moral agreement and disagreement explicitly bases itself on Walzer’s
conceptualisation of “thick” and “thin” values. He describes thin concepts as
“something like placeholders. When notions of right and wrong are actually at work,
they’re thickly enmeshed in the complications of particular social contexts ...
morality starts out thick”.^93 Appiah is concerned with finding agreement through
encounter and conversation, and so:
It’s when you’re trying to find points of agreement with others, say, that you
start to abstract out the thin concepts that may underlie the thick ones.
Thin concepts seem to be universal; we aren’t the only people who
have the concepts of right and wrong, good and bad; every society, it seems,
has terms that correspond to these thin concepts, too. Even thick concepts
like rudeness and courage are ones that you find pretty much everywhere.
But there are thicker concepts still that really are peculiar to particular
societies. And the most fundamental level of disagreement occurs when one
party to a discussion invokes a concept that the other simply doesn’t have.
This is the kind of disagreement where the struggle is not to agree but just
to understand.^94
There is a slightly different emphasis here in the understanding of thick and thin,
and Appiah’s conception of thin concepts certainly reveals itself to be more
foundational as his argument develops. He arguably is also more optimistic than
Walzer on how thick agreement might become when we meet on thin terrain. But
his description of the interaction between thick starting points and mutually-held
thin conceptions shares with Walzer an understanding of how our moral lives play
out, and thus serves as a promising zone of agreement, the zone this chapter has
been searching for.
In the final analysis, the use of Walzer’s moral minimalism as a basis for a
humanitarian internationalism serves three functions, the least important of which
perhaps turns out to be the “hard-case” value, namely that if we can tie together
the humanitarian impulse and a liberal communitarian perspective, we a fortiori
have a package that many cosmopolitans would accept as a minimal improvement,
especially those who broadly share his picture of moral life, such as Appiah. His
93
94 Appiah, Cosmopolitanism , 46.
Ibid., 46-47.