Cosmopolitanism

A Philosophy for Global Ethics

Stan van Hooft

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317492344
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Cosmopolitanism is a demanding and contentious moral position. It urges us to embrace the whole world into our moral concerns and to apply the standards of impartiality and equity across boundaries of nationality, race, religion or gender in a way that would have been unheard of even fifty years ago. It suggests a range of virtues which the cosmopolitan individual should display: virtues such as tolerance, justice, pity, righteous indignation at injustice, generosity toward the poor and starving, care for the global environment, and the willingness to take responsibility for change on a global scale. This book explains and espouses the values of cosmopolitanism, adjudicates between various forms of cosmopolitanism, and defends it against its critics.Cosmopolitanism has relevance for international distributive justice; peace; human rights; environmental sustainability; protection for minorities, refugees and other oppressed groups; democratic participation; and inter cultural tolerance. The book does not aim to impart factual information about global issues or to offer prescriptions for the solution of global problems. Rather, it highlights the ethical issues inherent in them and identifies the moral obligations that individuals, multinational corporations and governments might have in relation to them.While espousing a cosmopolitan form of global ethics, a liberal form of politics, sustainable and just forms of business practice, and an internationalist approach to global conflict and governance, it seeks to present as many sides of the ethical debates as can be supported by reasonable argument. Discussing the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah, Seyla Benhabib, Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Pogge, John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Henry Shue, Peter Singer and others, this book provides a clear and accessible survey of cosmopolitanism and analyses the reality of the rights and responsibilities that it espouses.

Chapter 1

Cosmopolitanism and patriotism

Love of a particular liberty … is not exclusive: love of the common liberty of one’s people easily extends beyond national boundaries and translates into solidarity.

(Viroli 1995: 12)

The first three features of cosmopolitanism that I identified at the conclusion of the Introduction were:

(1) measured endorsement of patriotism;

(2) opposition to nationalism and chauvinism;

(3) willingness to suspend narrow national interests in order to tackle global problems such as those of environmental degradation or global justice.

According to Ulrich Beck (2002), nationalism is one of the chief enemies of cosmopolitan societies. In order to explicate why this is so, we need to distinguish patriotism from nationalism, and to understand how they relate to each other and to cosmopolitanism.

The Nussbaum debate

Martha Nussbaum wrote an essay on patriotism, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, that was published in the Boston Review, a widely read intellectual journal in the United States, and was later republished with a series of responses and replies (Nussbaum 1996a). It critiqued the perceived insularity of American education and accused it of failing to produce citizens who are knowledgeable about, and thus concerned for, the wider world and its peoples. The education that Nussbaum advocated would involve not only expanding the scope of students’ interests to distant peoples, but also considering global justice and human dignity: values that have no borders. Nussbaum argued that students should be taught that they share the world with the whole of humanity and that their being American does not entitle them to a privileged position in the world. Such an education would allow students to learn more about their own way of life by seeing it compared to that of other cultures. It would allow them to see that many problems, such as global poverty and the despoliation of the environment, can be solved by international cooperation, and that the moral values they hold dear as Americans can and should be applied in other parts of the world. They would come to see that such values as human dignity, distributive justice and human rights should be realized globally. In a new introduction to the book that she wrote after the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, Nussbaum also highlighted the role of compassion, which should extend to the whole of humanity.

Among the several authors that Nussbaum discusses in the essay is Richard Rorty. Rorty supports patriotism or nationalism on the grounds that it is preferable that Americans define themselves according to their national identity rather than in terms of their ethnic, religious or other more local allegiances. On this view, patriotism is a positive emotion because it enlarges its holders’ outlooks from their religious, ethnic or other “tribal” identities to that of the nation. Rather than highlight the many differences between people within America, a nationalist sentiment serves to unite people into a common allegiance with common social aspirations. However, Nussbaum considers that this wider allegiance is still too local. It leaves out what we all share universally as human beings. A politics of nationalism still involves sectarian interests because it still says “America first’, even if it does not say, for example, ”Catholic first’! Against any form of patriotism or nationalism, Nussbaum says: “Only the cosmopolitan stance … has the promise of transcending these divisions, because only this stance asks us to give our first allegiance to what is morally good – and that which, being good, I can commend as such to all human beings” (1996b: 5).

The replies to Nussbaum’s essay are written by a veritable who’s who of authors who have written on multiculturalism, identity politics, pluralism and communitarianism. Most of them are critical of Nussbaum’s position. For example, Benjamin Barber argues that cosmopolitanism is a “thin” commitment based purely on intellectual conviction and lacks the appeal to the heart that parochial allegiances do.¹ As developed by Kant, it is a commitment arrived at by “pure reason’, which lacks the motivational pull of love of ”home and hearth“ or of nation. As developed by social contract theorists such as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), it conceives of individuals merely as rights-bearers able to enter into nothing more emotional than pragmatically constructed civic relationships with others. Accordingly he argues that ”What we require are healthy, democratic forms of local community and civic patriotism rather than abstract universalism and the thin gruel of contract relations“ (Barber 1996: 31). This point raises an issue that has been discussed ever since Kant developed his moral theory. Is morality a matter of purely intellectual conviction, or does it also involve the emotions? Kant rejects the emotions as irrelevant to morality on the grounds that they are unreliable, confused and inconsistent with the freedom of the will to act only on the deliverances of pure reason. Any moral theorist who rejects the moral relevance of the emotions will therefore also reject the emotion of patriotism. But they will then be left with a purely intellectual moral conviction centred on an abstract notion of persons as bearers of rights or holders of human dignity. Barber takes Nussbaum to be proposing such a purely intellectual commitment to the moral equality of all people.

But there is a tradition in moral theory that is an alternative to Kant’s. This tradition stems from David Hume (1711–76), who highlighted what he called the “feelings of humanity”. These included sympathy, compassion, the pleasure we feel when we see others flourish and the pity we feel when we see others suffer. Such feelings come upon us without deliberation – and so cannot be the object of moral imperatives – but they are morally laudable. They motivate us to act well. By highlighting compassion in her later introduction, Nussbaum places herself in this tradition. Many of her critics, including Barber, would see themselves as belonging to this tradition as well. For them the question is not whether emotions as such matter morally, but which ones do. For Nussbaum, compassion is a morally positive emotion, while patriotism is a morally negative emotion. In contrast, Barber, like Rorty, considers patriotism to be ethically positive.

Robert Pinsky (1996) also sees patriotism as a positive emotion. For him both patriotism and cosmopolitanism are states of love. They are commitments that arise from our insertion into specific cultural and historical contexts and reflect our positive responses to them. But, according to Pinsky, Nussbaum’s cosmopolitanism is in fact parochial in that it is the ideology of the globally mobile managerial class. It grows out of a kind of rootlessness that lacks grounding in specific communities. To critique nationalism as a form of “jingoism” is to fail to see the love of place and of community that is expressed in it.

Another of Nussbaum’s critics, Amy Gutmann, sees positive value in nationalism because we need the nation-state as a context for teaching students to pursue justice. It is only through the teaching of democratic citizenship in the largest community they are in – the state – that students can be taught the universal value of human rights. According to Gutmann (1996), the world is not a community in the relevant sense and the cosmopolitan focus on the world as such does not encourage a respect for justice in any concrete form. In a global context, the concept of justice becomes too abstract and intellectual to be motivational. We need the value debates that membership in a democratic political community encourages to teach us what justice is so that we can then take that lesson out beyond our nation’s borders. Making a similar point, Gertrude Himmelfarb rejects cosmopolitanism on Aristotelian grounds. She argues that every person must belong to a “polity”. We are inherently social beings and require a sense of belonging to a political community with which we can identify. She thinks cosmopolitanism is a dangerous illusion because, in positing a global form of citizenship, it neglects the situated and communitarian bonds of each individual. “What cosmopolitanism obscures, even denies, are the givens of life: parents, ancestors, family, race, religion, heritage, history, culture, tradition, community – and nationality. These are not ‘accidental’ attributes of the individual” (Himmelfarb 1996: 77).² For his part, Charles Taylor (1996) stresses the need for social and political solidarity in liberal states, in which the citizen’s allegiance is to a common national enterprise of seeking a good life. Such enterprises ought to include concern for outsiders but it would not help to replace them altogether with a purely cosmopolitan vision.³

Appiah endorses cosmopolitanism but argues that there is also a place for nationalism. For Appiah, a nation is an appropriate object of moral commitment, allegiance and loyalty. He sees a nation in the way that Taylor does: as a body of people united by a collective social project and by national sentiments that arise when a people lives together in state-like arrangements. Such a nation could include people of differing ethnicities, religions and cultural backgrounds, provided they are united by the common project of living in a political community. “Loosely and unphilosophically defined, a nation is an ‘imagined community’ of culture or ancestry running beyond the scale of the face-to-face and seeking political expression” (Appiah 1996: 27). Many multicultural societies in the world today have difficulties in creating a nation with a single social project in this way. Moreover, since the state is an institution necessary for the ordering of social life and since it exercises coercive power that, at least in the case of liberal democratic societies, has moral justification, it is a moral good. Appiah (2005: ch. 6) thinks that states are actually more important than nations (where nations are defined by the common ethnicity or traditions of its members) because they are the embodiment of the political project of making laws and a common life and so demand our civic allegiance in a way that national or ethnic traditions do not.

A further critic, Michael W. McConnell, reminds us that moral education begins with love of parents and spreads out to specific others through emotions such as admiration. The heroes of a nation are concrete role models, our emotional attachment to whom allows us to grow in moral responsibility. He repeats Barber’s claim that cosmopolitanism is too thin a conception to serve this educative role. He quotes the English social philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–97): “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind” (McConnell 1996: 79). Even while advocating universal concerns, it is necessary to invoke the values of one’s national culture or religion. In liberal societies, these values should include tolerance and a respect for the differences in the cultures and traditions of other peoples. In contrast, McConnell argues that, as cosmopolitanism is a commitment to abstractions such as “global justice”, “human rights” or “humanity’, it can lead to moralism and intolerance. According to him, ”The moralistic cosmopolitan, therefore, is not one who everywhere feels comfortable but who everywhere feels superior“ (ibid.: 82).⁴ This point expands Himmelfarb’s warning that cosmopolitanism is a dangerous illusion by suggesting that it is an imperialistic attempt at imposing Western values on the rest of the world.

In her reply to these critics, Nussbaum returns to the question of how upbringing impacts on moral education. She addresses the claim that moral education and the moral outlook it produces should be understood on the analogy of an expanding circle.⁵ This analogy suggests that one first learns to love and respect one’s parents and one’s family and only then can one learn to love the wider community. One learns to love and respect one’s own coreligionists or the members of one’s own ethnic, linguistic or cultural groups before one is able to love and respect one’s nation and, finally, global humanity. Whether one thinks that the nation is the limit of one’s moral affections or that moral concern for the whole of humanity is psychologically possible, the model used for theorizing the question is that of an expanding circle of moral concern in which moral education consists in the widening of this circle to its furthest limits.⁶ This account of moral education assumes that the centre of the circle – the individual self – is already shaped as a moral agent with fully formed moral motivations lacking only an appropriate object for its moral concerns. Such an agent finds itself initially alone but complete, and then learns to attach itself to its mother, its family, its community and so on. If the expanding circles were drawn in illustrations as a set of concentric rings defining zones of moral concern – representing family, community, neighbourhood, nation and then humanity – the rings themselves would represent “and then” in a sequence of developmental stages. This is the model implicit in the critiques of Gutmann, Himmelfarb, Taylor and McConnell. Nussbaum, however, understands the matter differently.

Nussbaum reminds us that developmental psychologists describe the process of moral education as one in which the infant comes to recognize itself at the same time as it recognizes others. Its identity is not pre-established but develops as its relationships with others develop. It is the acknowledgement and love given it by its parents that help shape the infant into the moral agent it will become. Moreover, this process is not only positive. The infant experiences pain, hunger and distress and, as a result, forms deeply ambivalent bonds with its primary carers. It is needful and also angry at being left needful. It then seeks to atone for this anger by love. The expansion of its compassion to others is not driven by moral teaching or ethical exemplars but arises because the child can empathize with needfulness. A multitude of childhood experiences, including stories such as fairy tales – which, Nussbaum reminds us, are seldom geographically or nationally specific – shape the child into a being who can empathize with those others who are needful in the same way as it is. Accordingly, the circle of compassion does not expand, but is all-embracing from the very beginning. It is not an expanding circle but an unlimited one. Of course, it is confined to what the child is familiar with, but it does not entail an “other” that is not yet included in its scope. According to Nussbaum:

All circles develop simultaneously, in a complex and interlacing movement. But surely the outer circle is not the last to form. Long before children have any acquaintance with the idea of nation, or even of one specific religion, they know hunger and loneliness. Long before they encounter patriotism, they have probably encountered death. Long before ideology interferes, they know something of humanity.

(1996c: 142)

Nussbaum’s point is that the love of humanity is not a further stage of moral development that comes after one learns to love one’s family or community, but is always already present in love of parents, community, tribe, race or nation. All of these illustrate what it is to be human and constitute concrete forms of the love of humanity. One does not have to learn to love one’s country in order thereby to learn to love humanity later. One learns to love humanity even as one learns to love family, community and country. In loving one’s family, one’s friends or one’s community, one has been loving humanity all along. If there are people who think that others from outside their family or community are less worthy of moral respect it will be because they have been taught by an excessively insular or nationalistic education to think that way.

However, there are other issues raised by Nussbaum’s critics. Is cosmopolitanism a “thin” commitment lacking the full-bodied and emotional attachments that typify love of family, community and country? Is patriotism a positive moral emotion? Can cosmopolitans also love the country in which they live? What is the role of the nation-state in the life of a cosmopolitan? Can it be a context in which global concerns are developed and expressed? Does a cosmopolitan’s commitment to human rights and global justice make her blind to local differences and intolerant of unusual social and political practices? Can the whole world be considered a polity – if not a community – in which we can learn what justice requires of us and what love and compassion demand of us? To answer these questions, let us make a fresh beginning.

Patriotism

The following phenomena could be used to illustrate patriotism, nationalism, chauvinism or all of them combined:

(a) Each year, on 26 January, Australia celebrates a national holiday called Australia Day. The date marks the settlement of the continent by British forces who established a penal colony housing convicts sent from overcrowded prisons in Britain. The Australian nation has sprung from these humble beginnings.

(b) Each year, on 25 April, Australia celebrates a national holiday called Anzac Day. The day commemorates a defeat of Australian and New Zealand forces at the hands of Turkish troops during the First World War at Gallipoli in the Dardanelles. Australian and New Zealand soldiers were said to have earned the respect of the world for their courage during that doomed campaign.

(c) There is occasional debate in Australia as to whether it should sever its ties with the United Kingdom and become a republic, and whether the Union Jack (the flag of the United Kingdom) should be removed from Australia’s flag.

(d) During a news broadcast, we are told that an Australian athlete won a silver medal at the Olympic Games. W...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Cosmopolitanism and patriotism
• 2. Human rights
• 3. Global justice
• 4. Lasting peace
• 5. Towards a global community
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index