Appiah, the moralist with a passion for crime novels

A philosopher, novelist, linguist, university lecturer and columnist for “The Ethicist” in The New York Times, Anthony Appiah comes from a cultured aristocratic family in Ghana, but was born in London, where he spent his youth, and takes part in these conversations, beginning, as always, with his earliest memory. “I was seriously ill for much of my eighth year, with high fevers and a long spell in hospital. The stay was long and tedious, and I remember the President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah – who had recently made my father a political prisoner – standing beside my bed alongside Queen Elizabeth. She had been our Queen, but now she was a foreign head of state visiting the hospital. She came over to my bedside and said hello. I had photos of my parents on my bedside table, and the Duke of Edinburgh, who had met my mother in the past, recognised her and sent her his regards. I remember the President’s perfectly polished black shoes, and then me running to the window to watch the group looking at the sword stuck in the ground in the hospital garden, said to have been placed there by the priest Akomfo Anokye, who founded the Ashanti Kingdom. That greeting meant they’d realised they’d met the son of a political prisoner, and the President flew into a rage: the doctor treating me was sacked and there was a huge outcry in the British press. As a result, my mother sent me to England to keep me away from that situation.”

“When I went to England, I left my Ghanaian primary school and attended an English one. This wasn’t what my parents had planned: they wanted to send me to an English boarding school for my secondary education. My father was proud of the excellent education he’d received at his Ghanaian boarding school, and we were steeped in the culture of the Ashanti, the region of Ghana where we lived: we spoke both English and Twi. My father raised us on Akan folktales, which became the centrepiece of my mother’s first children’s book. In our home, children’s books were a sort of neighbourhood library; and, as I grew up, I read more and more of the adult books from my parents’ collection, starting with Chinua Achebe’s "Things Fall Apart". At the start of the summer holidays, my mother would leave a pile of them on my bedside table: she made me read Tolstoy, whom she loved, and D. H. Lawrence. I would therefore say that my literary taste was shaped by my mother. It was my own decision to go to the University of Cambridge, because I wanted to study medicine and it was considered the best in England. My parents accepted my decision to switch to philosophy, which I liked better, but I feel it was in some way predestined, because when I was born my father had told a journalist that I would go to Cambridge if I wanted to be a philosopher and to Harvard if I wanted to study medicine: he certainly wasn’t lacking in ambition for me!”

“There were plenty of them in my parents’ bookcase, including classics by Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham. I grew up with the genre, and I’ve never been a snob: I enjoy many different kinds of writing. I write constantly, but mainly philosophy or cultural criticism, and writing genre fiction uses a completely different part of the brain. And you don’t have to do all that fact-checking…”.

“Socrates was right in the Phaedrus to worry that writing might alter thought. But he was wrong to think that this was a bad thing for thought. I can only truly work out what I’m thinking if I try to write it down. So, for me, writing is the way I decide what I think. I learn a great deal from conversation too, of course, as Socrates would have insisted. But for me, writing is the most important form of thought.”

“George Henry Lewes, the lover and partner of Mary Ann Evans, whom we know by the pen name George Eliot. He was a refined and lucid writer, responsible for important essays, including one of the earliest and most perceptive reviews of *Jane Eyre*. He was one of the intellectual forces behind the shift from metaphysics to a more scientific and psychological philosophy; but he also founded The Fortnightly Review, developed the idea of literary realism, wrote on Robespierre, Goethe, Comte, success in literature and acting, and published a novel, Ranthorpe, which explores London’s literary life in the Victorian era.”

“When I was at university, I greatly admired John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. I still find some of the ideas interesting, but I think his system doesn’t work – as he himself later acknowledged – and he fails to grasp the significance for political life of our various social identities.”

“As a teenager, I didn’t appreciate Jane Austen. Now I’d happily reread Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility or Emma.”

“Many! No one today could agree with Shakespeare’s politics! Weber’s German nationalism was fierce and unappealing. W. E. B. Du Bois never entirely escaped a certain kind of naturalism regarding race, even though the science he was familiar with contradicted it. But I have written extensively and admiringly about both of them.”

“John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty has greatly inspired my thinking on what it means to live a good human life; in particular, the third chapter, ‘On Individuality as One of the Elements of Well-being’. It sets out a vision of society and the state organised around the idea of letting people manage and develop their own lives, guided by an understanding of their own talents and values. Individuality of this kind is just one element of a good life, but I think it is fundamental. I have often taught Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel "The Remains of the Day", a subtle portrayal of a man who mismanages his life because he does not believe in individuality! I also love the Book of Psalms very much, because it offers an account of the inner life: the soul speaking out of fear, gratitude, anger, bewilderment and trust, seeking to understand itself in the presence of God.”

“It draws on an important aspect of human psychology, namely our tendency to develop negative attitudes towards people outside our own group. In this sense, yes, I think it is a reflection of our human nature. But that psychological tendency is directed towards different groups in different places and at different times. So it is not inevitable that people will hate or disrespect those they believe belong to other races; they may hate other religions, other ethnic groups, other nations, other social classes. Racism is not just a matter of bad attitudes; it is an ideology that teaches people to believe that Jews are disloyal or that Black people are stupid or hypersexual, and those teachings serve to maintain the superior status of ‘our’ kind. That is why racism must be understood as something constructed, taught and imposed, rather than as a mere outburst of instinct. Human beings may be inclined to divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’, but societies decide who counts as ‘them’, what stories are told about them, and what those stories serve to justify.”

“I think that every form of local racism is distinct. Previous American racism was organised along a Black-White divide. In the Caribbean and Latin America, there is often a mixed intermediate group. Current American racism is shaped by the resistance of many white people to attempts to undo centuries of racial injustice through affirmative action, something that has not happened on that scale anywhere in Europe or Latin America, except in Brazil.”

“The key factor has been allowing people with racist views to express them more openly. This is evident in the rise of rather explicit anti-Semitism. But within his administration there are people who are openly hindering Black people and women, for example in the upper echelons of the US military. The Department of Defence has a decades-long history of combining meritocracy with a genuine interest in promoting talented and committed officers from minority groups and women. All of this has vanished, and the New York Times reports that Pete Hegseth is actively ousting them. But the most shocking decision was the closure of most of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which has had the effect of increasing mortality in Africa and elsewhere by hundreds of thousands of people. Let me repeat that: hundreds of thousands of people would now be alive if Trump had not closed USAID. Many had organised their lives around an American promise: that we would continue to provide the life-saving medicines on which they depended, through programmes that presidents from both parties had supported for decades. Many of them were children. It is hard to believe that an administration with equal regard for people regardless of race would have done such a thing: this is the most serious racist decision taken by this administration.”

“I think that everything one might admire about him is linked to something despicable. But he oversaw the incredibly rapid development of a Covid vaccine, even though he now seems unwilling to take credit for it. And, despite the fact that he lies far more often than most politicians, he also has a certain candour, saying out loud things that most public figures would keep to themselves. I think many of his supporters find that appealing.”

“This is one of the points he has emphasised, but opposing ill-conceived diversity initiatives is no reason to be indifferent to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people of colour. Saying that African countries and Haiti are ‘shithole countries’, or talking about grabbing women by their genitals, certainly runs counter to the liberal stance of avoiding vulgar language when referring to historically oppressed groups, and this may appeal to those who are fed up with being told that the way they talk about trans people, Black people or women reveals racism, sexism or transphobia. The whole conversation about ‘wokeness’ reflects a failure on the part of the political and cultural elites. I think a significant section of the Democratic Party shares with the Republican Party a lack of understanding of how many working-class and middle-class Americans feel about many issues. And progressive Democrats, including young, university-educated people, often seem to harbour a sense of moral superiority towards the working class – an attitude one ought not to have towards a significant proportion of one’s fellow citizens. Letting them know that you hold such an attitude – as when Hillary Clinton called Trump’s supporters ‘deplorable’ – is not only wrong, it is terrible politics. Our constitutional structure gives rural voters disproportionate power because many of them are concentrated in small states, whilst many Democratic voters are concentrated in urban areas, which means their representatives win by large margins, ‘wasting’ voting power. It also means that even when the President is very unpopular across the country, as he is now, he can still win a majority in the Electoral College. This should encourage the Democratic Party to listen just as attentively to rural voters as it does to urban ones, to pay attention to the challenges they face and the issues that concern them. Obviously, they should do this as a matter of principle, but it is also common sense. Trump’s support among rural white voters has declined because his economic policies, including tariffs, have been rather detrimental to agriculture, not because the Democrats have developed a coherent policy to tackle the economic decline in many small towns.”

“As Thomas Piketty and his colleagues have argued, progressive politics increasingly reflects the ideas of the educated middle classes – what he calls the ‘Brahmin elite’ – including university lecturers like myself. The old Left was linked to the trade unions and to what we call the ‘blue-collar workers’ in the old factories of the industrial heartlands. We need to listen more to people in the bottom twenty per cent of the income distribution and less to those in the top twenty per cent. In a democracy, every social group deserves to be heard.”

“I was brought up in a very devout Protestant family; I went to church and Sunday school, said grace at meals, prayed before going to sleep, and even composed hymns. I then went to an Anglican boarding school, where every day began with prayer. I was a devout believer until the end of my teenage years and belonged to a group of evangelical students who studied theology together in our spare time at school. Then philosophical reasoning and the Church’s hostility towards gay people convinced me that the theological core of my Christian faith was untenable. So, I am an atheist who spent a largely happy time growing up within a Protestant denomination, and my sisters are all still devout Christians.”

“I know this may sound like lukewarm praise, but it strikes me as very sensible. It appears to be doctrinally quite orthodox, yet it recognises – as I believe Pope Francis also did – that the Church can still carry out its pastoral work effectively with people who do not agree with the Magisterium, and that certain matters – war, famine and disease, for example – are morally more urgent than issues of individual sexual morality. And he is also clear on social teaching when it comes to our duty towards what Matthew 25:40 calls ‘the least of these my brothers and sisters’. I find this enormously appealing. And his recent statements on AI show that he is concerned to ensure that we all understand the economic, social and moral costs of new technologies, alongside their benefits.”

“I’m not sure much further explanation is needed beyond the fact that the Pope says the things the President is doing are morally wrong. The President has always treated criticism as a form of insult, and for him the Pope’s criticism is particularly difficult to counter: it comes from a figure whose authority is moral, whose constituency overlaps with his own, and whose popularity far exceeds his own. Given the President’s narcissism, this could be part of the explanation.”

Born in London, he comes from a cultured aristocratic family in Ghana. “For me, writing is the way I decide what I think.” “The whole debate on ‘wokeness’ reflects a failure on the part of the political and cultural elites”