Appiah,

Identity

This use of “identity” is drawn from a long debate in philosophy about personal identity over time.

How do I know that I am the same person today that I was yesterday?

Philosophers often answer this in terms of memory or in terms of the continuity of a person’s thought bubble.

One way to answer this question comes from Aristotle and Locke.

There are essential properties that make me, me.

One modern way to answer this question is in terms of genetics

I am a unique genetic individual.

Appiah puts a very different spin on these old debates.

Ex 1

What if I had been born a girl?

From the chromosomal view, I would not be the same person -- a different egg and sperm would have gone into forming me.

Appiah is willing to grant this even though he has serious issues with the chromosomal view.

Ex 2

What if there had been an accident during his circumcision, and he had been raised as a girl? – He would be the same person chromosomally. Would he still be the same person as he is now?

Ex. 3

What if he had had a sex change operation, would he still be the same person?

To answer this last question he makes a distinction between two kinds of identity:

1) metaphysical identity (don’t confuse this with the issue of metaphysical suicide that we talked about in McHugh.)

This just means, would he be the same physical person in the sense of the ‘old view of identity’? He would have the same chromosomes, he would just have had changes done to his body.

Here is answer would be yes.

2) ethical identity Those aspects of his identity that are central to his sense of self and his projects.

In this sense, the answer would be no, because being a man is central to his sense of his own identity and personhood.

Racial identity

• There is no biological classification that matches our folk classification of different races.
• There is no racial equivalent of the X or Y chromosome.
• There are bodily markers of race. But they don’t correspond to any biologically based racial essences.
• Here race is different than sex.

He argues that there is no metaphysical racial identity, but that there is most certainly an ethical racial identity, although much of our idea of racial ethical identity is based on a false idea of metaphysical racial identity.

So, we need a different account of racial identity.

He is asking us to think of an internal point of view – what is it that goes into a person’s construction of their own ethical identity that leads them to consider themselves as members of certain racial categories?

Here we have more examples:

Example 4

What if Appiah underwent a race change surgery? Here he is thinking about Michael Jackson.

• Would Appiah be the same person after this surgery as before it?
• He thinks that most people would consider their ethical identity to remain intact after such a surgery.

He thinks that this is very different from sex.

“racial identities are less ethically central to us than gender identities.”

But, race is a very important ethical identity

In terms of race, ethical identity is not a matter of morphology, but a matter of descent and since changing your appearance does not change your ancestry, he thinks that changing your appearance is not that big a deal.

But, descent unqualified is not enough

“the experience of a life as a member of a group of people who experience themselves as—and are held by others to be—a community in virtue of their mutual recognition—and their recognition by others—as a people of common descent.” 534

Racial versus ethnic identity

What is the difference between an African American identity (racial) and an Irish American identity (ethnic)?

Irish Americans who are raised outside of Irish culture have a choice about whether or not they make their Irish descent an important part of their ethical identity

Someone of Irish American descent, who chooses not to do anything with that knowledge is not considered inauthentic “is not held to be unfaithful to something about herself to which she ought to respond.”

However, the matter is very different for African Americans.

An African American who chooses not to make the fact of their descent part of their ethical identity can fall into one of two categories

1) If they cannot pass as a white person, they are thought, both by African Americans and non African Americans of as being inauthentic.

a. They are not generally thought of as being dishonest because their bodies reveal the fact about themselves that they are denying

2) If they can pass as white, there are two value judgments that are often made

a. They are inauthentic

b. They are dishonest

Appiah thinks that we need to use false beliefs to make this distinction between ethnic and racial identity.

Generally a black person who doesn’t have an ethical identity of black is considered inauthentic because we have the idea that being descended from a black person makes you really black

But, race is not biologically real and so we need to give up this distinction.

Race and gender have different relationships to metaphysical identity but are both central to ethical identity. This means that they are “centrally implicated in the construction of life plans.” 535

If you ignore race and gender when you put together your life projects you are ignoring a social reality and fooling yourself. This is where inauthenticity comes from

We construct ethical identities in ways that depend on false beliefs about metaphysical identities.

But, we can construct them out of other materials.

If society didn’t institutionalize false metaphysical beliefs we may not want to do this reconstruction.

Our ideas of gender would be radically different.

Race could become ethnic identity which we will have for as long as we have cultures and families.