Kwame Anthony Appiah: prediction

Transcript context

…If that happened. If it continues. I think there’ll be a lot more of what are called bystander interventions in social life. That will mean that, probably, there’ll be a lot less sexual and racial and homophobic harassment because bystanders are very useful in dealing with that kind of thing. That will be good. A lot of people now witness those kinds of things, and they think it’s wrong, but they don’t say anything because we have this idea that, as I said, that “everybody’s responsible for their own moral life” kind of thing. If that were to take off, it would be a big change. It would have downsides as well as upsides — as these changes often do — because there’s a reason why, in the Muslim case, the tradition says that while you should do this, you shouldn’t, for example, be too nosy about what other people are doing because then the balance would shift too far in the other direction. And there are people who would respond to a change like that by nosily poking about in other people’s lives, and I think there’s a place for moral privacy, as well. Like all these things, it’s likely to go too far at some point. For our final segment, we cover your life. I sometimes call this the Kwame Anthony Appiah production function. Simple question — you were a child, you met Richard Wright, James Baldwin. What was that like?…

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