Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes

In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you're playing

Conversation doesn’t have to lead to consensus about anything especially not values; it’s enough that it helps people get used to one another

The challenge, then, is to take minds and hearts formed over the long millennia of living in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become.

Conversations...begin with the sort of imaginative engagement you get when you read a novel or watch a movie or attend to a work of art that speaks from some place other than your own. So I'm using the word 'conversation' not only for literal talk but also as a metaphor for engagement with the experience and ideas of others. And I stress the role of the imagination here because the encounters, properly conducted, are valuable in themselves. Conversation doesn't have to lead to consensus about anything, especially not values; it's enough that it helps people get used to one another.

The version of cosmopolitanism that I favor is exactly about balancing universality and difference. Many people who believe rightly in universality, want, wrongly, I think, to impose their vision of the world on others. They think not just that there are universal truths but that they already know what they are. And they don't think they have anything to learn, as a result, from others. They don't converse, they try to convert.

I started philosophy looking for answers. But along the way I came to prize exploring the questions. Progress in philosophy consists, I think, in a clearer delineation of the conceptual options, not in reaching determinate conclusions.

A value is like a fax machine: it’s not much use if you’re the only one who has one.

I believe there are universal moral values - some of which are very well served by a cosmopolitan attitude. You can think that there are universal values without supposing that everyone agrees as to what they are and without supposing that you have got them all right either.

Cosmopolitans begin, I think, with a sense of one thing we all certainly share, which is our fallibility. Nobody has reason to be confident that they're right about everything. That's one of the motivations for conversation across differences. It's in my interest to converse with people who are wrong about different things from the ones I'm wrong about!

There are many agreements across the so-called "world religions," at a certain level of abstraction. But when it comes to applying them in concrete situations they may lead to incompatible decisions. As an example, some people think that Christian ideas of sexual modesty suggest that homosexuals should be locked up, some people think that they mean that the churches should recongize gay marriages. But everyone believes in sexual modesty. I think there are universal moral truths, whether or not everyone accepts them. Here's one very low level but important one: it's very bad to torture people.

We can't literally talk with everybody else on the planet or even with representatives of every group. But we can be in favor of the respectful exchange of ideas in ways that don't presuppose that all the right answers are on our own side. Still, we should all have moral bottom lines. Once genocide or torture begins the priority shifts from understanding to stopping it. One hope I have for the global conversation as instantiated in human rights treaties is that we are slowly coming to consensus on certain moral baselines.

If someone hates you, they won't ask you for things.

One of the central challenges for global conversation today is to find ways of getting to understand very different views about gender and sexuality. But we should start by recognizing that these issues are subjct to disputation within every society as well as across societies. We need a global conversation that recognizes that we have these very different views. Next, try to agree on fundamental rights: things we think every person is entitled to. Finally, if we're convinced that what a government or a society elsewhere is doing to some people is badly wrong and the conversation gets nowhere.

The phrase 'academic freedom' is often used carelessly: here is a work that will allow a more careful conversation about those many crucial issues facing the academy, in which a well-worked out understanding of conceptions of academic freedom is, as its authors show, an essential tool.