Reviewed of Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity
Author(s)
Weinstock, Daniel
Abstract
The spirit that hovers over The Ethics of Identity is Mill’s, and in particular the Mill of On Liberty. This is true in at least two senses. First, it occupies a similar philosophical position to Mill’s great work in being neither a philosophy of liberal institutions nor an apolitical ethics, considering the rights and obligations of agents somehow divorced from their social and political contexts, but rather an account of the interface between individuals, liberal states, and the religious and ethnocultural communities that mediate the relationship between them. But it is also substantively Millean in putting forward an account of the importance and nature of individuality that stands at a certain distance from the kind of individualism that drives much contemporary liberal theory. Appiah realizes that, to paraphrase Marx, human agents make their lives but do not do so in circumstances of their choosing
