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A value is like a fax machine: it's not much use if you're the only one who has one.
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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It's important to understand that while honor is an entitlement to respect--and shame comes when you lose that title--a person of honor cares first of all not about being respected but about being worthy of respect.
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reputation
respect
shame
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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I am urging that we should learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement, but because it will help us get used to one another.
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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To create a life is to create a life out of the materials that history has given you.
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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And, like many philosophers, I am of the school that what goes without saying often goes even better with saying.)
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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This is, of course, an easy Berlinian riposte. Start with some graceful hand waving about incommensurability; declare that nothing could reconcile these great goods; and (with a tip of trilby) commend liberal pluralism for living with the contradictions.
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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Morality, on the other hand, as Immanuel Kant insisted, is ultimately practical: though it matters morally what we think and feel, morality is, at its heart, about what we do.
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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Once you start offering reasons for ignoring the interests of others, however, reasoning itself will usually draw you into a kind of universality. A reason is an offer of a ground for thinking or feeling or doing something. And it isn't a ground for me, unless it's a ground for you. If someone really thinks that some group of people genuinely doesn't matter at all, he will suppose they are outside the circle of those to whom justifications ..
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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I am not alone is doubting the imperative to respect cultures, as opposed to persons; and I believe we can respect persons only inasmuch as we consider them as abstract rights-holders.
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. I am human, I think nothing human alien to me.
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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But it does not in general make sense to suppose that a legislature has an intent in passing a law. Legislation is a political process, in which deals are cut and compromises made. In both the public and the private deliberations about any statute many inconsistent reasons will be offered for framing a clause one way or another; many suggestions, not all of them consonant with one another, will be offered as to what the overall aims of the ..
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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And that, as we've seen, seems consistent with our broader explanatory habits-with the observation that much of what we say when we're explaining what we've done is confabulation: stories we've made up (though quite sincerely) for ourselves and in response to others. In short-to overstate the point only slightly-because people don't really know why they do what they do, they give explanations of their own behavior that are about as reliable..
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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In the world of identity, utterances have functions, separate from their meanings.
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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This view is an instance of what my friend Skip Gates has called "cultural geneticism,"80 It has, in Bertrand Russell's wicked phrase, "the virtues of theft over honest toil." On this view, you earn rights to culture that is marked with the mark of your race-- or your nation--simply by having a racial identity." --
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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The story of sacred texts has always been the story of their readers: of shifting and often clashing interpretations.
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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The Romantic state could pride itself on being the emanation of one Volk and its primordial consciousness; the liberal state has to get by with a good deal less magic. The Romantic state could boldly identify itself with a people's Will; liberal states must content themselves with a
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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Yet in making our choices we must sometimes start with a vision, however inchoate, of what it is for a human life to go well. That was one of Aristotle's central insights. It is my argument that we should be free to avail ourselves of the resources of many disciplines to define that vision; and that in bringing them together we are being faithful to a long tradition. In the humanities, I think, we are always engaged in illuminating the pres..
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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Without reflection, without sorrow, without shame, they've built around me great, high walls. And I sit here now and despair. I think of nothing else: this fate consumes my mind: because I had so many things to do out there.3
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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People have long known in America what many in Europe have come to grasp--that we can hang together without a common religion or even delusions of common ancestry. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, various independence movements gained traction in Europe, from Caledonia to Catalonia. Neither the logic of territorial integrity nor that of national sovereignty can resolve such matters. But let the arguments not be made in term..
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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More recently, the intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has maintained that justice, reason, and the love of humanity "are, in fact, predominantly, perhaps even uniquely, Western values."19"
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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most people would have multifarious possible rewarding lives, if we made a world that respected a life well lived: a life in which a person gave others their due, had rewarding relationships with family, friends, and fellow citizens, and pursued projects they had elected with passion and purpose.
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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if relativism about ethics and morality were true, then, at the end of many discussions, we. would each have to end up by saying, "From where I stand, I am right. From where you stand, you are right." And there would be nothing further to say. From our different perspectives, we. would be living effectively in different worlds. And without a shared world, what is there to discuss? People often recommend relativism because they think it will..
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cultural-relativism
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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with religious denominations conceived of as a species of ethnic group).
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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We do not need to find something we are best at; what is important is simply that we do our best.
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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Being deluged with trolley problems is one of the professional hazards of modern moral philosophy.
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |
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Self-regarding considerations can be as universalizable as other-regarding considerations: we owe things to ourselves as well to others
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Kwame Anthony Appiah |