Kwame Anthony Appiah: Ethics, Identity, and Idealization

This chapter explores the wide-ranging moral theorising of Kwame Anthony Appiah. The chapter begins with Appiah’s early engagement with Du Bois, Pan-Africanism, and his initial considerations of the ways in which race can be considered morally significant. Appiah’s reformulation of his arguments about race into questions of identity (while contested) leads his work to offer important contributions to understanding how moral lives are formed and lived in relation to collective identity meanings. It is argued that Appiah’s work adds to contemporary sociological-psychological work on moral identity by integrating deeper notions of who we are and how we understand ourselves as being to questions of ethical significance. Yet, his work remains wedded to notions of individuality and life plans that are hard to sustain from the perspective of contemporary social scientific accounts of human agency. How this point manifests itself in Appiah’s resort to “as if” arguments is the focus of the final section.