Cosmopolitanism

Appiah introduces Sir Richard Francis Burton, a colorful Victorian who represents aspects of the second strand of cosmopolitanism. Burton, well traveled from childhood, was a gifted linguist who did translations for many languages, including Persian, Arabic, and Hindi. He also published a poem that he claimed was a translation of Persian poetry but was likely his own work presented as that of an alter ego. This poem described truth as “the shattered mirror strown / In myriad bits; while each believes / His little bit the whole to own” (5). Appiah describes Burton as someone curious about perspectives other than his own, a cosmopolitan characteristic. However, he did not show much acknowledgement of his responsibility to other human beings, the first strand of cosmopolitanism. Appiah notes that Burton seemed to believe knowing the whole truth wasn’t possible. Using the imagery from Burton’s purported translation, Appiah says Burton believed it was only possible to have “your little shard of the mirror” that does not reflect the whole (8).

Disagreements about truth claims often come up over religious practices, Appiah observes, so he uses the examples of making hajj, or going to Mecca, for devout Muslims and going to Mass for devout Catholics to assert that human beings do not have to agree about the exact meaning of an act to tolerate it. For instance, non-Muslims or non-Catholics may not accept the religious meanings of going to Mecca or attending Mass, and they might even consider those meanings mistaken, but they don’t necessarily consider the acts morally wrong, and they might even respect the integrity of living by beliefs.

However, there are limits to this “live-and-let-live attitude” (10). For example, some groups consider any religious expression outside their own to be idolatrous or offensive. Moreover, some religious and cultural practices may strike others as morally wrong beyond what they can tolerate. It would be convenient to have a rule book to resolve these conflicts, but it would be difficult to agree on the rule book and its application (11). Because of that difficulty, there is a tendency to accept that there is no one truth, that there is a “shattered mirror” of lots of moralities (11).

Cultural anthropologists by definition have an intellectual curiosity toward other cultures, one of the strands of cosmopolitanism. However, anthropologists tend to mistrust the idea of having responsibilities to other societies beyond leaving them alone.

Appiah identifies reasons for anthropology’s skepticism about intervening in other societies, providing a historical overview. Anthropologists often see outsiders’ perceptions of cultural practices as uninformed and lacking in context. This leads to the notion that “moral claims just reflect moral preferences” (15-16). Modern relativism has “hardened” into the idea that objective truth is itself an error (17).

Modern relativism is a scientific worldview based on a distinction between facts and values. This idea develops fully into what Appiah calls positivism, which is not one philosopher’s perspective but a picture of the world held by most educated people since the Enlightenment. Positivism holds that people are driven by (1) beliefs about what the world is like, which can be right or wrong based on evidence, and (2) desires about how we wish the world to be, which can be satisfied or unsatisfied based on us alone.

For a positivist, values end up being something very similar to desires, not nearly as substantive as facts. Hard evidence can require you to accept a fact, but science can’t explain why you shouldn’t desire something—unless you can somehow critique a belief underpinning the desire. If some people simply have different desires (and values) from ours, we cannot criticize them through appeal to reason. Appiah presents this as problematic, writing that there is “no alternative to relativism about fundamental values” (22).

Appiah notes challenges to positivism: If one has to point to every fact and provide evidence for every belief for a theory to be true, then it is hard to accept any theory. In addition, if one asserts that a belief (in, say, that something green is actually red) is unreasonable, is that a fact? What evidence supports this claim that it is unreasonable? If there is no evidence, it might be a value rather than a fact. Positivists also do not value toleration of others; they cannot champion that value over any other held.

Values shape actions, thoughts, and feelings. Interested in an alternative to positivist values, Appiah notes that if you hold kindness as a universal value, you want everyone to be kind, and you want everyone to want everyone to be kind because you recognize kindness’s value. He notes that it is actually rare to meet someone who thinks cruelty is good and suggests that people who hold minority opinions like this should be convinced otherwise or avoided.

Positivism’s biggest problem, Appiah suggests, is its starting point, which is the individual rather than the community (27). Values are defined by social consensus achieved through conversation. Appiah sees discussing stories (for example, movies) as one important way that humans refine values. When a group responds to a film using evaluative language, it can reinforce values and help think through questions. Using a “shared language of value” (30), Appiah thinks that diverse groups can meaningfully converse on moral questions. This is preferable to relativism, which closes off discussion by accepting that everyone is right from their own perspective (30-31).

Appiah describes his father’s and other Ghanaian family members’ belief in spirits and witchcraft. These kinds of beliefs are not symbolic, and they are not limited only to the Asante people in Ghana; belief in invisible spirits arises in many cultures. The positivist view would be that this is simply counterfactual and irrational, but Appiah wants to complicate the notion of “facts.”

Appiah invites the reader to imagine trying to persuade a hypothetical Asante believer that witchcraft is not real. To convince someone that sickness is caused by viruses, one must appeal to authority (science), and perhaps experience, to try to show that correlations that seem to be caused by witchcraft are not real. But they seem real to the believer, and there are alternate authorities and experiences. What is rational to us is primed by what preconceptions we already hold.

In the early 20th century, French physicist Pierre Duhem observed that scientists tend to deny or explain away evidence that contradicts their favored theories. He proposed the Duhem thesis, the idea that all theories are underdetermined, that people can come up with different theories to explain the same data. What’s more, the philosopher N. R. Hanson pointed out that collecting data itself involves theoretical preconceptions.

So, Appiah argues, we all work from a “great raft of beliefs” from our culture and society that we build on (41), even the scientifically minded. For his family members, he says, it is not irrational to believe in witchcraft, but this belief is not as effective a tool for understanding the world as science. However, while the scientific worldview does offer progress, it has not necessarily led to progress in understanding values; for that, we might need to look to societies where it is less engrained than our own. Appiah also suggests, against the positivist view, that there is no guarantee about resolving disagreement over facts, as facts may be no easier to come to resolution over than values.

Moral disagreement is common even within societies, but there are different types of disagreement. American philosopher Michael Walzer proposed that we have “thick” concepts of right and wrong (like rudeness or courage) particular to individual cultures, and “thin” concepts (like goodness) that tend to be shared more broadly across cultures. Sometimes a disagreement concerns a moral concept that another culture doesn’t have.

All societies agree on the importance of raising children well, so this is a “thin” value. Appiah describes the traditional family structure in his father’s Akan culture. Families are organized matrilineally, with maternal uncles playing the role fathers would in a Western family. Here, a distinctive family form is the “thick” value.

Appiah also acknowledges the existence of “taboos” in his father’s culture (and elsewhere), meaning local values that are not really moral and that produce pollution when they are broken. He thinks that avoiding breaking taboos is becoming less important in the face of other values because it is understood that not everyone shares them. Yet all cultures have values that are rooted in a sense of disgust that can protect us from real dangers but also can be irrational. For those who take the many prohibitions in Leviticus seriously, for example, this involves a complex set of religious beliefs and an intense emotional reaction. We don’t have to share these values to understand their motives, and we can discern some values in Leviticus, and most places, that are more universal.

When cultures do have enough common vocabulary to have conversation, the value terms they use tend to be “open-textured,” meaning people can “reasonably disagree about whether they apply in a particular case” (58). What counts as brave or cruel, for example, requires some discretion and could be contested. This is another way of having moral disagreement. Appiah examines the Golden Rule, which shows up in several world religions and is often mentioned as the basis for a global ethic. One limitation, however, is that when deciding how to treat someone, you have to choose between what you would prefer yourself and what you might prefer if you held the other person’s values. This is not a straightforward question, Appiah asserts.

Even when we share values and how to apply them, we might have moral disagreement about what weight to give our values. For example, even if two cultures agree that romantic love and family are both important, they may not agree that it is justified to turn against family to marry your true love.

Thus, Appiah sees three types of moral disagreement: failure to share a vocabulary of evaluation, differing interpretations of an idea, and differing valuations of ideas. It might seem like cross-cultural conversations will always result in disagreement, but Appiah ends the chapter by saying this is not so.