Thanks very muchto Anthony Appiahfor being our guest on the show last week. You can check out the episodehere.

I meant to be blogging about this one awhile back, but the rest of my life intruded, unfortunately. I'm about to head off to Australia for seven weeks, where I'll be a visiting fellow at the Australian National University. I'll actually do three of the shows from down under. That's going to be tough. I'll have to be in a studio there at 4.00 AM. Nowthatis dedication.

But back to the topic at hand. I thought our discussion with Anthony was interesting. I do wish we had had more time because we really only scratched the surface and were just getting to an interesting topic toward the end of the episode. By the way, I'm about half way through Anthony's latest book,The Ethics of Identity. It's a fascinating read and I highly recommend it.

我想在这篇文章中更深入地探讨一个隐藏在我们讨论表面之下的问题，但并没有真正得到解决。这个问题和那些认同身份的人有一点关系他们认为这些身份在某种程度上是“不可协商的”，或多或少是指示如何过自己生活的直接来源，也是指示如何过自己生活的来源与那些与自己身份不同甚至在某些方面有敌意的人有关。

By a "non-negotiable" aspect of an identity I mean, roughly, an aspect that the "holder" of that identityregards asnon-negotiableand thus as not subject to revision and reconfiguration.就我的目的而言，相关身份是否“真的”可以公开讨论或以某种方式进行修改并不重要。我想可能所有的身份都是可以修改的，并且会根据各种各样的事情重新配置。例如，某些身份在某些时刻不再可能存在。一旦奴隶被解放，一个人可以继续是一个顽固的南方种族主义者，但你必须找到新的方法来做到这一点。你不能简单地坚持做一个拥有奴隶的南方农业人。

在我看来，许多社会摩擦、政治动荡和文化变革都是由身份的“冲突”所驱动的，这些“冲突”被认为是不可谈判的，而当地的现实对这些身份的重新配置施加了压力。我并不是说只有被认为是不可谈判的身份才会受到这种外部压力。但我认为，那些认为自己身份的某些“威胁”方面是不可谈判的人，可能会以不同的方式进行抵制，而那些认为自己身份的某些方面是可以谈判的。例如，一个人可以自愿参与，也可以被拖着重新配置身份。想想那些迄今为止还未重构的性别歧视者，他们真诚地试图重新思考性和性别，以回应社会的变化;而那些迄今为止还未重构的性别歧视者，则尽其所能地帮助维持旧秩序，抵抗新秩序。

The real question, I suppose, is what, if any, aspects of an identity areworthregarding as non-negotiable? I'm not sure there's an a priori "once and for all" answer to that question. When I'm in a "liberal cosmopolitan" frame of mind, I'm tempted to say that just those aspects of ones identity that are consistent with a thoroughgoing allegiance to "the party of humanity" are worth considering non-negotiable. Everything that divides and separates, that pits "them" against "us" is unworthy of being regarded as non-negotiable.

There is probably something right about that. But although I count myself a "would-be" liberal cosmopolitan, I actually regard a liberal cosmopolitanism as a "that toward which" some of us have chosen to work, not as an actual concrete achievement already present on the ground. I mean several things by that. I've laid out some of it in other posts includingHow to be a Relativistand I took on some related issues in论教条主义的缺席。But I don't really want to re-hash those posts now.

The current point I want to make about liberal cosmopolitanism is that in one way it doesn't seem thick enough to support a concrete, particular identity that is tied up with a shared way of life. And in that sense liberal cosmopolitanism doesn't really define one possible identity that one might adopt among other possible identities. What , exactly, would it mean to live on behalf of "humanity at large." What would be the character of one's relation to one's family, friends, fellow citizens, or co-coreligionists if one lived primarily as one human among others? One possible answer is that you would always be a stranger, invested in none of the special projects that define one's nation or religion, sharing none of the special attachments that define one's family. Indeed, perhaps liberal cosmopolitans couldn't even share a special attachment to each other, it would seem. What kind of life is that? A rootless life, a life lived always and everywhere "on the outside," always and everywhere as a stranger.

I don't mean to deny that there are cosmopolitan responses to this line of criticism. Recall, for example, Appiah's way of thinking about the difference between ethics and morality. Appiah thinks of identities as "ethically significant" partly because an identity provides answers to the question "How shall I live?" He distinguishes that question from the question for morality "What do I owe to others." But he clearly thinks that ethics and morality can conflict. That's because he allows that ones choices about how to live, under what "identity" flag to march, can generate obligations, commitments, entitlements, of their own. But so can morality. Morality is anindependentsource of commitments, obligations, and entitlements, not necessarily tied to particular, local, concrete identities. Sometimes the demands of ethics arising from one's particular, local, concrete identity simply clash with the demands of morality. But Appiah believes, I think, that the demands of morality have a certain priority -- though he also thinks this priority is "defeasible," if I understand him rightly.

You can sort of see, given what he thinks identities are like and where they come from, why someone like Appiah would think that morality has defeasible priority over ethics. For Appiah, after all, there is not a fixed set of antecedently given identities. We "create" and don't merely inherit our identities. Now we don't create them ex nihilo. Rather, we take what is pre-given, what is made available by the milieu in which we merely find ourselves, and we somehow make something brand new out of it, by engaging in Millian "experiments in living." We are always reconfiguring our identities, trying out new ways of living, sometimes, presumably, with great success and sometimes not so successfully. This makes the ethical demands generated by our identities seem contingent and escapable. And it makes the demands generated by morality --which, by contrast, don't depend on the contingent localities of our identities -- seem more binding, less contingent.

只要一个人认为自己的身份是偶然的，可以通过这种方式修改，也许这一切都是合理的。但是，对于一个认为自己的某些方面或其他身份是不可商量的人，世界主义者应该说些什么呢?它又如何帮助人们接受这样的指控，即世界主义者无论何时何地都是一个无根的局外人?

先无根据的。假设世界主义承认世界主义不是其他身份中某一具体特定身份的来源。世界主义明确表达了一种道德约束，所有特殊的身份都受此约束。指导原则可能是:无论你采用什么身份，确保它与作为自己人生计划的一部分，适当考虑他人的幸福是一致的。以美国人的身份生活，以这个或那个社团的一员，或以宗教的一员，或以任何你愿意的方式生活，但在这样的生活中，你要认识到你的社团只是众多社团中的一个，你的社团的利益不能凌驾于整个人类的利益之上。

世界主义者甚至可以说，拥有某种精心配置的具体的特殊身份是一件好事，是一个过得很好的人的生活的一个关键，至少只要它以正确的方式受到道德考虑和对所有人共同人性的适当尊重的约束。

我很喜欢这个故事。有些时候，我很容易相信类似的说法，尤其是作为对“世界主义者无论何时何地都是陌生人”这一指责的回答。但我不确定这是否意味着，对我们共同人性的关注就能轻易地压倒或压倒任何更局部、更具体的关注。

Here's why. If who I am is in some sense defined by more local and particular attachments, I don't see off hand why those local and particular attachments don't trump whatever concern I feel for humanity at large. After all, it is those local and particular attachments that make me an insider, that define where home is. Too much attachment to the common humanity of all really does threaten to make me me always and everywhere the outsider.

Now I'm not prepared to fully reject the claim that morality trumps ethics. I'm just looking for more of an argument than I've ever seen. To rephrase my problem. I started out wondering what we can say to people who regard some aspect of their identity as "non-negotiable." But I see now I wasn't entirely clear about what I meant by that. I meant that: (a) those non-negotiable aspects are sources of felt commitments, demands, entitlements, etc. that place the person who adopts the relevant identity deeply at odds with cosmopolitan principles of morality and/or competing demands from the concrete and particular identities of others; (b) those aspects are regarded by the relevant person or persons as somehow bedrock definers of who and what they are.

对于我的担忧，世界主义者给出的答案基本上是，我们的身份不可能有这样的方面。这是因为围绕着不公正或不道德而产生的身份认同在某种程度上是非法的。但我不知道为什么会这样。有些人会诉诸冷酷而非个人的理性的普世戒律，或人类情感的温暖胶水，以阐明正义的原则，约束所有更多的本地产生的权利。一些哲学家——比如罗尔斯——认为，要确定正义的原则，我们必须从具体的身份和历史中“抽象化”。这就是他所谓的“无知之幕”的部分意义我从来没觉得这招特别有说服力。我一直无法理解，为什么我，生活在我所生活的旗帜下，和我所拥有的实际的特殊依恋，会被我所做的判断所约束，在我不知道，实际上，我是谁的情况下。不过，要详细说明为什么我认为这种“抽象”的论点没有说服力，恐怕需要一篇更长的文章。所以我想我现在就用这个简单的怀疑论宣言来结束这个话题。

显然，我还没有在这里解决任何问题，关于这一切真的还有很多话要说。更多。你真的应该读一读安东尼的书，因为书中谈到了很多这些问题，而且写得非常好。我怀疑，我们如何应对严重磨损的身份的真正答案接近于“崩溃”解决方案(或非解决方案)。在电影《撞车》中，人们学会了跨越他们的身份所造成的鸿沟，看到他们共同的人性，这些鸿沟是通过相互碰撞、被短命、在生活中搁浅的实验而形成的。哲学家们愿意相信，更有条理的东西——对我们共同人性的理性反思，在无知之幕后做出的判断——可能会奏效。但我认为很多人都错了。如果我们真的有一个共同的道德愿景，植根于我们对共同人性的共同认知，那将是一件伟大的事情。我认为，这将是一项独特而深远的文化成就。相信这样的事情是可能的，我认为，这是启蒙运动的真正创新。 And the project of trying to achieve the what the Enlightenment envisioned as a real possibility is a worthy and honorable one. But as I've said in other posts, the Enlightenment project is just that -- a project and one not yet achieved. It is a mistake to think that there is already and has always been a shared moral community that is rooted in the mutually recognized and endorsed demands of our common humanity. It isn't a mistake, though, to think that if we keep crashing into one another, we might someday manage to constitute such a community.