Transcript: Well it goes back, I think, to the epistemological problem that I think we face as creatures in our . . . in our world. So I think one question that I think is always useful to ask in political context is, “If I am so sure I’m right, how come she’s so sure she’s right too?” If it’s obvious what . . . to me the answer is; if the answer’s obvious, why isn’t it obvious to the other person? And I think just that sort of turn taking – standing in the other’s man’s moccasins, walking in the other man’s moccasins kind of thing of saying, “Well I’m so sure I’m right about this, and yet here are these other people who don’t think what I think.” How is that? Are they just fools or irrational? Or is there some part of reality that’s hidden from them? Or could it be that I ought to reflect more carefully on what I think, and listen a bit more to what they have to say. So that’s a kind of _________ you’d expect from a philosopher. It’s a question you asked me to . . . a question about questions. It’s an answer about answers. It’s an answer about questions about questions. But I think that it is . . . it is . . . it is a useful perspective to adopt given the conflicts that we have in the world today about many important matters.

Recorded on: 7/31/07

Transcript: I think the United States here labors under a disability which does not afflict all the industrial democracies. Which is that our founding fathers – and mothers for that matter – were so worried about tyranny that they made it very hard . . . they designed a system of government which made it very hard to do big things. They designed a system of government which was designed to produce a legislature that restrained the executive; and executive that fought with the legislature; and the judiciary that placed severe limitation in certain directions on what either of the other two could do. And it was likely to be disliked much of the time by the legislature, and arguably also by the executive. So I said . . . I said that I think leadership is important. We have a system in which leadership is extremely difficult because the incentives for those in opposition – and I include the (01:05:53) opposition between the branches as a form of opposition, even if they are in the same party, the incentives for the opposition are always to make leadership difficult.

Now it has to be said, to do him justice, that George Bush has also devoted a fair amount of his time to pushing the Congress to do more for example about AIDS in Africa, spend more money there than was spent for example under the Clinton Administration. And the trouble is to get money out of the Congress, whose members have to go home and explain why they are not subsidizing the corn in Iowa this year so much is difficult.

one of the things that I think has depressed me most about our political system in the last decade or so has been the incredible partisanship. There’s nothing wrong with people fighting about issues, and having different views about them, and arguing vigorously for their point of view. But opposing a point of view simply because it’s their point of view of the other party, right? That’s bad. But again, our political system is in some ways designed to reward that, because by defining yourself as “not them”, you draw on political identities. And political identities allow you to win elections and so on. So I think there are very difficult challenges facing the United States in particular in my view because of the divided system of government that we have; because of the separate branches and their conflicts – their intrinsic conflicts with one another.

Question: How do we fix it?

Transcript: I would say there are some potential institutional solutions that are consistent with not reforming . . . with not amending the Constitution. I think for example that . . . This is an idea that Jim Leach of Iowa, who is actually a former Republican congressman, has pushed which I think is every sensible idea. Part of the partisanship flows from the fact that electoral districts in the United States are increasingly designed to be majority one party or another. This means that the way you win election is by winning the party, and the way you win the party is going to be by persuading the most active people in the party, who are going to be the most extreme people in the party. Because they are the ones who are the most excited, as it were, by the political situation. The result is that if you design a majority system where the districts are designed to be majority one party or the other, you will get the most extreme people of both parties elected, and they will be the most partisan people, and you will have partisan legislature. It’s why the Congress is more partisan than the Senate, because in the Senate you can’t gerrymander because the districts are defined by the states. And it’s why Iowa is less partisan than other states, because in Iowa congressional districting, because of the way the Iowa constitution does it, doesn’t allow you to gerrymander the constituencies, which is why an Iowa congressman has made this proposal. Now it’s very hard to figure out how to do this in general, and it’s even hard to figure out . . . I’m not a lawyer, but it might be difficult to do by congressional action because our constitution envisages the states managing their own electoral processes. But I think urging on everybody that it’s tremendously important to have political districts in which there’s a real chance of shifting parties, because that pushes people towards consensus. It pushes people towards the middle. And we desperately need to be able to create consensus and to be in the middle, I think, in order to make progress of any of these questions. Now it’s a long answer to it, but it has to be a long answer because it’s a complicated question – how you reshape the institutions in order to make these things more likely to happen . . . the good things that we need to happen. But I think that it’s an instance of the general problem. You take human nature, and unless you design the institutions very carefully, people will be incentivized to do things which everybody, if they stand back from, can see are not helpful. It’s remarkable to see very smart, thoughtful, committed public servants behaving like spoiled children in the legislature, whether it’s in the Congress, the House of Representatives or in the Senate. Because that’s sort of what the structure of incentives is. And we can’t individually do much about this. We can’t even do much about it collectively unless we reshape the institutions to reward the people who are going to behave differently. Right now a congressman who says . . . A congressman from an agricultural state who says, “Look. It’s more important right now for us to have a just system of world trade in agriculture than it is to subsidize the people in my district” is (01:12:18) going to lose the next election. And we have to figure out ways around that problem. And I don’t have a general answer; but on the particular question of the kind of polarizing partisanships, I do think there are institutional changes that we could make. They’re perfectly constitutional to make. They’re perfectly legal to make them in the states, which would diminish the extent to which that’s true.

Recorded on: 7/31/07

Transcript: by resources I don’t just mean water, and money, and food. I mean including political contexts and institutional context . . . to live a decent human life. And that should . . . Because we’re all responsible for one another; because we have a shared responsibility for each other and for the planet, those two problems are problems that everybody should care about. We should care to think about the fact that there’s, you know, a billion people who live on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. And that’s barely living, and they certainly don’t have the opportunity to make the sorts of choices in their lives that give life meaning; that answer the ethical question of, “What is it for a life to go well in a . . . (59:34) in a positive way. So we have to figure out how to reshape . . . I don’t think the question of the poorest . . . let’s say the poorest million people is to be settled simply by . . . It won’t be settled adequately by, as it were, sending a check to somebody. We have to reshape the world, because in the end people are only going to be able to have the resources for a life of significance if they are making and doing things that sustain their own lives. Receiving a sort of dull check from somebody somewhere is okay for staving off starvation, but that isn’t the basis for a decent life. So we have to figure out how to reshape the economies . . . the economy of the world, and through that the economies of the poorest place of the world so that people have meaningful things to do which can allow them to not only eat, and be sheltered, and not to be sick too much of the time, but also to live lives of significance. And these . . . these two questions are obviously interconnected, but unfortunately they are making . . . each of the other makes the other one harder. The environmental problem means that certain forms of growth which might have allowed us to create the wealth to kind of grow out of the inequality problem are no longer in the long run sustainable. And the poverty problem means that many people in the world need to be using more of the world’s resources, not less. And so that means that some of us are gonna have to use less given the environmental constraints. And that is a hard sell. I mean I admit it’s a hard sell to me. I live a comfortable life in a very rich country which I enjoy enormously, and I am aware . . . I plant trees in order to . . . in order to lessen my guilt about the carbon burn that I place on the planet for example. So I’m doing my little bit there. But in order to plant the trees, I have to own a garden. I once calculated that the land that I live on near Princeton is a little bit more . . . There’s two of us – me and my partner. We have a little bit more than our fair share of the planet if everybody were to have the same patch of land. So I’m already having more. I already have more than my fair share just because I have the amount of land that I do. Now I am more preoccupied . . . I’m not really myself . . . this is a sort of philosophical issue; but I myself don’t think what matters in these questions of resources is equality. What matters is sufficiency. What matters is everybody having the resources for a decent life. So I don’t think it’s bad thing in and of itself that Bill Gates has much more than everybody else. So I’m not preoccupied with . . . with sort of the leveling down in order to make everybody have the same access to resources. If there’s a way for Bill Gates to get his fair share while everybody else is getting what they are entitled to, and that fair share turns out to be 10, 20, 30 . . . I don’t care if it’s 30 billion dollars. What I do care about is that there are a billion people who don’t have what any . . . on any reasonable standard, the minimum necessary to lead a life of human significance. So I’m glad to say that Bill Gates cares about that too, which is why he’s spending hundreds of millions of dollars on some of the problems of the world’s poor, and more power to him. So I think that those are the questions, the big questions. They have . . . they require all the things that humans are good at. They require good science, good engineering. They also require us to deal with all the things that humans are bad at, which include taking sufficient concern for other people when our own interests are at stake. But that’s . . . I don’t think any of this is controversial. I think most sane observers would agree that we face these problems. And it’s not . . . it’s not a partisan matter. Republicans and Democrats in the United States both are clear that we have to do something about the environment, and the global inequality needs . . . something needs to be done about it. We need to restructure the global system in ways that give everybody a shot at a decent life.

Recorded on: 7/31/07

Transcript: Now I mean at the moment I think it’s a bit hard to be too optimistic about the situation and the species because of the way in which our behavior is causing our environment to sort of collapse around us. I’m pretty certain that the kind of collapse that will make life intolerable isn’t going to happen in my lifetime; but I think it may happen not long after unless we make pretty big changes. And I worry that we don’t have the institutions that will allow people who have a sense of responsibility for the environment to act upon it in a way that actually makes the necessary changes. And here I think is a place where we need really very much to have responsible leadership. Again, you know, people talk about democracies as if a democracy is everything; as if it were the result of the activities of the people, but in a well organized democracy we do indeed select the people who make the big decisions; but they . . . their characters, and their individual visions, and the visions of the parties and institutions within which they live can make a big difference as to how we’re led. Here’s an important sort of fact about . . . about democratic societies. The democratic societies in Europe, which have abandoned capital punishment, almost all did so at a time when a majority of the voters were in favor of it. And as a matter of fact, a majority of the voters are in favor of capital punishment in many European counties today even thought they don’t practice it anymore. But immediately after the abolition of capital punishment in England, which happened when I was in school in England, there was a big shift in public opinion. People said well, as it were, it use to be legal. So we thought okay, it’s okay. Now it’s not legal, so now we think maybe it’s not okay. And there was a case where responsible leaders voting in Parliament without actually pressure from their parties – they were just told vote your conscience – made a decision. And that decision not only produced, I think, a good result, but it produced a result that shifted public opinion. So I know from that experience living through that that people can be led by responsible leadership.

Recorded on: 7/31/07

Transcript: Well unlike many modern humanists, I do believe in something like human nature, and I think that our sort of psychological natures, and especially our social psychological natures are constantly being drawn upon in the life of societies and institutions to shape what their possibilities are. So for example, the salience of identities is deeply rooted in a feature of human beings, and a feature of our psyches of a need for this kind of identity, and the solidarity that goes with it, and the meaning that comes from it. Which if it weren’t in our natures, these things wouldn’t matter. Identity wouldn’t (53:33) matter. It matters only because it matters to us as humans. And it matters to us as humans because of the kind of creatures that we are. So I think that’s . . . that’s one of the places that I start. But I think that I also want to say because of how I think about our psychologists, I think that it’s crucial to recognize that the institutional context in which people live makes a huge difference again as to what their possibilities are. I’ve never committed a serious crime. I’m pretty certain that if I’d lived and been raised in certain kinds of environments, I would have committed a serious crime by now. So I’ve been lucky to live in an environment which hasn’t made committing serious crimes an attractive option for me, or one that I can sort of live with psychologically. You know it follows from that that you want to make a world in which nobody is in the situation which would tempt anybody to commit a crime. There are, I think, people – we tend to call them psychopaths or sociopaths – that are people who may be more easily tempted to those things in normal circumstances. So we need to keep an eye out for them. But most people won’t commit crimes if they’re . . . if they have reasonable amounts of resources, and a family that loves them, and a community that makes sense to them, and you know a decent police force. So I think looking back on history reinforces for me both the persistence of human nature and the importance of institutions. The importance of organizing the world in ways that respect our natures and allow us to do, given our natures . . . to lead good lives and behave well towards one another.

Recorded on: 7/31/07

Transcript: Well I think I have no doubt I got my basic morals and compass from Sunday school and my parents as it were. And so . . . and I don’t want to sort of, as it were, deny or . . . and hide any of that; but that has to do with where it comes from, and where an idea comes from doesn’t settle the question of whether it’s right or not. So some of the moral ideas that I was raised with I think were incorrect. And so I haven’t held on to all of them; and but the basic thought – the basic sort of what I take to be the basics of a Christian thought – which is that we’re all responsible for one another; that you should care about the fate of other people to a reasonable degree and so on. I mean these are . . . these are thoughts that are . . . I happen to learn this way. Of course they’re there in most of the world’s traditions. I’m not saying it’s a Christian thought in the sense that it’s unique to Christian thought; but it is a thought that is central to Christian moral . . . That’s how I got it, but I wouldn’t think that’s a reason for holding on to it. I think I’ve tried to subject it to criticism, analysis, reflection. And so the version of it I hold isn’t exactly the version I was taught in Sunday school. I don’t, for example, believe in the Golden Rule. I think that the Golden Rule is misframed; but I do feel that that’s an important part of where I came from. How important religion should be as a source of ideas both about morality and about metaphysic; about what the world is like; about who made us, if anybody; and how the universe was made and so on, of course depends on which religious claims are correct. Clearly if the central claims of, say, Buddhist metaphysics are correct, then the Buddhist worldview is a great view and it should be the source of your views if you know that. Now . . . But of course the difficulty is that we are . . . Because of our rather poor epistemological situation, I don’t think most of us are very well placed to decide what the correct metaphysical view is – which of the religious traditions are right about what, if anything. And so people . . . But people have to live with the views that they have. I think they should sustain them, subject them to some kind of analysis, reflection, perhaps even criticism; but still even if you do that, you’re gonna end up with a view that is going to be different from views of lots of other people, and you’re gonna have to live in a world where that’s true – where lots of other people have different views about these religious questions; and you are not likely in the course of a lifetime going to be able to persuade any single person around to the same view as you have. And nor are you going to be able to be able to come to a consensus with them that some view in between your view and theirs. And so we have to learn to live in a world in which because we are in a poor epistemological system situation; because we’re not well placed to find out the truth, we have to accept that other people will have views that are different from ours on some very important questions, and that there’s not much we can do to come agreement about that; though I think there is something we can do to try to understand other people’s points of view and to learn from that. I think even the most sort of thoughtful and convinced atheist has things to learn from talking to people in religious traditions, whether or not she recognizes it and vice versa. And people in religious positions, I think, have things to learn form each other and non-religious people if they are willing to engage in a conversation. But the conversation . . . If the conversation is guided by the thought that three weeks from now we’re going to come to agreement, then that’s . . . that’s a mistake, and you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

Recorded on: 7/31/07

Transcript: So if you are a philosopher, you get asked on planes and trains and so on, you know, what your philosophy is. And I do have this sort of corny answer, which is that my philosophy is that everything is much more complicated than you first thought. I . . . So I mean given that that’s what I really do think, I think that reality is very, very complicated and difficult. Morality is very complicated and difficult, and we need guides to make our way through it. We need pictures, I think; but none of the pictures we have is completely right. The best physics isn’t quite right. The best biology isn’t quite right. The best philosophy isn’t quite right. We are ever striving to make better pictures, and pictures are not true or false. They are more or less adequate to what they’re trying to represent. So I wouldn’t expect there to be a sort of massive and obvious coherence to my views or anybody else’s. I guess I do have as a result of this thought a kind of, as I say, a tendency to think that there’s going to be some merit in almost any picture. And so to look for the balance; to look for what can be learned from every set of claims, every perspective that’s reasonably on the table. Rather than trying to bang my way through to one correct picture even of a small subject matter, I like to see what can be gained by looking at something from many points of view. And I think that that’s something that sort of spills over into my view about how you should conduct yourself. Politically I very much believe in listening to people who have policy views that I regard as _________ preposterous. To try and figure out why they think what they think, and to see whether there might something be said for their view; and if they’re willing to, tell them, you know, how I got to my view and why I think it’s reasonable; and see whether we can, if not come to an agreement, at least understand each other better. And sometimes I think not come to an agreement but shift each other’s position so that we end up in different places as a result of the conversation, even if we don’t end up in the same place. So those are kind of temperamental things, but I think they flow from a . . . from a picture of what you might call our . . . what philosophers might call our epistemological situation; the fact that knowledge is pretty hard to come by. We’re not very well placed to come by the truth, and we have a better shot, I think, at coming by it if we pay attention to all of the many different attempts at the truth that are out there in many intellectual activities, many sciences, many other disciplines, and in many civilizations and many cultures.

Recorded on: 7/31/07

Transcript: There are certain people that I read . . . have read over the years who I’ve found particularly helpful to return to when I’m thinking about, say, these identity questions. John Stuart Mills comes to mind. I mean I think that “On Liberty” is a book that repays endless rereading, and most years I read some of it with students at some level, undergraduate or graduate because I find it so rewarding, and I learn new things each time I look at it. So I think there are . . . there are some particular philosophers that I find inspiring and helpful in that way. Not that I agreed with everything he says. I’m not a Millian, but I’m someone who finds Mill endlessly rewarding to read. In general in philosophy, I think one of the ideas that has actually proved the most useful to me is an idea . . . is a relatively technical idea that comes from the work of a philosopher that most people haven’t heard of called Frank Ramsey – who died when young in England in the 1930s – who was a colleague of Russell’s and Moore’s and _________ and so on, and who laid the foundations, among other things, for much more modern thinking in many fields, not just philosophy. He was one of the first people to work out the way of thinking about how people should take decisions. It’s called “decision theory”, which is at the foundation of much modern economics for example.

I think very often it’s helpful rather than, as it were, trying to say what it is for a concept to apply in a direct way. It’s often helpful to say no, let’s ask a different question. What would it take to persuade me that it applies to a particular thing? And what would I (42:32) . . . What would be legitimate to do if it did apply? And you can think of, say, some of the work that I did on race as applying this basic Ramsay idea to the race concept. Asking not what is race, but how do we use it? How do we decide that somebody is of a certain race? What are our practices of ascribing racial labels? And then what do we do when we’ve ascribed a racial label? What follows from that? And then you can ask the question, “Which aspect of this set of practices can be justified?” If our practices of ascription presuppose false biology then they can’t be justified. If our ways of treating people on the basis of race are inconsistent with fundamental moral principals, then those ways of treating people can’t be justified. And so we must revise and reform the concept both to make it intellectually sound and to make it consistent with what our best understanding is of reality, and also to make it morally or normatively sound so that we can make it consistent with our best understanding of morality, and what it is to lead a good and responsible life.

I don’t like characterizing philosophers in terms of their ancestry, there affiliation within philosophy; but if I have to – if you put a gun to my head and say, “You have to do that” – I’d say I’m a Ramsian and I’m a Millian. Those are the two philosophers who I think have had the most influence on me.

Recorded on: 7/31/07

Transcript: So some identities are, as philosophers would say, determinants of a determinable. So some are like race. In principle, you know, the racial system is laid out so that you have to be . . . either of mixed race or one of the races. And you can’t be, as it were, Black and Asian at the same time. You can be mixed race, but you can’t be straightforwardly Asian and straightforwardly black at the same time. So in that sense that mutual exclusivity is built into the structure of some kinds of identity; but there’s nothing in general about identities that excludes the overlap of different forms of identity of gender, and race, and sexual orientation, and religion, and nationality, and class all in a single person. And indeed most people have all of those things. Why . . . Well what’s a sensible thought about how to deal with them? Well first of all . . . and this relates to what the proper answer to the question of what your identity is. Usually in a context, it’s pretty clear which aspects of your identity are the ones that are relevant. Sometimes . . . If I’m at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association, my identity as a philosopher is kind of important. But if I go to a meeting of a church group, it probably isn’t. And so I know . . . I know without thinking about it often what the relevance is of different dimensions of my identity. So when people get into trouble with this, it’s because they think that one dimension of their identity makes a demand on them that is inconsistent with the demands made by some other dimension of their identity.

Question: How can you pick an identity?

I think there are sort of two helpful guiding thoughts. One is morality is helpful there. That is to say that there are general obligations that we have to other people independent of their identity and our identity, and we better make sure we discharge those first of all. So if you find yourself being pulled in two directions by your identities . . . if you find yourself being pulled in one direction say as a Serb, and in the other direction as a Christian, it might be helpful to remember that you’re a human being, and that you have obligations to other people that are not connected with whether you’re being . . . you’re a Serb or a Christian. So I think that’s one thing. Morality helps – morality which defines what we owe to everybody irrespective of their identities. The second thing is that sometimes we do have to make choices. That’s part of what it is to make a human life. It’s to weigh in the balance. Am I going to go here with my religious identity? Or am I going to go here with my racial identity in this particular context? Or am I going to find some way hitherto unthought of to bring them together without that strong tension? And people are doing this all the time. It can sound very difficult in theory, but my model for this really was my father. My father was an Ashanti and a patriot of Ashanti; and a Ghanaian and a patriot of Ghana. He wrote an autobiography called “The Autobiography of An African Patriot” because he was a Pan-Africanist. He was a devout Methodist and very active in his church and cared about his church. And he was a citizen of the world. He was an ambassador of the U.N. for a while, and he worked very much in international affairs. He cared about relations among nations. Now you might think how can you be a loyal Ashanti and a loyal Ghanaian? After all Ashanti is a kingdom in the middle of the Republic of Ghana. Well the answer is, you know, look at my father’s life as it were. And look at lots of lives. People do this sort of thing all the time. You can be a loyal citizen of Texas and a loyal American. Occasionally they will (36:56) pull you in different directions and then you have a choice to make. But much of the time, you know, being Texan is gonna be what matters for some purposes, and being American is what matters for others. And when they do come into conflict, you have many things to appeal to help you resolve the conflicts, including, I think, your own sense of the relative weight in your own life, which is up to you of your state identity as opposed to your national identity. So you can’t tell people. You can’t . . . These are things that people have to figure out for themselves, because there is no morally correct answer, no ethically pre-given answer given to the question, “What’s more important – Texan or an American? What’s more important? You know, a Christian or a philosopher?” These things are not . . . You have to figure it out for yourself. I think all you can say to people in trying to be helpful is that you’re often going to have people who share one of these identities with you, make demands of you on that basis; but you’re entitled to resist in the name of your morality; in the name of a human identify; but also in the name of other identities that you have and which you don’t share with them. Everybody . . . If you just . . . I worked out the other day that you only need to have 32 properties . . . to consider only 32 properties to have a set of bundles of properties such that everybody in the world can have a distinct and unique bundle of properties. Because two of the 32 is bigger than six billion, and there are only six billion of us. So even in the smallest village, right, there are both men and women. So all the other identities are potentially inflected by gender. And among the women, some have more resources than others. Some are married and some are unmarried. Some have children and some don’t have children. All of these affect how their lives look to them and how they’re going to make the balance of these things in their lives. And the sort of key thought of the liberal tradition goes back to Kant. It goes back to Humboldt. It goes back to liberal _________ mill in the 19th century. The key thought is each human being has to face the challenge of making this decision for herself. You can take advice from other people. You should take advice from other people. Other people can tell you useful things. But it’s your responsibility in the end to make a decision, and you shouldn’t defer that responsibility to anyone else.

Recorded on: 7/31/07

Question: Should we embrace or reject our differences?

Transcript: My general philosophical, as it were, temperament is to find a middle ground between . . . between extremes. This is something that Aristotle also recommended. And I think there are two natural thoughts about identity which are both wrong. One natural . . . but they are sort of at opposite ends. One natural thought which has been taken out by much identity____________ is this is really great stuff. It’s important. It’s wonderful. We should . . . No human life can be made sense of without lots and lots of identity stuff. And at the other end is the view that no, what really matters is that you’re a human being. And all these other things merely divide us from one another. And we should focus on our common humanity. And that what it is to lead a good life is to lead a good human life; not an American life; not a good gay life; not a good straight life, whatever; not a good Christian life, but a good human life and so on. I think these are both wrong. That is to say, I think that it is important that identities can be a source of limitation and constraint; and that therefore we shouldn’t celebrate them unreservedly. But I think it’s also important to recognize that they can be a source of liberation and freedom and meaning; that they can help us make sense of our lives. And so neither of the view according to which all identity is sort of ethically and politically to be escaped from, nor the view that we should settle into our given identities and just sort of live through them seems to me quite right. Now that’s a very abstract way of charactering a contribution; but I think that it pays off when you start thinking about some of the things that I’ve written about like, you know, how religion should fit into politics; or questions about racial identity and belonging; and the balance between accepting that racial identities are important for historical reasons in our societies on the one hand, and on the other hand recognizing that they can be sources of limitation and constraint; and that they therefore need to be modified and developed . . . changed in ways that allow people to do good things with them.

Question: What about race?

Again on the race question in particular, people are rather inclined to suppose either that one should sort of settle into one’s racial identity, or that in the end we should abandon racial identity; that we should move beyond race because, after all, race is a social construct and biological fantasy and so on. I think from the fact that it’s a social construct or a biological fantasy, it just doesn’t follow that we have to abandon it. Of course we have to abandon those features of it that are committed to these untruths. But something remains after that. Something historically remains. And whether people should give up racial identities depends on, I believe in the end, on the moral question that is, “Can you find racial identities that allow you to be a decent person in your treatment of other people?” to which I think the answer is yes. And also it depends on whether people want to go on with it. If people want to abandon their racial identities, hey I don’t care. I mean that’s fine by me. It’s up to them. That’s the liberal thought. The liberal thought is people have to make their own lives. They have to decide which aspects of their identities to draw on. If they don’t want to draw on a racial identity, it’s not anybody else’s job to force them into doing so. But if people want to, and if they can do so in a way that’s morally responsible, then I see nothing wrong with it. And again it tends to be that the world is divided between people who have one of these extreme views. We must move beyond racial identity. Or we must stick into the racial identities that we have. I think people should . . . I don’t think we have to move beyond them, and I think people should be free to make their own sense of their racial identities to develop them in the sort of way in which over the last generation we’ve been reshaping the social meaning of gender; we’ve been reshaping the social meaning of race. Those are fine things to be doing. And again, just as it would make no sense to me to say we should abandon gender identities on the grounds that sexism has led to some very bad things; so I don’t think it’s obvious that we should abandon racial identities because racism has led to some very bad things.

Recorded on: 7/31/07

Transcript: how does the fact that I’m an American, or of Anglican origin, or gay, or a philosopher, or a Democrat . . . how do these things fit properly into the shaping of a decent life for me? And what significance does that have for others, including governments who want to regulate me? What significance does it have for them that these things matter to me and for me? And how much freedom should I be allowed to explore and express those things myself? And that’s sort of what my book “The Ethics of Identity” was about. It was about . . . Well it was about the ethics of identity. It was about how these questions of identity fit into the big ethical question, which is, “What’s a good life?”

Recorded on: 7/31/07

Question: When did philosophy spark your interest?

Transcript: Before I was a month or two old, my father had announced to the world that I would either be a doctor and go to Cambridge, or a philosopher and go to Harvard. So apparently my father knew something that I didn’t. I only discovered this later on looking through press cuttings. I don’t remember this from my childhood. And as it happens I did study medicine at Cambridge, and I did teach philosophy at Harvard, so it’s sort of interesting. I mean I don’t remember the first time I realized that I was really interested in philosophy. I think two things happened. One is I happened to go to a school where there were other people of my age – 15, 16, 17 – who got interested in it. And they were interesting and smart people, and I hung out with them and we read philosophy together, partly influenced by a couple of teachers – one a chaplain and the other an atheist.

It’s hard to believe this, especially if you’ve read “Language Truth and Logic”; but I found a book called “Language Truth and Logic” in the bookroom at our school, the place where you can buy books. And I found it extremely exciting. This was sort of a positivist manifesto. I’m not any kind of positivist really, but it was . . . but the idea that you could think rigorously about these important questions, and that you could sort of break through the sort of incrusted assumptions of your society or of societies in general and sort of see through to a clearer vision of what the world was really like, and what was important. And so that struck me, I think, as very exciting. I was going through a religious crisis at the time. I was evangelical 15, 16 year-old, and I was . . . I suppose I was in the process of losing my faith. I wouldn’t have known that at the time. But I was very interested in sort of theological questions, and again the kind of rigor with which philosophical argument could address these questions which were addressed, I thought, quite less interestingly perhaps by in the sort of Sunday school or religious setting. I think that was part of what excited me. I have to say that while that’s what sort of brought me to the subject, I don’t find myself terribly interested now in those questions. In the United States where the vast majority of people claim some sort of religious belief haven’t thought much about what that means. I mean they haven’t thought about what it means not it in terms of what they should do, but in terms of how they should think. And in particular people are very vague, I think, about what they mean when they say they think there is a god. And one of the things I found helpful in philosophy as a 16, 17 year old was attempts by philosophers to say . . . Most of them were quite devout and religious, but they were nevertheless people who wanted to be more sort of rigorous about what that meant than most people. I’m using this word “rigor”, and I don’t . . . I mean Aristotle said you should adopt the level of the precision that’s appropriate to the subject so . . . and he was right.

Question: What does a philosopher do?

Transcript: Well basically philosophical research is done by reading, and writing, and talking to people. And I would say that what philosophers try to do is to get clear as we can about the conceptual issues that surround some of the more important questions that human beings have to deal with. Like is there a god, and what is he or she like? How should one come to make moral judgments? What is it for a judgment to be true; but also what does it mean to say that there are ________? You know science generates new questions all the time. What’s a species? These questions have theoretical issues in physics and biology, but they also raise philosophical questions which philosophers can contribute to helping to understand. So there’s a vast range of things you might be spending your time on. And I think the distinctive contribution of philosophers is to try and be more careful about the conceptual end of these questions than most other people have to be. It’s not that other people should be doing what we do. We should be doing what we do. They should be getting on with what they do as well; but it’s useful to the civilizations, to the culture to have people around who do what we do. I like to tell students that, you know, in a lot of life if you want to figure out what to do, you can make sort of a three-step argument. That three step argument for a philosopher is gonna be broken down into 30 steps. We’re gonna look . . . Between the first and the second step, we’re going to find 10 stages. And we’re going to argue that it makes a difference how you understand each term. Or it can make a difference how you understand each term. This is why I think philosophers since Socrates, who was . . . who was mocked for this by Aristophanes the comic playwright, have been regarded as sort of, you know, logic choppers and kind of Fosse wordmongers. And you can do that, and you can get kind of a fetish about making distinctions which have no point. And I’m not interested in that.

Question: Can other disciplines use philosophy?

Transcript: Most great scientists – when they say things about the philosophy of science, about how one discovers scientific truth, about how one justifies scientific claims, about what distinguishes science from non science and nonsense – what most scientists say about that is, I think, not terribly interesting. It’s not philosophically rewarding a lot of it. You don’t have to have a good theoretical (20:54) account of the nature of your activity in order to pursue that activity at the highest level. And that applies just as much to physics as it does to ice skating. Great ice skaters aren’t people who have a great theory of ice skating; and great physicists aren’t, I think, people who have a great theory of physics. They are people who are good at figuring physical things out, doing the experiments, or doing the theory . . . the mathematical theory that’s required; but they don’t necessarily have a better grip than other people on what it is about what they’re doing that’s distinctively successful. Just as one can have very good vision but not know that it’s photons of light banging onto your retina that’s giving you the messages, so you can be very good at figuring out scientific things and not very good at understanding how the science works. So . . . so I don’t think that the task of philosophy of science says to provide scientists with a theoretical account of what they’re doing that’s going to make what they’re doing better. They’re doing fine by themselves if that’s the question, and they don’t need our help in that. But they . . . But science is a source of thoughts, beliefs, propositions which the rest of us, whether we’re scientists or not, have to figure out how to fit into our world. And that’s, I think, a place in which philosophy can be useful. I think philosophy belongs in the humanities, because I think the humanities are about . . . they’re about transmitting what’s valuable in our civilization for everybody. All the physicist has to do is get the physics right. It doesn’t matter whether we understand her. It doesn’t matter whether she’s a public intellectual or not. All that matters . . . that’s her task. I think some philosophers do things that perhaps are hard to mediate to the general public. But if the whole business of philosophy isn’t connected with the general life of the civilization, I think it’s lost its point. A large part of what we’re trying to do is to provide a framework within which we can think about all the other things we do; not from, as it were, on top of them. I’m not saying philosophy, as they used to say, the Queen of the sciences. __________ said about theology actually. But I’m saying rather that philosophy has this special place because we try to think . . . One philosopher once said something like, “Well how things in general fit together in general,” or something like that. I think that is a distinctive role. So you know I’m happy to work at the theoretical end of many disciplines. I’ve done work, say, in literary theory, which I think is sort of useful for the study of literature; but . . . and so it’s sort of _________ offer to literary theorists if literary students are interested. But I don’t think they need to do that in order to be good at what they do. It’s just that sometimes we can come along and notice and notice one of those famous distinctions, and it can help to clarify an issue in another field.

Question: What can people borrow from philosophy?

Transcript: You know people borrow from philosophers all the time. Often they borrow in ways that philosophers find a bit puzzling because they seem to involve borrowing things without really understanding them in the way that a philosopher would count as understanding them. But that’s okay. I don’t mind that either. But I think that I don’t want to claim, as it were, that everybody’s profession would be better done if they spent 10 minutes a day doing the philosophy of the profession. I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s rather that what we think about as the relationship between what everybody’s doing; and what everybody else is doing; and how each of us can sort of fit it in together in a picture of the world; and in constructing our projects and deciding how we are going to spend our lives.

Recorded on: 7/31/07

Transcript: My name is Kwame Anthony Appiah. I teach philosophy at Princeton. So I came from, as it were, two families. Everybody comes from two families, but mine came from rather further apart than most. My mother was born in the west of England on the border of Oxford in Gloucestershire in a part of the world where her father’s family lived for hundreds of years. And my father was born in West Africa in Ghana in the capital of the Ashanti Kingdom, which is sort of in the middle of Ghana in a town called Kumasi is the old capital where his family had also been for hundreds of years. And I guess I was brought up knowing something of the family history on both sides. So my mother’s father was a politician as was my father. My mother’s father . . . he was what’s called Chancellor of the Exchequer in England. He was finance minister just after the war. He was leader of the House of Commons during the war when Churchill was Prime Minister, and he was a pretty well known sort of socialist member of Parliament for much of his life. Also a lawyer, a very successful lawyer. He was Attorney General at one point. And my father was also a politician. He was a Member of Parliament in Ghana, an independent. He was also a lawyer. He was eventually President of the Ghana Bar Association. And I would say they were both people not very well designed for politics. My grandfather was a bit stiff necked. He was rather uninclined to the sort of compromise that I think is probably required to make politics work. And my father, if anything, was even worse at that. He was very bad at compromising and he stuck to his principals a great deal, which meant that he was always in opposition. He was never really in government . . . in elected government positions; but he enjoy . . . he really enjoyed, I think, being the kind of gadfly more than he probably would have enjoyed being in charge of anything.

My mother wrote children’s stories which were, in the first place, based on stories that my father had told us when we were growing up – traditional folk tales from Ashanti where we were growing up. And then she moved out and started writing other children’s books; but we started out . . . She started out writing stories based on the folk traditions of my father’s place. So that’s who they were. My father’s father was the brother-in-law of the king actually where we lived, and also his secretary. And then when the king died he was succeeded by my uncle who was married to my father’s sister, my Aunt Victoria. So we were pretty well connected in Kumasi I suppose. I remember going to the palace a good deal when I was a child to see my grandmother, who was the wife of the king.

I have to say that – and I think my sisters would agree – it didn’t strike us as a very difficult thing to do. We went back and forth between my mother’s part of the world, my grandmother’s home in England and our home. In both places we had large families that we knew. Many cousins, and uncles, and aunts and so on with whom we spent a lot of time when we were visiting them in England, and with whom we spent time in Ghana because we all lived together in the same town. I don’t remember thinking about it. I guess I’m not quite sure how old I was before I realized that most people didn’t do this; that most people didn’t oscillate back and forth between west Africa and western Europe. So I don’t remember thinking about it as terribly difficult.

At home in Ghana we were visited often by people from many places. I don’t remember it, but apparently Richard Wright, the African American novelist, visited us when I was a child. And C.L.R. James, the west Indian intellectual, visited. And then Pandit, who is the sister of Nehru, the Prime Minister of India. And my parents knew people from all over the place. So I think we grew up with a sense that we knew people in every continent, and that we were connected with them. And increasingly we were connected with them also through family. One of my English cousins lives in Thailand and is married to ______ wife. One of his sisters married a Kenyan and lived until he died in Kenya and so on. So we had . . . I had a Lebanese uncle in Ghana because one of my father’s cousins married a Lebanese man who lived in our hometown. So we grew up with a . . . in a family that contained people from many places. My Lebanese cousins, their father was Muslim so we knew about Islam a little bit. I have Jewish cousins in England, so I knew a little bit about that. We ourselves were sort of boring, mainstream Protestants. Both my parents were pretty active in their respective churches. I guess, you know, one of the things I do think about my background is that I got a lot of my sort of my moral education from Sunday School; from a certain kind of Christian background, which both my parents cared about a good deal. And it led them and it encouraged them to lead us to be pretty convinced of the importance of not tolerating injustice I suppose. My father was very active doing kind of pro bono, often political cases in Ghana when he was . . . as a lawyer, and I think, you know, we just grew up in a family which was pretty preoccupied with political life and with social life. My mother was very active in community stuff. We were taken when we were children very often to the children’s home and the old people’s home in our hometown to sort of take food to them, to see people there. So that, I think, was an important influence. I don’t mean that I spent all my time in old people’s homes and orphanages; but I do think I acquired from them the sense that you shouldn’t stand by when injustice is being done; and that you should be sort of actively involved in whatever community you live in. My father said to us before he died that we should think of ourselves always as . . . He said, “You should think of yourselves as citizens of the world,” and it’s clear that what he meant was, “I don’t care where you live. It would be nice if you lived in Ghana, but if you didn’t want to live in Ghana that’s fine. If you live in England that doesn’t matter either. What matters is that wherever you are, you are a kind of good citizen of that place, and that you have some sense of responsibility for the whole species, for the planet.” And the fact that he bothered to say it in this rather high-minded way was a reflection, I think, of the fact that he took that pretty seriously. And I try to take it seriously too. And it’s a good thing that he put it that way since only one of my sisters live in Ghana. The other two live in Namibia and Nigeria. And my Namibian sister is actually married to a Norwegian, so she lives a little bit between southern Africa and Western Europe.

Recorded on: 7/31/07