A section that caught my fancy from a brief bio of Kwame Anthony Appiah:

Presidential Lectures: Kwame Anthony Appiah: "Appiah is sensitive to the risks of this advice, and his more recent work refines the position he takes in Color Conscious. Characteristic is his essay, “Liberalism, Individuality, and Identity” (2001), which examines John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), perhaps the classic defense of autonomy from social constraint. Mill’s insistence on self-invention is close to Appiah’s own, but the personal freedom both philosophers advocate poses a pair of ethical dangers: “arbitrariness” in choosing our characters and the “unsociability of individuality.”[8] Together these threaten the human bond itself, and Appiah counters their corrosive effects by rewriting Mill. His argument is complex, following a conceptual path between romantic and existentialist notions of personal identity. But the indispensable element of Appiah’s argument is his connecting our acts of self-creation to the quality of our engagement and care of others. This reconciliation of Mill’s laissez-faire independence with the global interdependences of our postmodern condition is dazzling. Appiah summarizes his synthesis in a passage that also captures the spirit and vision of his work as a whole:

A free self is a human self, and we are, as Aristotle long ago insisted, creatures of the polis, social beings. We are social in many ways and for many reasons: because we desire company, because we depend on one another for survival, because so much that we care about is collectively created.[9]"