Abstract
Cosmopolitanism and nationalism are at war, if the criticism they relentlessly direct at each other is any guide. The current debates between defenders of these two views tend to solve their disagreements by showing that one view is incoherent and assigning victory to the other. I argue instead that cosmopolitanism and nationalism do not fail on their own, but are rather incomplete facets of the truth, because each reflects demands of morality that are in permanent tension with one another. Moreover, there may be no way in principle to establish a binding order of priority between nationalistic and cosmopolitan claims, even if in practice we will find various ways to negotiate between them.
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In addition to moral and political cosmopolitanism, cultural cosmopolitanism represents a distinctive view. Cultural cosmopolitanism rejects the idea that a person's well-being depends on membership in a defined culture. This view emphasizes openness to cultural diversity and mingling, immersion in different cultural milieus, and the plasticity of an individual's personal identity. See Samuel Scheffler, “Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism,” in Boundaries and Allegiances (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), 111–30. For a proponent, see Jeremy Waldron, “Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,” University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 25 (1992): 751–93. For a critical perspective, see Pratap Mehta, “Cosmopolitanism and the Circle of Reason,” Political Theory 28 (2000): 619–39.
Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972): 229–43; also Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), which is an elaboration and defense of Singer's position.
Singer, “Famine,” 231.
Singer, “Famine,” 231.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 15.
Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 11, 18.
John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 247. See also Allen Buchanan, “Rawls's Law of Peoples: Rules for a Vanquished Westphalian World,” Ethics 110 (July 2000): 697–721.
Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 128. See also 127–83.
Leif Wenar, “What We Owe to Distant Others,” Politics, Philosophy & Economics 2 (2003): 283–304. Thomas Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other? (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999).
Wenar, “What We Owe to Distant Others,” 284.
Wenar, “What We Owe to Distant Others,” 285.
Catherine Lu, “The One and Many Faces of Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Political Philosophy 8 (June 2000): 244–67.
Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in For Love of Country? ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 9. Nussbaum offers a much more nuanced view in Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Charles Beitz, “International Liberalism and Distributive Justice: A Survey of Recent Thought,” World Politics 51 (1999): 269–96, 291.
Robert E. Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985).
Nussbaum, For Love of Country? 5. The strong language she uses to disparage particularistic concerns prompt Nathan Glazer, Hilary Putman, and Michael Walzer to criticize this facet of her view in their response essays included in the volume. Nussbaum herself resists this interpretation of her view in “Reply”. However, her critics’ interpretation is plausible, if not entirely on the mark.
Nussbaum, For Love of Country? 5.
Nancy Rosenblum, Membership and Moral: The Personal Uses of Pluralism in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Roger Scruton, “The First Person Plural,” in Theorizing Nationalism, ed. Ronald Beiner (Albany NY: SUNY Press, 1999); David Miller, Citizenship and National Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000); Alasdair MacIntyre, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” The Lindley Lecture, University of Kansas, 1984.
MacIntyre, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” 12.
Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
Miller, Citizenship and National Identity, 27.
MacIntyre, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” 4.
Miller, Citizenship and National Identity, 27.
George Kateb, “Is Patriotism a Mistake?” Social Research 67 (Winter 2000): 901.
George Kateb, “Is Patriotism a Mistake?” 907, also 910–913.
MacIntyre argues that cosmopolitanism “requires of me to assume an abstract and artificial—perhaps even an impossible—stance, that of a rational being as such, responding to the requirements of morality not qua parent or farmer or quarterback, but qua rational agent who has abstracted him or herself from all social particularity, who has become not merely Adam Smith's impartial spectator, but a correspondingly impartial actor, and one who in his impartiality is doomed to rootlessness, to be a citizen of nowhere. How can I justify to myself performing this act of abstraction and detachment?” in “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” 12.
Samuel Scheffler, “Justice and Responsibility,” in Boundaries and Allegiances, 192.
For a good discussion and a critique of this view, see Scheffler, “Justice and Responsibility,” especially 86–87.
Thomas Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism A Defense,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (CRISPP) 5 (2002): 86–91. See also World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity/Blackwell, 2002).
Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism: A Defense,” 87, emphasis in original.
David Miller, “Cosmopolitanism: A Critique,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 5 (2002): 80–85.
Miller, “Cosmopolitanism: A Critique,” 82.
Miller, “Cosmopolitanism: A Critique,” 83.
If one is a citizen of a country where another individual suffers some institutional wrong, such as lack of due process, for instance, is one responsible for the unjust institutional outcome? Does this mean that one has failed in one's negative duty not to impose unjust institutions on others? Even if a more systematic injustice occurs, such that a group is mistreated in some objectionable way, say by not having access to equal political rights, does that imply that the other citizens are responsible for the unjustness of the institutional order? This seems like a difficult point to settle a priori. Responsibility depends on the kind of relationship between the citizens and the institutions that govern them. It matters whether those institutions are representative (they are the product of the citizens’ will in a broad sense) or are authoritarian, what each citizen's place in the institutional hierarchy is, and whether one has the power to affect the decisions of those institutions. In any case, the issues here are complicated, and at the very least the examples I just offered show that it is problematic to move from a negative duty not to cause harm to another person to a negative duty not to impose unjust political institutions upon that person.
There may be opportunity costs of the citizens of the country in question in terms of the benefits they have purportedly received by participating in the international institutions, which they now have to give up, but this is a different opportunity costs than that involving reciprocal obligations of membership in a nation.
Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights.
Thom Brooks, “Cosmopolitanism and Distributing Responsibilities,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 5 (2002): 92–97.
Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism: A Defense,” 91.
Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Steven Lukes, Moral Conflict and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Michael Stocker, Plural and Conflicting Values (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); John Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
For a brief description of deontic pluralism, see also W.D. Ross, The Right and The Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), especially Chapter II.
Ross and other deontic pluralists do provide a systematized account of distinctive duties, by separating primary, non-derivative duties from duties that are derivative from the primary ones. For such a list see Ross, The Right and The Good, 21.
Ross, The Right and The Good, 19.
Andrew Mason, “Special Obligations to Compatriots,” Ethics 107 (1997): 427–47; Joseph Raz, “Liberating Duties,” Law and Philosophy 8 (1989): 3–21.
Mason, “Special Obligations,” 439.
Mason, “Special Obligations,” 440.
Samuel Scheffler, “Relationships and Responsibilities,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 26 (1997): 189–209.
Scheffler, “Relationships and Responsibilities,” 189.
Scheffler, “Relationships and Responsibilities,” 196.
Scheffler, “Relationships and Responsibilities,” 200–201.
Kok-Chor Tan, Justice without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and Patriotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
This is, for instance, Robert Goodin's view in “What's So Special About Our Fellow Countrymen?” Ethics 98 (1988): 663–86.
Nussbaum, For Love of Country? 136.
David Miller thinks that the reductionist view misdescribes and undervalues the nature of particularist commitments, because it denies that they have “intrinsic ethical relevance.” Miller, “Bounded Citizenship,” in Cosmopolitan Citizenship, ed. Kimberly Hutchings and R Dannreuther (New York: St Martin's Press, 1999), 165; quoted in Tan, Justice without Borders, 148.
See also Tan Justice without Borders; Scheffler, “Relationships and Responsibilities.”
Tan, Justice without Borders, 150.
Tan, Justice without Borders, 150.
Brian Barry, Justice as Impartiality (Oxford University Press, 1995); Tan, Justice without Borders, 157.
Tan, Justice without Borders, 157.
Tan, Justice without Borders, 158.
Tan, Justice without Borders, 159.
Leif Wenar, “What We Owe to Distant Others?” 285.
For a cosmopolitan defense of negative duties see Loren Lomasky, “Liberalism beyond Borders,” Social Philosophy and Policy 24 (2007): 206–33.
Thomas Pogge, “‘Assisting’ the Global Poor,” in The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy, ed. Deen K. Chatterjee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 260–88.
For instance, are some countries responsible, due to their history of colonial domination, for the internal collapse of their former colonies? What kinds of responsibilities do these countries incur?
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I am indebted to John Tomasi, Sharon Krause, Charles Larmore, and William Galston, for kindly reading several drafts. In addition, I would like to acknowledge Jason Brennan, Adam Tebble, and the participants at the Political Philosophy Workshop at Brown University for constructive feedback. I am grateful for suggestions from Loren Lomasky, Thom Brooks, Andrew Polsky, and two anonymous referees for Polity during the final stages of writing this paper.
For the purpose of this paper I use patriotism and nationalism interchangeably here. Clearly there are cases where the national community and the political community have different boundaries; however, the concepts overlap significantly in both political practice and ordinary language.
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Pavel, C. Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and Moral Opportunity Costs. Polity 41, 489–513 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2009.1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2009.1