Vision of a New Utopia

...He has developed a distinctive, and very engaging, style that is conversational rather than didactic...

...Appiah thinks there is little reason to believe that minimizing the amount of badness in the world "involves bankrupting myself to send a large check to UNICEF...

...But if less human variety is the price of much greater human happiness, then so much the worse for multiculturality...

...Appiah's point is that although we do indeed have moral obligations to strangers, there is no easy way to determine how best to fulfill them...

...Where Wal-Mart sells the same stuff in every town on the surface of the planet, and everybody on earth wears pretty much the same clothes and eats pretty much the same food...

...published a year ago, and again in this new book, Appiah has two distinct targets...

...In a disaster, we have no qualms about leaving the neighbors to fend for themselves while we make sure that our children are safe...

...And he is suspicious of the demand, characteristic of "identity politics," that one should strive to be an "authentic" member of whatever marginalized group one happens to belong to...

...Some of them have argued that it is just as immoral not to try to prevent the death by starvation of a child in a faraway country as not to try to rescue a child drowning before your eyes...

...In one of this book's most striking passages, Appiah writes: "If the founders of this nation had dealt only with the most urgent moral problem facing them—and let us suppose that it was, indeed, slavery—they would almost certainly not have set in motion the slow march of political, cultural and moral progress, with its sallies and its retreats, that Americans justly take pride in...

...For example, to achieve what he calls "the one thing that matters—building a community of enlightened men and women across the globe...

...We have to concentrate on building institutions that will make famine, war and tyranny less common...

...Cosmopolitanism unmodified," Appiah notes, "taken as a sort of rigorous abjuration of partiality, the discarding of all local loyalties, is a hard sell...

...There is, he continues, "bound to be at least one thing I can do with the money that would do more good...

...Starting in 1992 with My Father's House, he has been writing about the need for what he calls "rooted cosmopolitanism...

...APPIAH ROUNDS OUT his vision of a cosmopolitan utopia by making clear that he has no more patience with the notion of "cultural imperialism" than he does with attempts to resolve political dilemmas by reference to unconditional moral imperatives...

...Jefferson turned his back on the suffering of the slaves in order to help create a new nation—a nation that eventually became a force for good...

...Shouldn't the choice be theirs...

...He distrusts the sort of abstract universalism that says we should be equally concerned with the welfare of every human being...

...As the philosopher Bernard Williams famously remarked, if you are confronted with a choice between rescuing two strangers and letting your spouse die, and rescuing him while letting the strangers die, there is something very wrong with you if you pause reflect before rescuing your spouse...

...Both because we have special obligations to those who are not strangers, and because the best way to fulfill an obligation may be one that involves the infliction of evitable pain, it is unlikely that philosophers are going to come up with abstract principles that will resolve our concrete moral dilemmas...

...We cannot simply parachute troops into every tyranny and every failed state...

...The line of thought Appiah pursues suggests that the socially just global society of our dreams might be one in which a great deal of cultural diversity has been lost forever...

...If most people freely opt for standardized and unimaginative ways of passing their days on earth, that is their right...

...Such facts are often brushed aside by the philosophers who think of morality as a matter of obedience to universal, unconditional imperatives...

...Cosmopolitans," Appiah says, "think human variety matters because we think that people are entitled to options, which they need to make...

...We need to conserve resources for longer-range projects, he maintains...

...They are also exceptionally well written...

...He offers plenty of arguments, but the reader is never baffled or bludgeoned...

...So we feel the same guilt that Jefferson must (at least occasionally) have experienced when he remembered the price the slaves were paying for his nation-building enterprise...

...Carried to its logical conclusion, that would mean that we should immediately sell all we have (except what is needed for our own children's subsistence) and send the proceeds off to the emergency relief agencies...

...All we can ask of them is that they abide by the strictures of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty—that they not give harmlessly eccentric individualists (the people who wear colorful red headdresses, or whose sex lives are atypical, or who study Latin) a hard time...

...Would you really want to live in a world in which the only thing anyone had ever cared about was saving lives...

...Why not ask the Zao...

...The problem would be working out what that was...

...Consider a world where only three or four languages are spoken, where as few people read Baudelaire in French or Basho in Japanese as now read Horace in Latin...

...IN the final—and what may prove the most controversial—chapter of Cosmopolitanism, Appiah argues that it is morally better not to give all one has to charity...

...lives of their own...

...In The Ethics of Identity...

...The unhappy history of their attempts to do so should make us realize that (as Appiah puts it, echoing Isaiah Berlin) "Not all values have a single measure...

...It is a position that has little grip on our hearts.' The suggestion that we should tear up our roots, abandon mother and father, divest ourselves of all merely emotional ties and respond only to what Kant called "the dictates of pure practical reason," flies in the face of perfectly legitimate claims to preferential treatment...

...Some books of that sort are very valuable...

...He was a child in Kumasi and a philosophy student at Cambridge...

...he is the author of two treatises on the philosophy of language...

...But his more recent works have been of wider interest...

...Working that out may require learning a lot about history and about economics (though perhaps not much about philosophy...

...Because we cannot do everything all at once, we good-hearted citizens of the rich democracies must continue, for the foreseeable future, to do less than we conceivably might to rescue people who are being starved, raped and tortured...

...Reviewed by Richard Rorty Author, "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, "Achieving Our Country" Many books by philosophy professors consist of long strings of argument, interspersed with pre-emptive replies to possible objections from other philosophy professors...

...So he rejects the principle that says, "If you can prevent something bad (like a child dying) from happening at the cost of something less bad (like your own bankruptcy), you ought to do it" in favor of "Do the most you can to minimize the amount of badness in the world...

...He taught in both places, as well as at Cornell, Duke and Harvard, before taking up his present position in the Philosophy Department at Princeton...

...What one remembers best are his examples, anecdotes and apothegms...

...But, as Appiah says, "There is no place for the enforcement of diversity by trapping people within a kind of difference they long to escape___Are we to stop the importation of baseball caps into Vietnam, so that the Zao will continue with their colorful red headdresses...

...Just as the incommensurability of values insures that no individual can remain morally pure, so the circumstances of modern life insure that no culture can remain uncontaminated...

...Kwame Anthony Appiah used to write that kind of book...

...Such tedious uniformity might seem a cheap price to pay for a world in which no sick child goes untreated, famine is unknown, and the rule of law is taken for granted...

...He wants us to be careful to neither under- nor overemphasize the need for roots...

...Trying to keep a culture pure usually means getting people to stick with the old when they would rather go with the new...

...Once that is done, we feel justified in helping our neighbors first—simply because they are our neighbors—even though they are in less danger than people on the other side of town...

...Appiah was born into the political classofBritain(thanks to his mother) and of Ghana (thanks to his father...

...To appreciate their merits, however, you have to have read a lot of other philosophy books...