Professor Appiah sums up democratic philosophy in UNDEF Advisory
Board debut  Mar 30, 2010  Anthony Kwame Appiah, Laurance S.
Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton
University and a member of the UNDEF Advisory Board for 2010-11,
spoke at the Board's Spring meeting on 29 March. His remarks
were a concise yet profound reflection on the nature and
philosophy of democracy:  "The trouble with most accounts of
democracy is that they want to insist that it has a simple
definition and a few virtues. But democracy, which emerged in
the modern world, in response to monarchy and empire, has many
elements and many inter-connected virtues, which are mirror
images, if you like, of the vices of the Ancien Régime. In
democracies, unlike monarchies and aristocracies, elites have to
live with the discipline of knowing that they may be replaced;
and they have to permit public criticism, from which they can
learn about the impacts of their decisions on the life of their
citizens, and through which citizens