CET 2025 Slot 1 · Verbal – Page 8

I eschew the notion of racial kinship. I do so in order to claim what Michael Sandel calls the unencumbered self: an individual who chooses aims and attachments rather than accepting them simply because of custom, tradition or inherited status. On this view, the self is the author of the obligations it chooses to recognise.

Sandel objects that such a self is an illusion. Certain obligations of solidarity, religion and community bind us for reasons unrelated to a choice. Family and community connections formed in childhood, loyalties inherited from the past, and membership of a nation or people help constitute who we are. We understand ourselves partly as bearers of a particular history, not merely as independent choosers. Racial kinship is one expression of this conception of an encumbered self.

I recognise a virtue in this account: it can affirm the value of a people whose worth has been denied by prejudice. Yet that does not establish that inherited membership should determine a person's identity or achievement. What should properly be the object of pride for an individual is what that individual has chosen and accomplished, not an achievement credited to them merely because others of the same ancestry performed it.

This distinction supports my objection to racial solidarity as an overriding claim upon the individual. Respect for other people does not require treating their ancestry as one's own accomplishment. The disagreement is therefore about identity: whether we define ourselves primarily through inherited family, history and culture or through our own choices and independent accomplishments.