Cosmopolitanism

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COSMOPOLITANISM

When the Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (c. 412–c. 323 BCE) was asked where he came from, he said "I am a citizen of the world" (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, bk. 6, chap. 63). The Greek term is "kosmopolitēs," the source of the English word "cosmopolitan." Cosmopolitanism is actually a range of views—moral, political, and cultural—affirming the importance and value of the community of all human beings. Against particular and local allegiance to the polis, city-state, or modern nation-state, the cosmopolitan would emphasize a general and far-reaching concern for humanity.

It remains unclear whether Diogenes' own view was meant to affirm a positive duty to humanity or only to deny the conventional obligations of citizenship associated with the polis. But the Greek Stoics, such as Zeno of Citium and Chrysippus in the third century BCE, developed the tradition by identifying the law of the cosmos with divine reason and extending world citizenship to everyone who lives in accordance with it. Roman Stoicism—especially as developed by Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius—strongly influences modern cosmopolitanism by counting the possession of reason as a sufficient condition of membership in this foremost ethical community. Marcus Aurelius developed the idea of natural law as the common law of the polis of which all human beings are fellow citizens (Meditations, bk. 4). Nonetheless, the Roman Stoics readily acknowledged duties to one's country along with duties to humanity as a whole.

With advances of natural-law theory in the seventeenth century, international law, or the law of nations, got its first explicit modern statement in the theories of Hugo Grotius and Samuel Von Pufendorf. In the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant, partly inspired by Stoicism, viewed all persons as members of a single community of rational agents, each of whom is free, equal, and independent. On these grounds he strongly criticized European colonialism and imperialism. In Perpetual Peace (1795), Kant argued for a federation of republics, each recognizing the human rights of all persons. (See Heater 1996 for a history of cosmopolitan thought.)

Cosmopolitanisms, as sets of moral, political, and cultural views, have developed significantly in the late twentieth century. Below are some of the most important arguments and distinctions made in recent debates, with particular emphasis on the core moral claims.

Moral Cosmopolitanism

Moral cosmopolitanism is characterized by three basic commitments. First, it is a species of moral individualism, maintaining that the basic units of moral concern are human individuals rather than groups or other collectivities. Second, it is egalitarian, holding that each individual counts equally from a moral perspective, that is, that no person is worth more than any other and that every person is entitled to equal consideration. Finally, cosmopolitans are moral universalists, who believe that the proper scope of moral concern encompasses all persons, regardless of their ethnic, racial, cultural, religious, and national affiliations. In short, moral cosmopolitanism affirms the equal worth of every human individual, quite apart from any subgroup to which they might belong, along with a commitment to impartial concern.

The great interest in these ideas is for their possible implications for an account of the basic moral and political obligations of persons. A dominant puzzle is the apparent contradiction between (1) widely recognized special obligations and associative duties, for example, ties to one's family members, friends, fellow citizens, and compatriots, and (2) general duties to individual human beings, regardless of membership in any of these communities. How are special duties compatible with the requirement of equal concern?

To address this question, it will be useful to flag two truths about cosmopolitanism. First, it can be defended by a deeper moral theory, including utilitarianism, a theory of human rights, contractarianism, and a Kantian account of fundamental obligations explained ultimately by the categorical imperative. Such defenses are exemplified by some of the most notable recent thinkers in this tradition: the utilitarian Peter Singer, the human-rights theorists Henry Shue and Thomas Pogge, the contractarian Brian Barry, and the Kantian Onora O'Neill. Charles Beitz is less easily classified: His moral cosmopolitanism at times has drawn on contractarian thought and lately has issued in a sustained focus on human rights as the appropriate language of international justice.

The second truth about cosmopolitanism is that it can come in strong and moderate varieties, both sharing a commitment to helping other human beings regardless of citizenship, nationality, ethnicity, race, religious affiliation, and geographical location (Scheffler 2001). Strong moral cosmopolitans believe that universalist, egalitarian individualism entails that the basic moral claims of all human beings are the same, and that any special regard for some persons over others must be justified by the role such regard plays in promoting the good of the human community as a whole. As the prominent cosmopolitan Martha Nussbaum has said, the reason a cosmopolitan should show additional concern for the locals or fellow nationals "is not that the local is better per se, but rather that this is the only sensible way to do good" (1996, pp. 135–136). Moderate moral cosmopolitans, on the other hand, believe both that there are basic obligations toward all other human beings that each of us must recognize, and that particular affiliations—to family, nation, state, and so on—give rise to special duties justified independently of any instrumental value for promoting the good of humanity. On this view, associated duties do not derive from our universal duties to human beings in general.

David Miller's defense of nationality (1995, 2002) is a good example of a view strongly opposed to the idea that we have the same duties to each person in the world. For Miller, a nation is a community of belief, extended in history, active in character, tied to a particular homeland, and associated with a distinctive public culture. Compatriots share a common national identity and possess special reasons for recognizing duties to one another beyond those to persons generally. For one thing, nation-states involve institutionalized reciprocity, in which members contribute their efforts and wealth to the community for the benefit of fellow members. For another thing, nation-states pursue collective cultural projects involving distinctive choices about work, religion, and culture more generally, and these projects give rise to nationally different mixtures of burdens and benefits. The upshot of these two points is that fellow nationals owe to one another a range of duties that they do not owe to nonmembers, but these duties are compatible with the view that each person is due equal concern in virtue of their being human.

This dispute about the nature of cosmopolitan morality becomes especially acute in matters concerning just distribution. Here a range of views seem to deny the force or extent of cosmopolitan justice. Theorists such as Michael Walzer (1983) claim that these duties of distributive justice make sense only within the context of a community, such as a nation, within which the goods to be distributed are produced and shared. David Miller (1998) has defended the related view that some principles of distributive justice are comparative and some are noncomparative, and the comparative principles can apply only within communities and not globally. John Rawls (1999) has argued that the scope of distributive justice should be limited to the basic structure of a particular society conceived of as a self-contained cooperative venture for mutual advantage. On his view, justice beyond the nation-state is concerned with interstate rules aimed at promoting toleration and peace worldwide, but questions about the distributive entitlements of particular individuals considered as such can gain no footing.

Such views seem to go beyond merely rejecting strong moral cosmopolitanism; they offer positive views that seem to minimize the substance of global duties of distributive justice. But it is precisely on the basic justice-related claims of individuals that something like strong cosmopolitanism appears most plausible. If one believes that all human beings possess the same rights to be free from torture, persecution, hunger, and homelessness, it seems natural to infer that our duties as human beings include aiming to bring about a world in which these rights are protected and promoted to the same extent for each and every person in the world. No amount of reciprocity between fellow nationals in one country can generate special duties to each other when there are countless foreign nationals suffering from deprivations of their basic interests. Moral cosmopolitanism and the idea of justice itself seem to share a fundamental commitment to impartial concern for all persons affected by an institutional framework. In a worldwide network of social, political, and economic institutions, distributive justice demands that each human being on the planet be entitled to concern from a perspective that includes their interests on a par with everyone else's. Special treatment for insiders is legitimate only if it can be justified to those excluded from it (Barry 1998, p. 145).

These sorts of considerations have led cosmopolitans to argue for strong obligations to alleviate the continuing dire suffering and death of millions of our fellow human beings. Peter Singer (1972) has defended the utilitarian view that we are morally required to stop such suffering where we can do so without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance. The argument emphasizes the moral irrelevance of distance. A dying child on another continent obligates us just as much as a dying child next door. This cosmopolitan aspect of the case has been more readily accepted than the specifically utilitarian aspect of maximizing benefits, the demand for which has seemed difficult to square with commonsense views about the limits of moral obligation.

One influential line of argument proposed by Brian Barry (1973), Thomas Pogge (1989), and Charles Beitz (1999) has suggested that a consistent application of John Rawls's justly famous original-position argument for principles of distributive justice would lead in the direction of strong moral cosmopolitanism. If the Rawlsian veil of ignorance rules out knowledge of facts about oneself that unfairly skew one's choice of principles, then—along with sex, race, class, and conception of the good—citizenship too ought to be obscured from the contractors' considerations. If principles of distributive justice should not privilege or disadvantage people on the basis of characteristics they possess for which they are not responsible, then their citizenship should not affect their life prospects. If Rawls is correct that inequalities should be allowed only when they maximally benefit the worst-off group, the scope of principles of justice should encompass the least advantaged in the world.

Political Cosmopolitanism

There is a long tradition of favoring political institutions beyond the local or national—a view often allied with the need to promote global peace. While the positions of moral and political cosmopolitanism are distinct, political and legal proposals tend nonetheless to be linked to underlying moral views that emphasize the universal scope of concern for the interests of persons. Options for political cosmopolitanism take various forms, each an instance of the general institutional view that authority should be shifted from individual states to supranational political institutions (Beitz 1994, p. 124).

One option would be a single state encompassing the whole world. Immanuel Kant's rejection of a world state has been followed by later theorists, including John Rawls, who concurs with Kant's judgment that such a state would be either a global despotism or the backdrop for unending civil wars. But if duties to other persons have global scope, it seems reasonable to think that global institutions of some sort will be necessary to make sure that those duties are fairly distributed and that they achieve the goal of protecting human beings from avoidable harm.

Another approach is David Held's model of "cosmopolitan democracy" (2004), which envisages not a single world government but a range of reforms of international political and economic institutions in the name of democratic accountability, consent, and inclusiveness. Held's approach is distinctive in its appeal to democracy as the core value of global political legitimacy, but this is questioned by those who rank justice, rather than democracy, as the highest-ranking value underpinning any assessment of global political institutions.

Cultural Cosmopolitanism

Cultural cosmopolitanism is a view about the conditions under which individuals can generate an identity and live a good life. It emphasizes that cultures are constantly changing and that individuals can benefit from mixing elements from different cultural traditions. Strong cultural cosmopolitans believe that individuals can live well only by drawing on a range of cultural traditions and practices, while moderate cultural cosmopolitans hold that a range of good lives can be grounded in both this sort of openness to cultural variation and a more traditional, inward-looking existence with its settled cultural commitments (Scheffler 2001, Waldron 1992).

While the strong position is more contentious, both views deny that lives can be good only when lived within the confines of a particular cultural or national tradition. Consequently, this form of cosmopolitanism is relevant to evaluating cultural nationalism and its attendant claim to political self-determination (Caney 2005)

Conclusion

The recent flourishing of cosmopolitan thought signals a recognition that any plausible account of politics, morality, distributive justice, and the good life for human beings should take seriously the idea that humanity is a community whose claims on us are both fundamental and far-reaching. A significant project for the future is developing a comprehensive account of the basis and implications of cosmopolitan political morality.

Bibliography

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Encyclopedia of Philosophy