The Ethics of Identity Paperback – January 22, 2007

Kwame Appiah has given us a new paradigm for the discussion of ethics, basing it on the dynamics of identity.In my 1987 book on gay identity, I showed how all identity is a social artifact, the result of the interaction between the individual and the possible identities presented by societyAppiah calls this process, "soul-making." Today it could be called "self-making," the way that we cobble together a personality for ourselves from various roles and occupations available in society.Identity always entails membership in a group. Like language itself, it is not of our making, but made available to us to use.Appiah takes it for granted that the goal of a liberal society is to assure the autonomy of the individual in this process. He spends much of the work, however, in discussing the intrinsic conflict between the liberal view of that personal freedom and the demands of one's various identities.The critical point of the book is that ethics has its origins in those identities, each of which has its own demands and rules. Our life goals and meanings come from those identities. We measure our success in life by how well we have performed the tasks set out by our various identity/role/memberships. Identity is the framework of ethics.This leads Appiah to examine the role of the state in soul making and creating one's identity.Taking cue from Plato, who wrote that "politics is the art of caring for souls," Appiah holds that the state has a radical interest in ethics, in protecting the autonomy of the individual both in creating an identity and pursuing it.Everything the state does, he writes, should be governed by how it affects the freedom, intelligence, and virtue of individuals pursuing their identities.Appiah's argument that identity, as our chosen life-path, is the source of obligations is weak. He seems to abstract identity from our identification with the various groups we choose to be part of.The whole notion of "ought," like "must," is an implied passive construction meaning, "is obligated." Who, we must ask, is the obligator?The obvious answer is not the individual nor the identification itself but the other members of the groups which we have joined. They have set the standards against which we measure our performance.We live in an ocean of mutual obligations. The voice of our consciousness is always speaking in the imperative mood. In our heads, we are naturally teachers, telling others what to do. Our ethical obligations are always created by those others whom we have chosen to join.Also missing in this erudite discussion was any of the work on deviant identity done by Becker, Goffman, Sagarin, and Matza and many others of an earlier generation. They changed the field sociology to benefit millions.Deviant identities are very special and bring their own demands that further limit autonomy by avoiding the "anxiety of choice." In becoming gay, for example, "one chooses not to choose"Appiah suggests that one who experiences homosexual desires has little choice about adopting the gay role. This ignores the great disconnect between the behavior and the identity noted in the Kinsey studies.Most people who have homosexual experiences do not adopt the identity, while there are many who adopt the identity with very little and even no homosexual experience.There are also many who deny the label and are able to enjoy the autonomy of living without it.There are many African-Americans, Native Americans, and others who surmount the limitations of the roles that society has created for them.Parents living in the inner city, for example, struggle daily to keep their children from hating in response to the enraging humiliations they face in a segregated city. They do this by living, thinking, and acting in such a way as if the oppression and domination did not exist. They try to define how a human being should act in such circumstances, what it is to be a normal human being, or, in Appiah's word, a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world. In this effort, many have been remarkably successful.Appiah states regarding deviant identity on p. 112: "Each of these categories has served as an instrument of subordination, as a constraint upon autonomy, a proxy for misfortune. Some identities, we can show, were created as part of a classificatory system for oppression."Yet, he goes on to say: "...categories designed for subordination can also be used to mobilize and empower people as members of a self-affirmative identity.... As a parameter, identities provide for choosing, for defining the shape of our lives, but they also provide a basis for community, for positive forms of solidarity."A second weakness in the book is the lack of attention given to work identity. In any society, what one does for a living plays a major role in defining the self.As Marx told us, it is work that ennobles us and defines our unique position in the universe. Work is always at the heart of both ethics and identity.

Appiah organizes a cogent argument with respect to historical context, respect for discourse, and a range of theory, bottom, and evidence. A great framework for looking at individuality, group, and cosmopolitan identities in a diverse world.

As for the content, it's quite philosophical, and very challenging in the first chapter. If you stick with it through the first 13ish pages you'll find that it gets much more understanding and hitting home.Perfect e-book excluding the fact that it doesn't have page numbers. It's like any other books out there if you've gotten them before.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, a name not well known in a subject equally lacking in general popularity, however Appiah's books are surprisingly readable, offering challenging concepts in an digestible prose style.

Excellent!

There have been various attempts, in the past couple of decades, to carve out a case for group rights; the argument has been that old-school liberalism, with its emphasis on the individualism, is inadequate, because it can't accommodate "difference." Appiah's book politely and subtly demolishes this line of argument. For one thing, he calls into question the assumption that diversity (as opposed to the freedoms that make it possible) is a value in itself. He challenges what he calls the "preservationist ethic," which would preserve dying ways of life in formaldehyde. He reminds us that Locke and the other founding theorists of liberal individualism were writing after a long period of religious factionalism and bloodshed spawned by a fixation with differences; that there is something to be said for the affirmation of Sameness, of a shared humanity. And he further reminds us that not all identity groups are deserving of respect: in the case of what he terms "abhorrent identities," we should be quite content for those identities (e.g., a Nazi identity or, in a case he discusses, the Christian Identity Movement) to disappear. In a critique of what has been called the politics of recognition, Appiah raises concerns about what he terms "the Medusa Syndrome" - in which official recognition (of a tribe, an ethnic community) ends up turning the object of its concern into a fixed and freeze-dried state. This book is a major contribution to political theory, but it would be hard to parse its arguments in partisan-political terms. As Appiah says in the book's preface, he writes "neither as identity's friend nor as its foe." What he does succeed in demonstrating is that the precepts of pre-postmodern liberalism - a creed that takes the individual as the ultimate unit of concern - have been widely underestimated. The book is also a pleasure to read; characters from Stendhal, George Eliot, Tolstoy, and Dickens weave in and out of the pages; he has a gift for illustrating points with a pertinent bit of poetry - Horace, Donne, Philip Larkin (and, new to me, the contemporary poet Carl Dennis). All of which sets the book apart from the sometimes horribly mechanistic language of contemporary political philosophy. Finally, he has an admirable impatience with cliché and cant. Parts of the book can be a little dense (including a long discussion of Kant's "two standpoints"); I wouldn't recommend even academics to take this book to the bench. And I find some of his discussions -- particularly those having to do with education -- frustratingly unburdened by a sense of the real-world challenges. But this is one of the most rewarding books on liberalism (small-l liberalism) I've read in years.