Cosmopolitanism - by Kwame Anthony Appiah

ISBN: 9780393079715
Date read: 2025-09-28
How strongly I recommend it: 7/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

So many interesting ideas and questions about relativism, beliefs vs desires, openness, authenticity, pluralism.

my notes

Cynics ~400 BC first coined the word “cosmopolitan”: citizen of the cosmos.
It was meant to be paradoxical.
A citizen belonged to a city to which he or she owed loyalty.
Cosmopolitanism originally signaled a rejection of the conventional view that every civilized person belonged to a community among communities.

There is much to learn from our differences.
We neither expect nor desire that every person or every society should converge on a single mode of life.

Hitler and Stalin launched regular invectives against “rootless cosmopolitans”.
Anti-cosmopolitanism was often just a euphemism for anti-Semitism.
Patriotism requires loyalty to one portion of humanity - a nation, a class - ruling out loyalty to all of humanity.

How real are values?
What do we talk about when we talk about difference?
Is any form of relativism right?
When do morals and manners clash?
Can culture be “owned”?
What do we owe strangers by virtue of our shared humanity?

A cosmopolitan openness to the world: picking and choosing among the options you find in your search.

Words like “right” and “wrong” make sense only relative to particular customs, conventions, cultures.

What grounds modern relativism is a scientific worldview that makes a sharp distinction between facts and values.

Those who claim that they are just talking common sense are in the grip of an old theory.

Beliefs are supposed to reflect how the world is.
Desires reflect how we’d like it to be.
Beliefs are meant to fit the world.
The world is meant to fit desires.
So beliefs can be true or false, reasonable or unreasonable.
Desires are satisfied or unsatisfied.
Beliefs are supposed to be formed on the basis of evidence.
Desires are just facts about us.

In an earlier philosophical language, desires would have been called “passions” from a Latin root meaning something you suffer, or undergo.
Because passions are just things that happen to us, no evidence determines which ones are right.

When we act, we use our beliefs about the world to figure out how to get what we desire.

Because beliefs are about the world, and there’s only one world, they can be either right or wrong, and we can criticize other people’s beliefs for being unreasonable or simply false.
But desires can’t be right or wrong, in this sense, because desires are simply not responses to the world; they’re aimed at changing it, not at reflecting how it is.

Much of what we ordinarily desire has beliefs built into it.
This is the only way desires can be criticized: by criticizing beliefs they presuppose.

Desires set the ends we aim for.
Beliefs specify the means for getting to them.

When we talk about what we take to be universal values, we’re talking about what we want everyone to want.
If we say democracy is valuable, then we want everyone to want to live in a democracy.
We might say that someone who wants everyone to want X “believes that X is valuable,” but that is still just a complex desire.
I value kindness intrinsically, unconditionally.
Even if you showed me that some acts of kindness would have effects I didn’t want, that wouldn’t persuade me to give up kindness as a value.
It would only show me that kindness can sometimes conflict with other things I care about.
To value something is to want everyone to want it.
Values are naturally imperialist.

Positivism doesn’t motivate intervention, but it doesn’t motivate nonintervention.
British officer trying to stop a suttee was told by an Indian man, “It’s our custom to burn a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre.”
To which the officer replied, “And it’s our custom to execute murderers.”
Toleration is just another value.

Care how other people think and feel about stories?
People tell stories - discussed, evaluated, referred to in everyday life.
Evaluating stories together is one of the central human ways of aligning our responses to the world.

If relativism about ethics and morality were true, then at the end of many discussions, we would each have to end up saying, “From where I stand, I am right. From where you stand, you are right.”

Living effectively in different worlds:
Without a shared world, what is there to discuss?
People think relativism will lead to tolerance.
But if we cannot learn from one another what it is right to think and feel and do, then conversation between us will be pointless.
Relativism of that sort is just a reason to fall silent.

Ghana’s atheists could hold their meetings in a phone booth.

It’s impossible to present data in language that isn’t infused with theoretical ideas.
What it’s reasonable for you to believe, as you look out on the world, depends both on what you believe already and on what ideas you have been introduced to.

Everyone has his own taboo: the ruler, the royal, and the slave.
The ruler’s taboo is disagreement.
The royal’s is disrespect
The slave’s is the revealing of origins.

People eat pigs but won’t eat cats.
Since there are societies where people eat cats, we know it’s possible.
The defense is that the very thought of it fills them with disgust.

We defend them as rational, yet these reactions are not really explained by the stories we tell.
You might think that failing to respect your parents is a bad thing, but that it’s bad in a way that’s different from adultery; different, too, from sex with an animal; different, again, from incest.
In Leviticus 20:9–13, all of them are deemed worthy of death.

Courage is an intelligent response to danger, not just ignoring it.

When we disagree, it won’t always be because one of us just doesn’t understand the value that’s at stake.

Golden Rule:
When you do something to someone, what you do can be truly described in infinitely many ways.
I have to know not just why I am doing what I am doing unto others, but also how the act will strike those others.

Kant argued that whenever you were trying to pick the right thing to do, you should identify a universal principle on which to act (he called it a “maxim”).
Universalizing the maxim:
Would you be happy if everyone had to act on that maxim?

Tragedy is not a clash between good and evil but between two goods.

Be able to agree about practices while disagreeing about their justification.

In medieval Spain, Jews and Christians lived under Muslim rule.
It was possible only because the various communities did not have to agree on a set of universal values.
These historical examples of religious toleration were early experiments in multiculturalism.
Shared values help us live together.
But we don’t have a shared theory of value or a shared story.
As long as this settled pattern is not seriously disrupted, we do not worry much about whether our fellow citizens agree with us or their theories about how to live.

We do what we do because it is just what we do.
Justifications come not when we are going on in the usual way, but when we are thinking about change.

What moves people is a gradually acquired new way of seeing things.
In places where a generation ago gays were social outcasts and gay acts were illegal, gay couples are increasingly being recognized by their families, by society, and by the law.
What has produced this change?
Instead of thinking about the private activity of gay sex, people started thinking about the public category of gay people, and got used to it.

We should learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement, but because it will help us get used to one another.
We don’t understand things. We just get used to them.

We can live in harmony without agreeing on underlying values.
It works the other way, too:
We can find ourselves in conflict when we do agree on values.

One of the effects of colonialism was not only to give many of the natives a European language, but also to help shape their purposes.
The independence movements of the post-1945 world that led to the end of Europe’s African and Asian empires were driven by the rhetoric that had guided the Allies’ own struggle against Germany and Japan: democracy, freedom, equality.
This wasn’t a conflict between values.
It was a conflict of interests couched in terms of the same values.

Conversations across boundaries of identity - whether national, religious, or something else - begin with the sort of imaginative engagement you get when you read a novel or watch a movie or attend to a work of art that speaks from some place other than your own.
Conversation not only means literal talk but also as a metaphor for engagement with the experience and the ideas of others.
It doesn’t have to lead to consensus.
It’s enough that it helps people get used to one another.

In Ghana, success in life depends on being enmeshed in a web of relationships.
To get things done, you need to be someone or know someone with the social standing to work your will.
Since most people don’t have that status, they need to find someone - a patron - who does.
In a society like this, to ask someone for something is to invite him to become your patron.
It’s a sign that you think he has the status to get things done.
It’s a way of indicating respect.
If someone hates you, he won’t ask you for things.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: “If a lion could speak, we couldn’t understand him.”

Cosmopolitan curiosity about other people:
We start with some small thing we two singular people share.
Once we have found enough we share, there is the further possibility that we will be able to enjoy discovering things we do not yet share.
That is one of the payoffs of cosmopolitan curiosity.
We can learn from one another, or we can simply be intrigued by alternative ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.

Cross-cultural communication can seem immensely difficult in theory, when we are trying to imagine making sense of a stranger in the abstract.
But when the stranger is no longer imaginary, but real and present, you may like or dislike him.

Homogeneity produced by globalization?
Globalization is also a threat to homogeneity.
Trade means travelers.

Different people require different conditions for their spiritual development.
The same things which help one person towards the cultivation of his higher nature, are hindrances to another.
A wide range of human conditions allows free people the best chance to make their own lives.

Trying to find some primordially authentic culture can be like peeling an onion.
What people think of as traditional West African cloths are known as java prints, and arrived with the Javanese batiks sold, and often milled by, the Dutch. The traditional garb of Herero women derives from the attire of nineteenth-century German missionaries.
A tradition was once an innovation. Should we reject it for that reason as untraditional? How far back must one go?
Cultural purity is an oxymoron.
People wear Levis on every continent. In some places they are informal wear; in others they’re dressy.
You can get Coca-Cola on every continent.
In Kumasi you will get it at funerals.
People in each place make their own uses even of the most famous global commodities.

People die when their bodies die.
Cultures die without physical extinction.

Islam is universal, but it has always been embedded in given cultures - the results of many influences.
For fundamentalists, there is nothing in these cultures to be proud of, because they have altered the pristine message of Islam.
Globalization is a good opportunity to dissociate Islam from any given culture and to provide a model that could work beyond any culture.
Such neofundamentalists reject the culture within which their religion was embedded.
The failure of Osama bin Ladin’s jihad may have turned many fundamentalists back to dawa - preaching and precept, exhortation and example.
Quest for a universal community beyond cultures and nations.
Individualized Islam of universal ethics that inverts the picture of cosmopolitanism.

Cosmopolitan commitment is to pluralism:
There are many values worth living by.
You cannot live by all of them.
So we hope and expect that different people and different societies will embody different values.

Another aspect of cosmopolitanism is what philosophers call fallibilism - the sense that our knowledge is imperfect, provisional, subject to revision in the face of new evidence.

Ghana is a country where Christians, Muslims, and the followers of traditional religions live side by side.

If someone really thinks that some group of people genuinely doesn’t matter at all, he will suppose they are outside the circle of those to whom justifications are due.