I think Kwame Anthony Appiah is one of the wisest people in the world. In this interview with the Chronicle, he touches on many hot button topics in what seem to me highly sensible ways.
On tolerance in the university:
I would like to be at a university where we can talk to each other across differences of politics and religion and national origin and sexuality and all the things that sometimes divide us. That is something that a liberal education is likely to encourage.
Of course, if you have a bad experience in the course of your liberal education, you may want to hide away in the community that makes you happy. But if we do it right, we should make these attitudes attractive. That’s not because I’m a relativist. Some of the attitudes that we need to be engaged with are wrong, whether they’re about facts or norms. But as a social matter, we are a diverse society. This was the central presupposition of Rawls’s theory of justice: We have to accept that we live in a society which has a diversity of what he called “reasonable conceptions of the good life.” Being willing to live side by side with people isn’t the same as thinking that they’re right.
When my very devout Muslim uncle had us over for meals at Eid, he was indifferent to the question of whether our Christianity or his Islam was correct. When his children came to us for Christmas, we didn’t think, “You can’t talk to these people. They’re wrong about Jesus.” Intellectuals find it hard to combine thinking it’s very important that something is true with being perfectly happy to hang out with people who don’t believe it. But that’s an important human skill because diversity isn’t going to go away anytime soon.
On trigger warnings:
In an inevitably plural society, one of the things a person growing up needs to acquire is skin thickness. So I don’t think encouraging people to resent everything they think is a moral mistake made by everybody else is a good way to prepare yourself for a happy life. . . . At the beginning of most of my classes, I tell students that if someone says something that upsets you, assume they didn’t mean to. . . .
So while we need to create a welcoming atmosphere in the classroom — not because that’s our job, but because it’s necessary in order to do our job — these supposedly protective measures have not really helped. They’ve made a lot of people unwilling to raise questions because they don’t know whether they’ll be punished in some way or ostracized.
On free speech and the US first amendment:
My attitude to giving the government the power to regulate speech is not that there aren’t imaginable circumstances in which, all things considered, it might be good to do. It’s just that, if you give governments that power, overwhelmingly, they will use it in bad cases. That’s the history. . . .
Any regime has costs as well as benefits. You can harm someone by using certain words. I don’t deny that. But the question is whether giving the state the power to decide which words those are. That’s not something I’m inclined to be optimistic about. When I was eight, my father was carted off to prison in Ghana by the president without being tried for anything because of things he said. So I don’t like giving governments the power to lock people up for things they’ve said.
Appiah has spent years answering ethics questions sent in by readers of the New York Times Magazine, things like "can I ban my obnoxious brother-in-law from Thanksgiving dinner?" What use was his philosophical training in answering those questions?
It turns out that there’s a bunch of tools that I have because I can ask questions in a systematic way. Taking them in chronological order, there’s a Confucius question — which is, what are the relationships? What duties arise out of the relationships? There’s an Aristotle question: What would a virtuous person do? There’s a Kantian question: What are the rights and duties? And there’s a Millian utilitarian question: What are the consequences for human welfare? If you answer those questions, you’ve often focused on all the relevant stuff.
And on the question of what discipline he thinks he practices, since he has published in philosophy, African studies, race relations, history, and more:
I think of myself as an intellectual, as someone who wants to understand things.
What a remarkable man.
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