Kwame Anthony Appiah

There's something really clever going on in Appiah's take on ethics in a global world. He goes out of his way to point out that while the main thrust of his positive argument is "you care about X because your neighbour does" is easy to articulate, it's damn hard to get there in most ethical systems.

I don't think this will appeal or even make sense to anyone interested in defining their identity with nations and states. In many ways, Appiah's moral compass only makes sense in a post-colonial show more context. If you think some accident of your birth entitles you to a special or nobler moral value then he has nothing to offer you. The very point of Appiah's approach to ethics is to first realize that most of the historical precedents that are pointed to for defining moral identities are themeselves mutable. Judgements aren't static. They change over time and they change dramatically when in contact with the wider world.

Why bother reading this? In a political era where nationalism and populism is surprisingly effective, Appiah points out that the purity of moral identities is fiction. This isn't ivory tower philosophy. It's applied ethics that gets the experience of the world from a non-majority point of view--something that's really hard to find articulated so well in any work on ethics. show less

Angelo Soliman was an African slave who was trained as a fashion accessory for the nobility: Serving a cup of coffee in style. Via Southern Italy, he was a servant first of Count Lobkowitz and later Liechtenstein. Privileged and limited at the same time. he was quite successful and even influential, becoming a Freemason, marrying a woman of Dutch origin and acquiring a house extra muros. Not a bad life for an African slave! Alas, the Austrian Emperor had no respect of his black skin. Despite show more the protestations of his daughter, Soliman's body was skinned and a taxidermised exhibit of an African wild man complete with feathers created (which the cultured servant Soliman never was) and exhibited in the natural history collection for a few years (until the new director removed the strange item from public display. He did not, however, bury the remains. A fire during the 1848 revolution destroyed Soliman's skin and purged the museum's black stain.

Both the exhibition in the Wien Museum and its catalogue marvelously use the biography of Soliman to present larger concepts of 18th century society, e.g. the less well-known north-south African slave trade (where the majority of slaves ended up in the Ottoman Empire), the role of black servants as status symbols and fashion accessories (a human specimen among the Baroque ménagerie) to fascinating details such as one had to be a citizen of Vienna to acquire property intra muros. The catalogue is exceptionally well curated, with very little overlap, good coordination among the different authors and beautifully illustrated. Highly recommended. show less

Appiah argues for the necessity of talking with others; not necessarily agreeing with them or changing our minds, but trying to understand them. That alone is an important lesson for our fractious republic, where both sides think they have a monopoly on truth and talk past each other. The first part of book includes a lot about Appiah's early life in Ghana, as the child of British-educated Ghanaian barrister and an English mother. Much on the importance of individual and societal narratives show more and how our stories define and explain us. Later he takes on the issue of "cultural patrimony" and who owns artifacts of the past. Appiah shows a good deal of common sense in this and will annoy a lot of zealots. Finally he addresses the issue of what we owe to others, again with much common sense, and neatly skewers the simplistic sophistries of Peter Singer and his ilk. This is a book rooted in an old-fashioned humanism, which immediately brought to mind Terence's homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto, a quotation that Appiah indeed discusses part way through the book. I doubt that professional philosophers will like the book much; too much common sense and not enough opaque jargon. show less

"Astronomers have stars, geologists have rocks, but what do moral theorists have to work with?"

In a field that is full of abstraction, Appiah brings you what you rarely get in a philosophy classroom: a collision with real world research on applied ethics. The thrust of this book is not so much the Appiah is championing contemporary experiments so much as he's exploring how such works complicate the ivory tower normative systems that we've used from Aristotle, to Kant to Rawls.

This is not show more the sort of book you read to tie up your moral theories in a bow, which not by accident, is also why it's such an interesting work no matter where you fall in between deontological, consequentialist or virtue approaches to moral reasoning. show less