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  • The Ethics of Identity
  • Amanda Anderson (bio)
The Ethics of Identity, by Anthony Appiah; pp. xviii + 358. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005, $29.95, £18.95.

Anthony Appiah's The Ethics of Identity is of interest to scholars of the Victorian period because its hero, intriguingly, is John Stuart Mill. As its title indicates, Appiah's book provides an alternative framework for understanding the insistent centrality of collective identities to contemporary political and intellectual life, and to the project of liberal cosmopolitanism that Appiah has been developing. One key move Appiah makes, also announced through the title, is to replace the well-worn and oft-critiqued "politics of identity" with an "ethics of identity." Appiah is certainly interested in exploring the politics of group identity—he does so through a number of philosophical analyses and illuminating examples—but his attention is equally trained on the notion that group identity is a profound source of personal value and utterly central to the ways in which we understand, fashion, and narrate our lives: this pushes the idea somewhat closer to ethics—or ethos—than to politics.

Mill is important to Appiah's project for a number of reasons. First, Mill's comprehensive liberalism serves as a model for understanding liberalism as a project that involves both a core set of commitments to individual freedom and autonomy as well as a dedication to self-cultivation and ways of life. But this does not mean that Appiah himself believes the world should be populated by comprehensive liberals of the Millian sort. Indeed, while Appiah credits Mill for introducing the great value of diversity into mainstream Anglo-American political thought, he sees Mill's understanding of diversity as "culpably individualist," and adapts the discussion to what he sees as the important value of group diversity (144). He uses other aspects of Mill's political thought to advance his agenda in this regard, including Mill's emphasis on education. More generally, Mill is useful to Appiah because of his ability to examine various sides of the most pressing questions, and because of his spirit of philosophical inquiry, which Appiah shares and exemplifies. Indeed, one of the great virtues of the book is its Millian ability to enter into many divergent lines of argument, follow through their implications, and then make a considered and balanced judgment about their relative merits.

Ultimately, Appiah advances a liberal cosmopolitan ideal that attempts to balance the value of identity (conceived not only in terms of cultural affiliation but also with respect to other group affiliations that are religious or social) over and against the value of autonomy. The two values serve as correctives to each other. This approach also translates into an attempt to articulate a kind of rapprochement between communitarianism and liberalism, or between embedded modes of existence and the cultivation of practices of detached evaluation and analysis of our customs and beliefs. On the one hand, as a thinker who values liberal autonomy, Mill would seem to be on the side of analysis and self-examination. But on the other hand, as Appiah points out, Mill was aware of the importance of custom, tradition, and ingrained sentiment, and also wary of the corrosive [End Page 321] effects of analytical thinking on the sentiments and on psychological well-being. To illustrate this side of Mill's thinking, Appiah adduces Mill's own insistence, in Utilitarianism (1861), on the crucial way in which new habits of thinking (in this case, the identification of one's own pleasure with the good of the whole) may gradually become ingrained and natural.

Of course Appiah might also have adduced, in this respect, the essay on Coleridge ("Coleridge," 1840), where Mill stresses the conditions of permanence (the strong attachment to traditions and customs) required for any form of political society. This is an admission that Mill brings to bear within a more general tendency throughout his work to privilege the liberal values of autonomy, impartiality, and critical distance on embedded customs and beliefs. Appiah's discussion of Mill seems to read him as engaging in a balanced appreciation of the forces of tradition and embedded life, on the one hand, and...

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