus, fellatio, anal intercourse – there's a list of things that some just think are disgusting and they ought not to be done for that reason. It's just a fact about human beings that many human beings care deeply about whether what other people do is, for them, disgusting or not. We have to say to people “In the area of sex, what disgusts you in other people's behavior is irrelevant to whether or not you should interact with them.” It's not their business anymore than it's my business if they choose to eat things that I think are disgusting to eat.

AB: People often confuse their values with morals.

AA: Yes, often people want to universalize their norms; they want to treat them as binding on everybody. It's reasonable for them to apply to do for themselves, but it's not reasonable for them to impose on other people. Look, everybody has norms or values that they don't want to universalize, right?

AB: Right.

AA: I know what kind of music I want to listen to, but I don't think that everybody should have the same idea. We don't normally want to universalize our aesthetic values, our taste. I don't want to universalize my sexual taste. I don't think everybody should want to do the sort of things I want to do sexually, but other people do think that. My view is they're wrong. They're mistaken. It's a mistaken view to think that those things should guide your moral judgments. I know I live in a world where there are people who think that way. I'm not going to be able to tell all of them that they're wrong, so I have to learn how to live in a world full of people who I think have made a serious moral mistake.

AB: That wrongness that we feel about other people – we all feel it one way or another, whatever debate we may be having – is actually the launching point for cosmopolitanism?

AA: I think that cosmopolitanism is connected with the idea that certain values should be universal. Certain respects for the dignity of human beings, for example, is something that everybody ought to acknowledge. There are lots of norms that should be universalized, but there are lots of norms that we think shouldn't be universalized, as well. The difference between cosmopolitans and other kinds of people who want to universalize their values is that we have a narrower range of values we want universalized and then we want people to live by their own ideas.

AB: Is there an end to cosmopolitanism or is it an ever-evolving discussion?

AA: [Laughs] What defines it for me is the wisdom to engage in this kind of discussion. The discussion doesn't have ends, but it does have bound limits. If the person I'm discussing with turns away from me to speak to somebody else, then as far as I'm concerned the conversation is over and my job's done.

Tune in Monday for part two of this conversation, during which Appiah talks gay marriage, ENDA and which candidate captures the cosmopolitan spirit.