Appiah - The Honor Code: Amy Baehr Notes

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Professor Amy Baehr, from the Philosophy Department, sat down with the First-Year Connections Program to discuss Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.

First-Year Connections: What are some of your first impressions of Appiah’s book? Amy Baehr: It is a wonderful book. Appiah gives an account of how we can continue what he sees as the crucial moral revolutions we’ve witnessed over the past 200 years. He thinks we can harness our innate desire to be respected by others – and our desire to deserve the respect of others – and put it to work on contemporary moral problems, problems that are in need of moral revolutions today. The example Appiah gives of a moral problem in need of a revolution today is honor killings. Appiah’s optimism that a moral revolution is possible to reduce or even eradicate the practice of honor killings makes me wonder about other morally problematic aspects of our contemporary world. Might it be possible for the U.S. electorate to be convinced that it is dishonorable for the United States to allow so many people to live mired in poverty with little hope of upward mobility,1 or that it is dishonorable for the United States to incarcerate such a massive number of young men (the majority from these impoverished and hopeless circumstances), leaving children without fathers and households without a second breadwinner?2 Might it be possible to convince global elites that it is dishonorable for wealthy countries to monopolize global wealth as they do, especially given the unbelievable material abundance produced by the global capitalist system?3 First-Year Connections: Appiah is a philosopher. He teaches at New York University. If you had to explain Appiah’s book to a nonphilosopher, what would you say?

1 In 2010, one in five children in the U.S. lived in poverty. During the same year, 38% of African Americans lived in poverty. http://www.npc.umich.edu/poverty/#2; http://inequality.org/wealthy-parents-inherited-advantage-decliningmobility/ (Sites accessed 5/15/2014.) 2 The U.S. can now boast of 2.3 million incarcerated people. http://www.naacp.org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet (Accessed 5/15/2014.) 3 The World Bank estimates that 1.22 billion people in the world live on less than $1.25 per day. http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview (Accessed 5/15//2014.)

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