Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers | Kwame Anthony Appiah

Furthermore, there is no culture, including our own, that possesses all the virtues to a supreme degree, any more than there is an individual human being who is such a paragon. We all have something positive to learn from others, therefore; no person and no culture has the definitive answer to the eternal question of how we should live. An awareness of the possibility of difference, that the way one does things is not the only conceivable way to do them, is the beginning of all serious moral reflection.

So far so good. Professor Appiah also shows us that belonging to humanity and believing in the metaphysical equality of each person wherever he comes from and whatever his culture do not entail the rigorist consequences proposed by another philosopher at Princeton, Peter Singer, who believes that if you fail to devote the whole of your discretionary income to saving life that might otherwise be saved by it you are as good as killing the people you have thus failed to save. As Appiah points out, a world in which everyone behaved as Professor Singer advised would be deeply impoverished, in more senses than one; indeed, had everyone behaved according to Singer’s categorical imperative from the outset of history, Man would still be living in the caves.

Appiah is so urbane and balanced that one begins to wonder how it ever came about that the world is, and always has been, so conflict-ridden. He grew up in Kumasi, in a cosmopolitan milieu in which everyone accepted everyone else, including their religious customs, as a matter of course. Why can’t the world be more like the Kumasi of his childhood?

The author’s recollection of a pre- lapsarian world, in which every kind of believer rubbed along with every other kind of believer in perfect amity, leads him to a rather rosy-spectacled view of Islam, according to which (as he quotes) ‘there is no compulsion in religion’. Yes, but what about the well-known punishment for apostasy, which is surely somewhat coercive? While custom can accommodate contradiction, doctrine cannot — which explains why those inspired by doctrine are so often exceedingly cruel. We live in a world in which ever more people feel the need for a doctrine to call their own: an unintended consequence, no doubt, of the vast expansion of education in the last 50-100 years. If Democrats and Republicans cannot now meet comfortably over the dinner tables of New York, what chance is there that secularists, let alone atheists, and Salafists will come to an amicable arrangement about how the world should be governed?

In the end, this book doesn’t answer the hard questions because it doesn’t ask them. I don’t expect the Israelis and Hezbollah to reach an agreement when they come to realise that they share 99.99 per cent of their DNA, as well as all the physiological needs of human beings. Sometimes differences are what count.