What were they thinking?' we as... - Kwame Anthony Appiah - Quotes.Pub

What were they thinking?' we ask about our ancestors, but we know that, a century hence, our descendents will ask the same thing about us. Who knows what will strike them as strangest? The United States incarcerates 1 percent of its population and subjects many thousands of inmates to years of solitary confinement. In Saudi Arabia, women are forbidden to drive. There are countries today in which homosexuality is punishable by life in prison or by death. Then there's the sequestered reality of factory farming, in which hundreds of millions of mammals, and billions of birds, live a squalid brief existence. Or the toleration of extreme poverty, inside and outside the developed world. One day, people will find themselves thinking not just that an old practice was wrong and a new one right but that there was something shameful in the old ways. In the course of the transition, many will change what they do because they are shamed out of an old way of doing things. So it is perhaps not too much to hope that if we can find the proper place for honor now, we can make the world better.

Inspirational Quotes / Honor Quotes

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes

Self-regarding considerations can be as universalizable as other-regarding considerations: we owe things to ourselves as well to others.

We do not need to find something we are best at; what is important is simply that we do our best.

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.

And though upper-class status doesn’t always entail having money, it does entail some social proximity to money. Real poverty, it has been observed, is about social isolation as much as it is about material deprivation; the poor don’t have the sort of friendship networks that the advantaged draw upon.29 That’s why we may balk at calling a penniless graduate student “poor.” Class is one way that you benefit from the money in the pockets of friends and acquaintances.

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.

All Faith is false, all Faith is true: Truth is the shattered mirror strown In myriad bits; while each believes His little bit the whole to own.

The most reliable predictor of whether students liked a course, it turned out, was their answer to the question ’’Did the professor respect you?

In the world of identity, utterances have functions, separate from their meanings.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. I am human, I think nothing human alien to me.

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.

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.

Being deluged with trolley problems is one of the professional hazards of modern moral philosophy.

Experiments in Ethics Quotes

To create a life is to create a life out of the materials that history has given you.

The Ethics of Identity Quotes

Possibly, there was something to be said for the intellectual discipline of second-guessing what you thought was true.

Humility Quotes / Maturation Quotes Openness Quotes

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.

The Ethics of Identity Quotes

The most reliable predictor of whether students liked a course, it turned out, was their answer to the question ‘‘Did the professor respect you?

Education Quotes / Counseling Quotes Mentoring Quotes Openness Quotes

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 are due.

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers Quotes

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.

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers Quotes

And that, as we've seen, seems consistent with our broader explanatory habits-with the observation that much of whatwe 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 as anyone else's, and in many circumstances actually less so.1a

Experiments in Ethics Quotes

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 statute are. To extract from this mishmash of mixed motives a singular coherent intention will usually be impossible.46

The Ethics of Identity Quotes

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