{"id":4318,"date":"2010-01-05T21:04:13","date_gmt":"2010-01-05T21:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=4318"},"modified":"2017-03-18T14:39:46","modified_gmt":"2017-03-18T14:39:46","slug":"the-ethics-of-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=4318","title":{"rendered":"The Ethics of Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/press.princeton.edu\/titles\/7806.html\" target=\"_blank\">The Ethics of Identity<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/press.princeton.edu\" target=\"_blank\">Princeton University Press<\/a><br \/>\n2004<br \/>\n384 pages<br \/>\n6 x 9<br \/>\nHardback ISBN: 9780691120362<br \/>\nPaper ISBN: 978-1-4008-2619<br \/>\ne-Book ISBN: 978-1-4008-2619-3<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Kwame_Anthony_Appiah\" target=\"_blank\">Kwame Anthony Appiah<\/a><\/strong>, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the Center for Human Values<br \/>\n<em>Princeton University<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/press.princeton.edu\/titles\/7806.html\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/press.princeton.edu\/images\/k7806.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>A New York Times Editors&#8217; Choice <\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>One of Amazon.com&#8217;s Best Nonfiction Books of 2005 <\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Winner of the 2005 Award for Excellence in Professional\/Scholarly Publishing in Philosophy, Association of American Publishers <\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Honorable Mention for the 2005 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality: in the past couple of decades, a great deal of attention has been paid to such collective identities. They clamor for recognition and respect, sometimes at the expense of other things we value. But to what extent do &#8220;identities&#8221; constrain our freedom, our ability to make an individual life, and to what extent do they enable our individuality? In this beautifully written work, renowned philosopher and African Studies scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah draws on thinkers through the ages and across the globe to explore such questions.<\/p>\n<p>The <em>Ethics of Identity<\/em> takes seriously both the claims of individuality&#8211;the task of making a life&#8212;and the claims of identity, these large and often abstract social categories through which we define ourselves.<\/p>\n<p>What sort of life one should lead is a subject that has preoccupied moral and political thinkers from <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Aristotle\" target=\"_blank\">Aristotle<\/a> to <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/John_Stuart_Mill\" target=\"_blank\">Mill<\/a>. Here, Appiah develops an account of ethics, in just this venerable sense&#8211;but an account that connects moral obligations with collective allegiances, our individuality with our identities. As he observes, the question who we are has always been linked to the question what we are.<\/p>\n<p>Adopting a broadly interdisciplinary perspective, Appiah takes aim at the clich\u00e9s and received ideas amid which talk of identity so often founders. Is &#8220;culture&#8221; a good? For that matter, does the concept of culture really explain anything? Is diversity of value in itself? Are moral obligations the only kind there are? Has the rhetoric of &#8220;human rights&#8221; been overstretched? In the end, Appiah&#8217;s arguments make it harder to think of the world as divided between the West and the Rest; between locals and cosmopolitans; between Us and Them. The result is a new vision of liberal humanism&#8211;one that can accommodate the vagaries and variety that make us human.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Table of Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>PREFACE<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/press.princeton.edu\/chapters\/s7806.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">Chapter One: The Ethics of Individuality<\/a>\n<ul>\n<li>THE GREAT EXPERIMENT\u2014LIBERTY AND INDIVIDUALITY\u2014PLANS OF LIFE&#8211;THE SOUL OF THE SERVITOR\u2014SOCIAL CHOICES\u2014INVENTION AND AUTHENTICITY\u2014THE SOCIAL SCRIPTORIUM\u2014ETHICS IN IDENTITY\u2014INDIVIDUALITY AND THE STATE\u2014THE COMMON PURSUIT<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Chapter Two: Autonomy and Its Critics\n<ul>\n<li>WHAT AUTONOMY DEMANDS\u2014AUTONOMY AS INTOLERANCE\u2014AUTONOMY AGONISTES\u2014THE TWO STANDPOINTS\u2014AGENCY AND THE INTERESTS OF THEORY<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Chapter Three: The Demands of Identity\n<ul>\n<li>LEARNING HOW TO CURSE\u2014THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL IDENTITIES\u2014MILLET MULTICULTURALISM\u2014AUTONOMISM, PLURALISM, NEUTRALISM\u2014A FIRST AMENDMENT EXAMPLE: THE ACCOMMODATIONIST PROGRAM\u2014NEUTRALITY RECONSIDERED\u2014THE LANGUAGE OF RECOGNITION\u2014THE MEDUSA SYNDROME\u2014LIMITS AND PARAMETERS<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Chapter Four: The Trouble with Culture\n<ul>\n<li>MAKING UP THE DIFFERENCE\u2014IS CULTURE A GOOD?\u2014THE PRESERVATIONIST ETHIC\u2014NEGATION AS AFFIRMATION\u2014 THE DIVERSITY PRINCIPLE<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Chapter Five: Soul Making\n<ul>\n<li>SOULS AND THE STATE\u2014THE SELF-MANAGEMENT CARD\u2014RATIONAL WELL-BEING\u2014IRRATIONAL IDENTITIES\u2014SOUL MAKING AND STEREOTYPES\u2014EDUCATED SOULS\u2014CONFLICTS OVER IDENTITY CLAIMS<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Chapter Six: Rooted Cosmopolitanism\n<ul>\n<li>A WORLDWIDE WEB&#8211;RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITANS&#8211;ETHICAL PARTIALITY&#8211;TWO CONCEPTS OF OBLIGATION&#8211;COSMOPOLITAN PATRIOTISM&#8211;CONFRONTATION AND CONVERSATION&#8211;RIVALROUS GOODS, RIVALROUS GODS&#8211;TRAVELING TALES&#8211;GLOBALIZING HUMAN RIGHTS&#8211;COSMOPOLITAN CONVERSATION<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>ACKNOWLEDGMENTS<\/li>\n<li>NOTES<\/li>\n<li>INDEX<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>But to what extent do &#8220;identities&#8221; constrain our freedom, our ability to make an individual life, and to what extent do they enable our individuality?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1196,8,17,6941,394],"tags":[1708,325],"class_list":["post-4318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-monographs","category-philosophy","category-socialscience","tag-kwame-anthony-appiah","tag-princeton-university-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4318"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52594,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4318\/revisions\/52594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}