Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World

Kwame Anthony Appiah — philosopher, ethicist, and author of Cosmopolitanism — joins Tyler Cowen in Ep. 72 to range across epistemic humility, cosmopolitan patriotism, cultural heritage, the function of moral advice, and the lessons of a life lived across continents.

Key ideas

1. All our pictures of the world are slightly wrong — so hold many of them. Appiah’s master epistemological commitment is that no single picture of the world — scientific, commonsense, religious — is perfectly accurate. Because the part of a rival picture that conflicts with yours may be the part your picture gets wrong, you are better served working with several pictures simultaneously than discarding any one on grounds of internal conflict. He calls this his Ghanaian inheritance: a portfolio approach to belief.
2. Cosmopolitanism does not require rootlessness — it requires roots elsewhere too. The nationalism–cosmopolitanism debate is a false binary. Appiah’s cosmopolitanism demands attachment to a particular place; what it adds is the recognition that others are equally attached to theirs, and that global exchange enriches both. Shakespeare’s most famous play is about a Dane; Japan’s most celebrated poet wrote in a Chinese-invented script. What a culture values most is typically the product of dialogue with somewhere else.
3. The question for cultural heritage is access, not ownership. On whether the British Museum should return artefacts, Appiah reframes the question: the goal is that every person in the world lives, some of the time, near a significant body of serious objects. Repatriation sends Malian objects to Mali, but Mali’s deficit is not Malian art — it is Italian Renaissance painting, Chinese pottery, Aztec tapestry. The right frame is collective curation for humanity, not national title.
4. Bystander intervention may be the next moral revolution. American society moved, in the thirty years before 2019, from a strong norm of leaving others to their own moral lives toward an emerging norm of public comment on strangers’ conduct. If that norm consolidates, bystander intervention against sexual, racial, and homophobic harassment will increase substantially — though Appiah notes the tradition of commanding right and forbidding wrong also carries a warning against nosiness.
5. The advice column is for the million readers, not the letter-writer. Appiah is candid that he rarely changes the letter-writer’s mind; the main function of the New York Times Ethicist column is to give a wide readership a worked example of how to reason through questions of confidentiality, loyalty, the weight of relationships, and the balance of interests — questions philosophy has a great deal to say about.

Content

The portfolio approach to belief

The episode opens with a question about why Ghana has few atheists — Appiah traces this to the character of West African religiosity: an orientation toward the spiritual world that treats doctrinal fine points as details, accepting that ‘who knows exactly what the truth is about these things?’ His own official position extends this fallibilism to all knowledge. Because every picture of the world is slightly wrong, the part of one picture that conflicts with another may be the wrong part of yours, not of your rival’s. The practical upshot is to hold as many pictures as you can manage — commonsense mid-sized objects (the ‘everyday dry goods’), scientific models, religious frameworks — and remain most confident about the least theoretically loaded of them. He is least certain about cutting-edge physics: he believes in string theory, he says, ‘with a confidence that’s probably below half.‘

Ghana, Pan-Africanism, and political learning

Appiah offers an explanation of Ghanaian political stability that is structural rather than institutional. The surprise, he argues, is not the early coups but the subsequent stability of a country younger than he is — born in 1957 from the union of the Gold Coast and British Togoland. He attributes the national coherence partly to centuries of Ashanti economic integration, partly to the Twi language functioning as a common second tongue long before British rule, and partly to the deliberate re-professionalisation of the military under Jerry Rawlings, who — ironically — taught the army to refuse his own appeal to intervene when he lost an election. Political learning, Appiah suggests, works: witnessing coup cycles long enough, populations and militaries conclude that it does not get better that way.

On Pan-Africanism he distinguishes two strands: the diasporic identity born in the Caribbean and the United States with Du Bois and Padmore, which remains culturally vital though politically thin; and the sub-Saharan political project of integration, which founders on the absurdity of borders (flying London–Accra is faster than driving Lagos–Accra) without as yet generating the political will to remove them.

Cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and what the elites missed

Asked why cosmopolitanism has not persuaded a resurgent nationalist world, Appiah offers two diagnoses. First, the elites who led globalisation and European integration did not listen: they assumed the benefits were obvious and paid ‘almost no attention to the tensions and difficulties that were produced.’ Second, their critics were not wholly wrong that gains were distributed unevenly — the right response was better domestic policy (more investment in deindustrialised regions), not less globalisation. The cosmopolitan answer to stagnant middle-class wages is not retreat but fairness: in wartime Britain, Appiah notes, incomes were also constrained but felt tolerable because burdens were visibly shared.

He pushes back on Tyler Cowen’s framing of cosmopolitanism as a parasite on nationalism. The correct relationship, he argues, is mutual: cosmopolitanism celebrates connections among places each of which is rooted in its own something. You can be a cosmopolitan patriot — you must be, if cosmopolitanism is to be persuasive to anyone who is not already Appiah.

Cultural heritage as a collective trust

Appiah’s position on repatriation is distinctively non-nationalist. When Cowen presses him on whether the Dogon people are entitled to decide what happens to their own religious objects, Appiah says no — these things ‘matter to all of us.’ He draws an analogy to the Taliban as trustees of Afghan Buddhist material: possession does not confer the right to destroy. The obligations flow from trusteeship, not from national or ethnic title. For the British Museum the practical agenda is more sharing and rotation, not return: sending Dogon masks to Mali does not give Mali what it lacks, which is access to the breadth of human material culture.

Philosophy, diversity, and the advice column

On his own discipline, Appiah locates his contribution at an intersection — between analytic philosophy and African and African-American studies — that he helped create at Yale in the early 1980s. He describes the pipeline problem for women and minorities in philosophy not as a talent gap but as a culture problem: the field communicates, implicitly or explicitly, that early performance reveals innate capacity (‘the it’), which is empirically false and drives out precisely those most likely to correct a mistaken signal. The fix is also cultural: tell undergraduates that philosophy is a skill developed through work, not a trait revealed at first attempt.

On the Ethicist column, Appiah is bracingly modest: the column gives people a worked example for the million readers; the letter-writer is largely going to do what they were going to do anyway, and Appiah would need to know far more about their situation to give genuinely tailored advice. He suspects many letters serve the function of breakfast-table evidence in a domestic argument.

The production function

The final segment covers Appiah’s biography: childhood in Kumasi with an Ashanti royal uncle and a British grandfather who was Chancellor of the Exchequer; illness at eight that erased his early memories; Kwame Nkrumah — his father’s friend and imprisoner — ignoring him while the Queen of England did not; learning to write at a sheep farm in New Jersey (the farm’s value is reminding him that a happy existence untroubled by geopolitics is possible); and chairing the Booker Prize, for which he read 173 novels. His career advice to a 19-year-old: do not plan. Be attentive to what you find in yourself and what the world offers, and match the two together. The work is the product of a community of scholars, and you are ‘one tiny proboscis on that vast amoeba of philosophy.‘

Related

• Kwame Anthony Appiah — guest
• Tyler Cowen — host
• Science and Religion — concept; Appiah’s portfolio approach to belief speaks directly to the relationship between scientific and religious pictures of the world
• Enlightenment — concept; cosmopolitanism as a distinctly Enlightenment inheritance
• Pragmatic Theory of Truth — concept; the fallibilist epistemology underlying Appiah’s ‘pictures of the world’ framing