The Conscription of Quakers in the First World War

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If you push people into a certain kind of identity politics, they're going to claim that it's a terrible imposition on them if you ask them to do something or other. And the way i win the argument is by saying, this is superimportant to me, and who is the government to say it isn't superimportent? Well, we do have models for dealing with this. One model is the model that developed in societies that had conscription for conscientious objection. We didn't just allow people to declare that they had a conscientious objection. They had to show that they were willing to take on the sort of risk that conscription imposes on people without being willing to fight. So that

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a British-Ghanaian philosopher, the Ethicist columnist for the New York Times Magazine, and one of today's deepest thinkers about the nature of identity. His scholarly writing, journalism, and novels help us to envision a world in which our professed categories enrich rather than impoverish—or, in his terms, a world which reveres “universality plus difference.”

In this week’s conversation, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Yascha Mounk discuss neutrality as a liberal ideal, the limits of identity politics, and the merits of race-abolitionism.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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