Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Individuality ****

As a person nearing retirement, I have been thinking a lot about the question of personal identity. It's often noted that we derive a large portion of our identity from the work that we do. How will my identity change when I'm no longer a technical writer or a Googler? My mother's friends know me only as "Google Mike"!

I was attracted to The Ethics of Identity by the final word of the title, but as the second word makes clear it is a work of philosophy not of psychology or self-help.

The (small L) liberal conception is that each person should be free to autonomously craft their individuality, and that the state should support each person's flourishing according to their freely chosen definition of flourishing. The first complication is clarifying what the terms. What is "individuality" and how "autonomous" are we?

It may be helpful to consider two rival pictures of what is involved in shaping one's individuality. One, a picture that comes from romanticism, is the idea of finding one's self –– of discovering, by means of reflection or a careful attention to the world, a meaning for one's life that is already there, waiting to be found. This is the vision we can call authenticity: it is a matter of being true to who you already are, or would be if it weren't for distorting influences. … The other picture, the existentialist picture, let's call it, is one in which, as the doctrine goes, existence precedes essence: that is, you exist first and then decide what to exist as.

Either way, we don't construct our identities ex nihilo. Rather, we use values and experiences that flow from our membership in groups.

For many critics, the language of autonomy reflects an arrogant insularity; all that talk of self-fashioning, self-direction, self-authorship suggests a bid to create the Performance Art Republic.

The rhetoric of authenticity proposes not only that I have a way of being that is all my own, but that it developing it I must fight against … all the forces of convention. This is wrong… My identity is crucially constituted through concepts and practices made available to me by religion, society, school, and state, and mediated to varying degrees by family. … They are not constraints on the shaping; they are its materials. …

Given the diversity of concepts and practices that define people's values, how can –– and how should –– the state support everyone's inevitably conflicting definition of flourishing? This is where the ethical questions come in.

The book offers compelling insights throughout. I really appreciate Appiah's conclusion about how we can best reach each other across cultures and value systems: through specific situations rather than disputed abstractions. 

We often don't need robust theoretical agreement in order to secure shared practices… The humanism I have caricatured was right in thinking that what we humans share is important. It was wrong about the contours of what we share. Far from relying on a common understanding of our common human nature or a common articulation (through principles) of a moral sphere, we often respond to situations of others with shared judgments about particular cases. It isn't principle that brings the missionary doctor and the distressed mother together at the hospital bedside of a child with cholera: it is a shared concern for this particular child.

I share the view that there is a "basic level" of experience that we share as human beings. Different groups extract different abstractions (like autonomy) from those experiences, but we can bridge the gap between them by returning to the basic level.

To make sense of inequality or injustice, we often suppose that we need a positive account of equality and justice, taking those terms as conceptually primary. We may do better to accept that inequality and injustice are, in fact, the primary concepts. "No fair!" your four-year-old protests, and you see her point, even if you still can't offer a pervasive account of fairness…

I also found Appiah's thoughts about diversity thought provoking.

The rhetoric of diversity has risen as its demographic reality has declined… There are still seders and nuptial masses, still gefilte fish and spaghetti. But how much does an Italian name tell you, these days, about church attendance, or knowledge of Italian, or tastes in food or spouses? …

You might wonder, in fact, whether there isn't a connection between the thinning of the cultural content of identities and the rising stridency of their claims. Those European immigrants, with their richly distinct customs, were busy demanding the linguistic Americanization of their children, making sure they learned America's official culture. One suspects they didn't need to insist on public recognition of their culture, because they simply took it for granted. Their middle-class descendants, whose domestic lives are conducted in English and extend eclectically from MTV to Chinese takeout, are discomfited by a sense that their identities are somehow shallow by comparison… 

Spectator-sport diversity would seem to have more aesthetic than moral force. I may fervently want there to be Amish driving buggies, Mennonites milking cows, and Shakers shaking on their exquisitely crafted furniture; but it would be a moral error to take measures, therefore, to discourage members of these picturesque communities from leaving and joining others.