ADRIAN MA, HOST:
Is it wrong for me to give someone money with strings attached? Or if I lose a lot of weight, is it OK for me to lie about how? Or what about this - if I think my partner has dementia, is it OK for me to leave them before it worsens? Now, don't worry, these are not all my issues. These are actually a few of the thorny and often provocative ethical questions Kwame Anthony Appiah has received over the years. They come from readers of his New York Times column The Ethicist. And it's in part because of that work that Appiah, a professor of philosophy and law at NYU, recently received one of the biggest honors in the humanities, the Library of Congress' Kluge Prize. And so we thought, let's have him on because who could not use some good advice on how to tackle life's trickiest dilemmas? Professor Appiah, welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, and congratulations.
KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Thank you very much. I'm glad to be with you.
MA: And can I just start off by asking you, how did you find out that you won this Kluge Prize? What was your reaction?
APPIAH: I got a message asking me if I could take a call from the librarian of Congress on the phone. I know who she is, and I am an admirer of hers.
MA: Right.
APPIAH: So I thought, no reason why I shouldn't take a call from her. And then in the course of the call, they told me that I had been selected for this prize, which is, indeed, a very great honor, and I was extremely surprised.
MA: In announcing this prize, the Library of Congress posted a video on YouTube where you are in it calling philosophy a collective activity. What do you mean by that?
APPIAH: Anything that any particular philosopher writes, unless they're not doing their job properly, is going to be responsive to what's been written by everybody else and - I mean, on whatever the topic is. And we make progress together. It's true that I write my articles. Philosophers don't very often write adjoined articles, unlike people in, say, the sciences. But those articles reflect thinking that's been shaped by our students, our colleagues and by the literature.
And so my work and anybody's work is very different from what it would have been if we hadn't been doing all this together, if there hadn't been a lot of philosophers and a lot of conversations, a lot of classes, a lot of seminars. So in that sense, on the one hand, there are parts of the job that you do on your own, but the product, as it were, is a result of the interaction of many minds.
MA: It's an interesting shift from writing, you know, like, papers and books to writing a column that responds directly to readers' questions.
APPIAH: Yes.
MA: What made that feel like the right move for you?
APPIAH: I hadn't thought very much about how useful, as it were, the tools of the trade of the professional philosophical ethicist would actually be in helping people think about the very practical problems that they bring to that column. But I discovered that the tools I had allowed me to settle down when faced with a question - and even if I didn't know what I thought the right advice should be when I just read the letter, when I started asking myself the questions that my training teaches me to ask, it turned out that I could usually write an answer - not necessarily an answer that said what someone should do, but an answer that, as it were, analyzed their situation in a way that I thought was - at least, I hoped was useful and interesting.
And you have to remember that though - that it's an important point about the genre of the advice column, that while, on the one hand, people are writing in for advice, on the other hand, it's a column. And so you have to write things that are interesting, not just to the person who asked you the question but to your readers in general.
MA: I mean, you talk about the tools that you use in the process. I'm curious, like, when people write to you looking for advice on these life questions or their ethical dilemmas, what is the process? Because when people come to me for advice, I usually just kind of riff. You know, I just say whatever comes to the top of my head.
APPIAH: (Laughter).
MA: But I'm guessing you're a little different.
APPIAH: What you ought to do depends on what's going on and then what will happen if you do it. And in order to know the answer to that question, you've got to be able to dig in a little bit. So one of the things that the fact-checking process on my column does is to make sure that if I have gone to the CDC website to look up an answer about a question that has to do, say, with, you know, viruses or drug abuse or something - make sure that what I say is right. But if it's right - well, obviously if it's wrong, they'll tell me. But if it's right, it's relevant in order to answer the question.
And then you have to go on and ask these other questions, the normative questions, then the ethical questions, in the light of the facts. But how we should act depends on what the world is like and what will happen if we do those things and what has happened. And so getting clear about the factual situation is often an important part of getting clear about what you ought to do.
MA: People write you sometimes with very deeply personal questions that they might not feel comfortable sharing with others.
APPIAH: Yes.
MA: Do you have any advice for them on seeking out advice, especially if it's something they are sort of embarrassed about?
APPIAH: I guess I would say to someone who's got a problem that they might have brought to me, think about the people that you have access to that might be able to help. Think about whether your friends wouldn't, in fact, be helpful, wouldn't just be - would be more than just judgmental, but they would actually help you think it through. I think thinking things through out loud in conversation with another person who's helpful is often better than just stewing over them on your own.
So I would say, you know, there are professional counselors of one sort and another, those associated with religious traditions, couples' therapists, psychotherapists and other kinds of therapists. And then there are friends. And I would think that most people have access...
MA: Yeah.
APPIAH: ...Not everybody, but most people have access to one of those, at least. And I think stewing over a problem on your own is not a good strategy.
MA: We've been speaking with Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy and law at NYU, and the 2024 recipient of the Kluge Prize from the Library of Congress. Professor, thank you so much for speaking with us.
APPIAH: It was a great pleasure.
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