Where does Kwame Anthony Appiah find the time?! The London-born, Ghana-reared Princeton professor has penned or edited twelve books, three novels and countless other pieces on cultural and social theory. His most recent work, Cosmopolitanism – which came out in 2006 and will soon be eclipsed by Experiments in Ethics – compels the reader to engage the wider global community. How can we revel in our particular communities while reaching beyond to our fellow man?
Our editor chatted with Appiah earlier this week to discuss the difference between morals and values, what to do with wing-nut fundamentalists like Fred Phelps and why Appiah won’t force anything down your throat. Unless you ask for it, of course.
We’ve split the conversation into two parts. Part one can be found after the trusty jump. You’ll have to wait until Monday to finish this job (see below).
Andrew Belonsky: One thing that comes up in your work is the idea of tolerance. You discuss how we have to have dialogue with people. We have to converse with all people to breed tolerance and come to some basic communal understanding. A lot of people take issue with the word “tolerance”. I’m sure you’ve heard this before – you know, you tolerate a spur in your boot if you’re backpacking and don’t want to take your shoe off. It’s something that can still irritate, not something that you accept. Through your thinking, is it possible to grow acceptance from tolerance? Or is tolerance the end?
Anthony Appiah: Well, I think it depends on what you’re talking about, but assuming the thing you’re tolerating, you’re just bearing with it – that’s not the same thing as acceptance at all. Unless there is a process – many people go through it – that begins with tolerance and ends with acceptance. But I completely agree that acceptance and toleration are very different, at least with respect to homosexuality. Part of the reason I think that is because many of the arguments against sexuality are terrible! They’re such bad arguments! If you grow up in a homophobic culture, you can be a reasonable person who doesn’t like homosexuals. I think a reasonable culture will eventually accept homosexuals, not just tolerate them, but then someone in a different culture sees tolerating homosexuals as unreasonable.
AB: A cosmopolitan thinker creates boundaries of where they’re willing to go with somebody. There are people who are going to be unreasonable and you have to know your boundaries. If someone crosses that boundary – for example, someone like Fred Phelps: someone who insists on going around holding signs saying “Fags Must Die”. If we can accept that there are people that we’re not going to be able to come to an understanding with, what happens to those people in a cosmopolitan society? Do they just create their own camp and there’s no communication?
AA: I think the idea is that you have to stop people from acting on these things. You can’t just say that they’re wrong. If they’re acting in ways that are- beating people up, stopping them from doing things they’re entitled to do, then you have to line up and stop them. If they beat people up, they should be arrested.
AB: What if they’re not assaulting someone? What if they’re picketing a gay man’s funeral?
AA: Well, the people who do that are very particular in our society. They’re not the standard. That’s not the standard form – most of us think you shouldn’t picket funerals – period. We understand it’s a particularly cruel thing to do. I think the people who do this are hateful. I think we should say that they’re hateful and I think we should persuade them that they’re not right. But, in the end, what we can do is offer comfort to the people they’re picketing.
AB: Can we discuss the difference between values and morals? Values “guide acts, thoughts and feelings,” you say in the book. They’re are informed by your family, your friends. Values are contextual on a subjective level. Meanwhile, morals can be applied on a more universal level.
AA: Sure. There are traditional ways of thinking about what defines morality, and no simple answer. But there are two, I think, very big thoughts about this. One is that we should think of morality as having to do with our obligations to other people – what we ought to do or ought not to do to and for them. It defines morality by its subject matter. Another way of thinking about morality is that it’s the set of universalizable rules: things that we ought not to do whoever we are, wherever we are, no matter what. If you take the second view, if you think of morality as consisting of the rule – the norms – that everybody ought to conform to, then many values are not moral values.
AB: Can you elaborate?
AA: Many of the things that guide my life are not the kinds of things I think that other people ought to follow. They’re just the ones that I follow. They are things that I care about, because they’re subject to my life. I don’t expect other people to conform to them, but there are the ones that I do. Morality is essentially about which norms everybody ought to conform to. If you take the other way of thinking: morality defines itself in terms of what we owe to others, then it seems to me that the question of sexuality isn’t obviously moral at all, because much sexuality only affects other people through their consent. Most sex acts are with people who want it and it’s not a moral issue at all.
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.
M Shane Walsh
I’m generally find anything reminiscent of ‘self help” psychology simple-minded and tedious. This, does approach the practical variables of a very unique and timely aspect of our experience as inhabitants of a diverse human world, and may offer some
answers to the difficulties inherit in living in a diverse world.To be honest, I like it because I’ve mostly been a very curious and gregarious person and a hard core freak for diversity in my life.
However, I foresee a a problem in his cognition about the aprehension what other people do or should comprehend about gay people, since it we challenge the normal heterosexual perspective of what human relationships should or can be. It is odd somehow that if heterosexual people are threatened by who we are and how we love, why are we not envious of them , or are some of us/
I find that I and some other people respond very differently to the prospect of new and different people differently than others. A long time ago, I decided that i wasn’t going to be afraid of anyone. I think that that is true Unless the people are offensive I
enjoy a diversity in my encounters.
I think that I have had more trouble personally relating to gay people because of the sexual aspect-I think , but that seems to be more in the midwest , although, for most of my life I think that the sexual aspect has become an agenda , even when I don’t want it to be.
jason
congrats to queerty for such a thoughtful interview with an important philosopher! i can’t wait for the second installment!!!
Charley
The nature of “cosmopolitanism” is self serving victorian arrogance. Not a new concept of “one world”. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832) It’s a feel good philosophy based on Abrahamic religious values. We are basically what we are, descendants of one cell organisms, evolving from the primal ooze, striving for survival. Primates will be extinct in 2 million years. Self preservation is the truth, and it is everyone’s own responsibility to survive, no one else’s.