Chapter 12
Cosmopolitanism
thom a s p ogge
Based on the ancient Greek words cosmos (world) and polites (citizen), a cosmopolitan is
a citizen of the world. The more common modern meaning closely reflects these ancient
roots. Persons are called cosmopolitans, or cosmopolitan, when they are understanding
and respectful of foreign cultures, travel widely, and can interact well with people from
many societies. And cities or gatherings are called cosmopolitan when they bring
together persons and groups with diverse ethnicities, languages, cultures, religions or
lifestyles.
Like other-isms, cosmopolitanism is an intellectual position – or, more precisely, a
family of such positions. With aesthetic considerations standing in the way of calling
such a position and its adherents ‘cosmopolitanist’ (in analogy to ‘perfectionist’ and
‘materialist’), the word ‘cosmopolitan’ has assumed a second meaning: characterizing
a theory or person committed to cosmopolitanism. Only this second meaning of ‘cosmopolitan’ concerns us here.
Unlike some other -isms, cosmopolitanism involves not merely views about how
things are, but primarily views about how things ought to be. Cosmopolitan positions
centrally include evaluative and normative views; they assess and prescribe. The
central idea guiding these moral assessments and prescriptions is that of including all
human beings as equals. This central idea can be understood and employed in diverse
ways, and a variety of cosmopolitan positions can therefore be distinguished.
This variety can be reconstructed in two steps. In a first step, one distinguishes
topically the various subject matters to which the central cosmopolitan idea can be
applied. In a second step, one can then distinguish, within each subject matter, different
ways of understanding and applying the central cosmopolitan idea. Focusing on the
first step, let me distinguish four main kinds of cosmopolitanism, each of which will
then be more fully discussed in a subsequent section.
To motivate this distinction, we can start out from the way moral conceptions are
generally categorized according to the types of entities, or iudicanda, for which they
provide assessments and prescriptions. Such iudicanda are of four main types: individual and collective agents, the conduct of such agents, social institutions (rules, practices) and states of the world.
Ways of assessing agents and their conduct are closely interrelated and therefore
usually treated together in what may be called a conception of ethics. Such a conception
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is cosmopolitan if its assessments and prescriptions are based on taking equal account
of the interests of all human beings. Cosmopolitan conceptions of ethics exemplify our
first kind of cosmopolitan position: ethical cosmopolitanism.
The subject matter of agents and their conduct can be further subdivided. One can
formulate a conception of ethics specific to individual human beings and their conduct,
for instance, or a conception of ethics specific to states and their conduct. When such
a conception is animated by the central cosmopolitan idea, it can be said to exemplify,
respectively, interpersonal or international ethical cosmopolitanism.
There are two prominent ways of applying the central cosmopolitan idea to the
subject matter of social institutions. The more direct way is through the demand that
social institutions ought to be designed so that they include all human beings as equals.
A moral conception centring around this demand envisions one universal political
society that includes, or at least is open to, all human beings. Invoking the ancient
Greek word polis (city-state), such a universal polity is often called a cosmopolis. Any
moral conception prescribing such a unified legal organization of the whole human
world in preference to other institutional designs can be said to exemplify legal cosmopolitanism. This is our second kind of cosmopolitan position.
There is also a more indirect way for a moral conception to address the subject
matter of social institutions. Rather than demand outright some particular institutional
design, such a conception might instead endorse a moral criterion by reference to
which alternative institutional designs ought to be assessed and ranked. Following
John Rawls (1971), moral conceptions of this sort have come to be known as conceptions of (social) justice. A conception of social justice is cosmopolitan if and only if its
assessments and prescriptions are based on taking equal account of the interests of all
human beings. Cosmopolitan conceptions of social justice exemplify our third kind of
cosmopolitan position: social justice cosmopolitanism.
It is an open, partly empirical question whether a cosmopolitan conception of
social justice (endorsing some specific moral criterion for assessing alternative
institutional designs) supports some particular variant of legal cosmopolitanism
(endorsing some particular type of world state). Whether it does depends on how it
specifies the relevant interests of human beings and on whether the so-specified human
interests, taken equally into account, are best served by some world state or by
some alternative design of the global institutional order, such as a system of
sovereign states.
While the evaluative component of any legal or social justice cosmopolitanism is
focused on the design of social institutions, its prescriptive component addresses individual and collective agents, specifying their responsibilities in regard to social institutions. In this respect, such conceptions are complementary to conceptions of ethics
– the former specifying the responsibilities human agents have specifically in regard to
social institutions and the latter specifying their remaining responsibilities within a
given social and institutional environment. Here a commitment to legal or social justice
cosmopolitanism can be combined with a rejection of ethical cosmopolitanism: one can
endorse a world state (legal cosmopolitanism) and/or a cosmopolitan conception of
social justice – and simultaneously deny that human agents, even beyond their responsibilities in regard to social institutions, are required to take impartial account of the
interests of all human beings worldwide.
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The distinction between these two subject matters of morality – one centring on
institutional design, the other on human conduct and character within a given social
and institutional environment – has traditionally been seen as posing a problem of the
unity and coherence of morality as a whole. Historically, different solutions to this
problem have been proposed. One approach seeks to achieve unity through structural
homologies, as when Plato theorized that justice in individuals has the same complex
structure as justice in the city-state. Another approach seeks to achieve unity through
subordination: by shaping the polity for the sake of ethical living or, conversely, by
shaping human conduct and character for the sake of the polity. Yet another approach
seeks to achieve unity instrumentally: by directing social institutions as well as the
conduct and character of human agents to one common goal. It is within this last
approach that the fourth iudicandum, states of the world, comes to the fore.
Moral conceptions focused on states of the world postulate a common goal or system
of goals: that the world should go well by the lights of some evaluative standard. Such
a common goal – which may involve a complex combination of interrelated desiderata
– is often formulated in terms of justice: as the goal of a just world or of justice on earth.
In such formulations, justice is understood as a property of states of affairs, not of social
institutions. Though often conflated, these two understandings of justice are importantly different. A common-goal conception might diagnose as an injustice the sheer
fact that some are born into affluence and others into poverty, while a corresponding
social-justice conception would diagnose as unjust any institutional order that avoidably
gives rise to such unequal starting positions. While the former is focused on the assessment and improvement of states of the world, the latter is focused on the assessment
and reform of social institutions. I flag this important conceptual difference between
two ways of understanding justice through selective use of the word ‘social’. The claim
that the world ought to be such that people have equal opportunities is a claim about
justice; the claim that social institutions ought to be designed so that people have equal
opportunities is a claim about social justice.
Any conception that unifies morality’s subject matters by postulating one common
goal for all of them is monistic in the sense of Liam Murphy (1999). It applies to all
moral questions – including the questions of how social institutions ought to be designed
and of how human agents ought to conduct themselves within a given social
and institutional context – and it answers them all in a unified, broadly consequentialist way by reference to a single evaluative standard. Such a monistic moral
conception is cosmopolitan if and only if the standard in terms of which it assesses the
world takes equal account of the interests of all human beings. If it does, then this
conception exemplifies our fourth and final kind of cosmopolitan position: monistic
cosmopolitanism.
Legal Cosmopolitanism
Legal cosmopolitanism endorses a world state or cosmopolis which, invoking the ancient
Greek word polis (city-state), is a political society that includes all human beings or at
least is open to all. Endorsed by various Cynic and Stoic thinkers in antiquity and
envisioned by Anarcharsis Cloots in the aftermath of the French Revolution, legal
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cosmopolitanism has remained a fringe view that is today dismissed nearly universally
(but see Nielsen, 1988; Wendt, 2003).
These dismissals tend to be quick, typically doing little more than point out that a
world state would be dangerous and that Kant also thought it a bad idea. Rawls is fairly
typical, writing: ‘I follow Kant’s lead in Perpetual Peace (1795) in thinking that a world
government . . . would either be a global despotism or else would rule over a fragile
empire torn by frequent civil strife as various regions and peoples tried to gain their
political freedom and autonomy’ (Rawls, 1999, p. 36).
This appeal to Kant is questionable. Kant writes that a plurality of independent states
‘is still to be preferred to their amalgamation under a single power which has overruled
the rest and created a universal monarchy. For the laws progressively lose their impact
as the government increases its range, and a soulless despotism, after crushing the
germs of goodness, will finally lapse into anarchy’ (Kant [1795] 1995, p. 113). This
passage expresses strong reservations about a universal monarchy achieved by conquest. Kant does not, here or elsewhere, express such reservations about a liberal world
republic achieved through a peaceful merger of republics. To the contrary, he prefers
such a world republic over a league of sovereign states, and thus seems to endorse the
latter for merely strategic reasons:
For states in their relation to one another, there cannot be any reasonable way out of their
lawless condition which entails only war except that they, like individual human beings,
should give up their savage (lawless) freedom, adjust themselves to public coercive laws,
and thus establish a continuously growing international state (civitas gentium), which will
ultimately include all the nations of the world. But under their idea of the law of nations
they absolutely do not wish to do this, and so reject in practice what is correct in theory.
If all is not to be lost, there can be, then, in place of the positive idea of a world republic,
only the negative surrogate of an alliance which averts war, endures, spreads, and checks
the force of that hostile inclination away from law, though such an alliance is in constant
peril of its breaking loose again. (Kant [1795] 1995, p. 105)
Even granting, without textual support, that Kant believed any world state would
invariably lead to despotism or civil strife, it is quite doubtful that his opinion is the best
evidence one can have about whether a just world government is feasible in the twentyfirst century and beyond. This is doubtful because the last 200 years have greatly
expanded our historical experience relevant to this question and have vastly improved
our social theorizing, especially in economics and political science. In particular we
have learned from the federalist systems of the United States and the European Union
that – Kant’s contrary view notwithstanding – a genuine division of powers, even
in the vertical dimension, is workable and no obstacle to stability and justice
(Pogge, 1992).
While the common dismissals of legal cosmopolitanism are extraordinarily flimsy,
they contain an important element of truth: endorsement or rejection of any specific
world state model should depend in large part on an evaluation of how this model
would actually work in the real world. A well-grounded expectation that such a model
is associated with a substantial risk of despotism or civil strife is a solid moral reason
for opposing its implementation. An unqualified commitment to any variant of legal
cosmopolitanism should therefore be rejected.
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Any systematic evaluation of world state models, assessing them against one another
and against alternative global institutional designs (such as a system of sovereign
states), requires some moral criterion or standard of assessment as formulated and
defended by a conception of social justice. Let us then examine conceptions of this kind
– and cosmopolitan conceptions of social justice in particular – that might possibly
ground a qualified commitment to some variant of legal cosmopolitanism.
Social Justice Cosmopolitanism
Legal cosmopolitanism is distinctive by advocating a cosmopolitan institutional
order, while the other three kinds of cosmopolitanism advocate cosmopolitan moral
standards or criteria – for assessing, respectively, human agents and their conduct,
social institutions, states of the world. Following the more recent literature, we might
say broadly that all three kinds of moral cosmopolitanism share four commitments in
common:
•
Normative Individualism: The ultimate units of moral concern are human beings, or
persons – rather than, say, family lines, tribes, ethnic, cultural or religious communities, nations, or states (which may be units of moral concern only indirectly,
in virtue of their individual members). A cosmopolitan moral criterion thus bases
its assessments and prescriptions solely on information about how individual human
beings fare or are treated.
• Impartiality: In processing such information, a cosmopolitan moral criterion takes
each included human individual into account symmetrically. Economists call this
the Anonymity Condition: that a certain number of included individuals experience
a certain fate or treatment enters the assessment in the same way, regardless of who
these individuals are.
• All-Inclusiveness: Every human being counts as an ultimate unit of moral concern
and is therefore included in the information base on which a cosmopolitan moral
criterion bases its assessments and prescriptions.
• Generality: This special status of every human being has global force. Persons are
ultimate units of concern for everyone – not only for their compatriots, fellow
religionists or suchlike. The assessments and prescriptions a cosmopolitan moral
criterion delivers claim authority over all individual and collective human agents.
We can better understand what a criterion of social justice is by looking at the criterion proposed by Rawls. In his classic work A Theory of Justice, Rawls focuses on the
institutional order (‘basic structure’) of a self-contained and self-sufficient society of
human beings and argues for assessing alternative feasible designs of this institutional
order on the basis of the distribution of social primary goods each such design would
generate among the society’s individual members. The criterion he formulates for the
comparative assessment of such distributions – his famous two principles of justice
(Rawls, 1971, pp. 266–7) – contains both absolute and relative components: as far as
possible, the basic structure is to be designed so that each person has a fully adequate
scheme of equal basic liberties, so that fair equality of opportunity obtains, and so that
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the difference principle is satisfied (socio-economic inequalities among citizens are generated exactly insofar as this optimizes the worst socio-economic position).
By taking the self-contained and self-sufficient society of Rawls’s theory to be humankind at large, one arrives at a cosmopolitan interpretation of his theory. According to
this interpretation, the global basic structure should, as far as possible, be designed so
that each human being has a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, so that fair
equality of opportunity obtains worldwide, and so that the difference principle is satisfied globally (socio-economic inequalities among human beings are generated exactly
insofar as this optimizes the globally worst socio-economic position).
Rejecting this cosmopolitan interpretation, Rawls wants his theory to be applied
only to certain national societies, paradigmatically the United States. In fact, he rejects
at the global level any substantive conception of social justice, cosmopolitan or otherwise. Transnational institutional arrangements are to be designed through agreements
negotiated among liberal and decent societies (Rawls,1999, p. 37, laws 2 and 3). Left
unconstrained by any substantive conception of social justice, such negotiations reflect
the unequal expertise and bargaining power among negotiating governments and tend
to sideline the interests of individuals, especially of those living in non-liberal or poorer
societies.
Rawls does provide a moral conception that reaches beyond national borders. This
conception applies not to transnational institutional arrangements, but to the foreign
policy of liberal and decent societies. Beyond that, it differs from a cosmopolitan conception of social justice in three further respects. First, Rawls’s international conception
takes peoples rather than individual persons as the sole units of moral concern, stipulating each people’s sole interest to be that it maintain itself as a well-ordered (i.e., liberal
or decent) society. Second, Rawls takes this interest to support a moral concern only for
the absolute deprivation of other societies. Well-ordered societies ought to help other
willing societies reach a threshold level at which they, too, could be well ordered. They
can do this by giving economic assistance to burdened societies and by promoting
respect for human rights. Such help is humanitarian – not something a burdened
society or its citizens could claim as their due. Third, inequality across national borders
– relative deprivation – is a matter of moral indifference. No matter how large such inequality may be or become, well-ordered societies have no moral reason to rein it in.
Leaving aside the internal problems with this non-cosmopolitan conception of international ethics Rawls presents (Pogge, 1994), what reasons can be offered for rejecting
any conception of social justice applying to transnational institutional arrangements?
One reason Rawls gives is the supposed infeasibility of a world state. This is not a good
reason. If a world state were indeed associated with great dangers of despotism and
civil strife, then a cosmopolitan conception of social justice (e.g., the cosmopolitan
interpretation of Rawls’s theory) would correctly reject this institutional design in
favour of other designs that better secure the fundamental interests of all human beings
– perhaps a global federation on the model of the European Union, or a loose league of
nations as Kant had described, or a states system like that existing now. The infeasibility of a world state counts against legal cosmopolitanism, but not against social justice
cosmopolitanism.
Another reason Rawls gives is that his theory of social justice is too distinctively
liberal to be acceptable across the diversity of human cultures. This may be a good
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reason against the Rawlsian variant of social justice cosmopolitanism, but cultural
diversity could be accommodated through a less demanding variant of social justice
cosmopolitanism. We find an idea for a plausible such variant in Article 28 of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights: ‘Everyone is entitled to a social and international
order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.’ The basic idea here is that the design of all social institutions should be guided by
the pre-eminent goal that the human rights of all human beings be fulfilled. If this goal
cannot be fully achieved, we should come as close as possible. The principal imperative
governing all institutional design is that of minimizing avoidable human rights deficits
– with human rights deficits possibly weighted differentially on the basis of their causal
genesis, giving greater weight to any deficits that social institutions require or authorize than to deficits these social institutions merely engender or fail to prevent.
A plausible and widely sharable cosmopolitan conception of social justice could
contain, as an additional subsidiary directive for institutional design, a preference for
more equal socio-economic distributions among human beings (the Pigou–Dalton condition is one prominent specification of this preference).
Such a conception of social justice is individualistic by focusing exclusively on how
individual human beings fare or are treated: on each person’s human rights and socioeconomic share. It is all-inclusive by taking account of the human rights and socioeconomic shares of all human beings worldwide. It is impartial by taking the human rights
and socio-economic shares of all human beings symmetrically into account. And it is
general by specifying all human agents’ responsibilities in regard to social institutions.
Despite its emphasis on human rights, such a conception of social justice need not
be excessively Western or liberal. To be fully realized, a human right must be fulfilled
for all. It is fulfilled for any one human being when this person has secure access to its
object (that which the human right is a right to). The pre-eminent goal of institutional
design is then that all human beings have secure access to the objects of all their human
rights. This goal is widely sharable in a world of diverse cultures. It does not incorporate
global versions of fair equality of opportunity or the difference principle. Nor does it
require a world state. Rather, it could be achieved through a plurality of territorial
societies that might be quite diverse: some liberal societies might maintain secure
access to the objects of human rights through pervasive use of judicial mechanisms,
while some non-liberal societies could maintain secure access through other institutional arrangements more congenial to their cultures. All these societies could be free
to adopt additional social justice goals for their national institutional order, provided
these are suitably subordinated to the pre-eminent institutional goal of human rights
fulfilment.
Our world is very far from realizing human rights, as billions of people, mostly in the
poorer countries, lack secure access to basic foodstuffs and safe water, to minimal clothing and shelter, to physical safety, basic education and healthcare, and to vital civil and
political freedoms. The social justice cosmopolitanism I have sketched supports a critique of the status quo insofar as the massive human rights deficits it displays are
institutionally avoidable. Social institutions are unjust insofar as they foreseeably contribute to an avoidable human rights deficit.
Many present institutional arrangements do so contribute. The organization of the
North Korean economy foreseeably contributes to avoidable food insecurity in that
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country, for instance. Similarly, the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO)
regime foreseeably contribute to the massive persistence of avoidable severe poverty in
the world’s poorer regions – by permitting affluent countries to ‘protect’ their markets
through tariffs, quotas, anti-dumping duties, and huge subsidies and export credits to
domestic producers, for example, and by enforcing costly intellectual property rights
(IPRs) in seeds and essential medicines.
In the affluent countries, we typically see unfulfilled human rights abroad as an
occasion for aid and assistance. We wonder whether we ought to do more to help and
protect the poor and oppressed abroad and more also (as suggested by Rawls’s ‘duty of
assistance’) to enable their societies to govern themselves better. Social justice cosmopolitanism can relate us to the poor and oppressed abroad in a different way. Our failure
is not merely that of helping too little, but that of designing and imposing transnational
institutional arrangements that foreseeably produce and perpetuate avoidable human
rights deficits on a massive scale.
Sympathetic to Rawls, a number of theorists have opposed this conclusion with the
assertion that the concept of (social) justice does not apply to transnational social institutions – at least not yet. For Michael Blake (2001) the morally relevant difference
between national and transnational institutional arrangements is that the former are
coercive and the latter are not. He illustrates this point with a fable of two homogeneous societies consensually establishing trading relations. While the laws within each
society are backed by coercion, the terms of trade are not coercive because either society
is free to decline or discontinue this relationship. Blake concludes that it would not be
morally objectionable for such trade to benefit those in the richer society much more
than those in the poorer one.
Letting the fable stand, let me note that matters are importantly different in the real
world. Consider, for instance, the ongoing globalization of IPRs through the WTO and
many bilateral treaties. Such IPRs, typically held by corporations in rich societies, are
effectively enforced worldwide. Citizens of WTO member states are coerced into compliance with the international IPR regime just as they are coerced to comply with purely
domestic rules and regulations. This coercive element is an integral part of the global
IPR regime, explicitly prescribed in it and fully intended by those who design and
uphold it.
The coercively imposed global IPR regime has dramatic effects on individuals. Insofar
as it requires the manufacture and sale of generic drugs to be prohibited and suppressed, for instance, it deprives many poor patients of access to existing life-saving
medicines. It would seem then that – by Blake’s own standard –some important actual
international institutional arrangements are subject to social justice assessments.
There is no morally relevant difference between one government coercively imposing
certain rules on the people within its jurisdiction and a group of willing governments
coercively imposing such rules on the people within the union of their jurisdictions.
Thomas Nagel (2005) gives a more complex reason for supposing that national
social institutions are, and international social institutions are not, subject to requirements of social justice: unlike transnational social institutions, he holds, a national
institutional order is imposed with coercion claimed to be legitimate, in the name of its
participants (putative joint authors of these rules or at least intended beneficiaries), with
an expectation of acceptance of this order.
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To see how this line of thought is implausible, consider that national regimes may
lack all three of these features: a ruler or ruling group may coercively impose its rules
without claiming to be entitled to do so, without any pretension of ruling in the name
of its subjects, and without any expectation that these subjects ought to accept the
authority of the rules imposed upon them. If the concept of social justice were inapplicable to a national society in this condition, the rules imposed by some of the very
worst tyrants, colonial powers and occupying armies would elude the requirements of
social justice. And all other tyrants, colonial powers and occupying armies would have
a splendid opportunity so to exempt their impositions as well. Any moral conception
providing this opportunity and incentive is clearly unacceptable if not obnoxious.
It is disputable, moreover, that the three features Nagel highlights are lacking in the
imposition of transnational social institutions. The international IPR regime with its
coercive aspects is elaborately defended both procedurally and substantively – as fairly
arrived at and beneficial to all. This regime is administered by agencies (WTO; World
Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO) within the United Nations system and under
its We the Peoples motto. And strong moral language – ‘piracy’, ‘counterfeiting’, etc. – is
routinely used to express an expectation of compliance.
I conclude that Rawls, Blake and Nagel have given no good reasons for exempting
transnational institutional arrangements from any and all social justice assessments.
The failure of their arguments leaves open the path to a cosmopolitan conception of
social justice that makes certain widely sharable demands on the design of any institutional order – for example, that it must not produce massive human rights deficits or
huge socio-economic inequalities that are foreseeably avoidable. Such a conception
would assign human agents various duties of social justice, that is, duties in regard to
social institutions: insofar as we share responsibility for the design of social institutions,
we must work towards their just design. Insofar as we participate in just social institutions, we must comply with them. Insofar as we participate in unjust social institutions,
we must promote their reform. Cosmopolitan conceptions of social justice will differ in
how they specify social justice and in how they specify human agents’ duties of social
justice on this basis. They will also differ in regard to whether human agents have a
duty of social justice to help create just social institutions where none as yet exist – for
example, in a state of nature. Kant assigned such a duty to any human agents who
cannot avoid affecting one another.
Cosmopolitanism is often dismissed as a view that leaves no room for any kind of
partiality towards family, friends or personal projects (Scheffler, 2001; Miller, 2003).
Any plausible variant of cosmopolitanism must be able to distance itself from this
caricature. Variants of social justice cosmopolitanism do so by distinguishing different
domains of human life and then prescribing cosmopolitan impartiality for only one of
these: for the design and administration of social institutions. The general idea of such
a division by domain is familiar from the case of judges and referees who must be scrupulously impartial, but only when acting in their respective roles. This idea extends to
the rest of the population. All adults are supposed to be impartial in certain domains
– when we serve as jurors, certainly, and also when we speak, act or vote as citizens.
Thus, no matter how much a mother may love her children and no matter how committed she may be to their having the very best educational opportunities and employment prospects, we (normatively) expect her citizen’s judgement on affirmative action
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in the education system not to be influenced by her children’s gender or skin colour.
Similarly, we would condemn a compatriot who bases her citizen’s judgement about
the invasion of Iraq on her beliefs about how this invasion would affect her private
investments. Insofar as citizens speak, vote and act as citizens, we are expected to be
impartially guided by justice and the common good without regard to our personal
projects and loyalties. Outside this domain, we may give greatly disproportionate
weight to our friends, family and personal projects in deciding where to live, whom to
marry, which career to pursue, and so forth – all this without in any way compromising our commitment to social justice.
Social justice cosmopolitans apply this idea more generally, beyond the nation-state:
when human agents weigh in on the design of transnational institutional arrangements, they ought to set aside their personal projects and allegiances as well as their
national loyalties so as to take impartial account of the interests of all individuals
affected by these institutional arrangements.
Monistic Cosmopolitanism
According to social justice cosmopolitanism, injustice is primarily a property of institutional designs. Social institutions are unjust insofar as they foreseeably do worse by
human beings than some alternative feasible institutional design would do. Human
agents and their conduct can be called unjust in a secondary sense insofar as they violate
their duties of social justice – by contributing to the design or imposition of unjust social
institutions.
Monistic cosmopolitanism rejects this primary focus on the assessment of social
institutions. It understands injustice as primarily a property of states of the world. This
property is understood to supervene on properties of, or comparative relations among,
human beings – one person’s enslavement, for instance, or another’s disadvantage
from birth. Social institutions can then be called unjust in a secondary sense insofar as
they contribute to injustice in the world. But social institutions are not unique in this
regard. Human agents and their conduct, and all other causally relevant factors human
agents may affect, can all be labelled unjust in the same secondary sense insofar as they
avoidably contribute to injustice in the world. Monistic cosmopolitanism co-ordinates
all human agents and all humanly shapeable factors towards one unitary goal: to make
the world as just as we can make it.
The central contrast between social justice cosmopolitanism and monistic cosmopolitanism is that the former seeks to formulate a goal specifically for social institutions
whereas the latter seeks a unitary goal for all iudicanda. This contrast in range is closely
analogous to one much discussed in recent work on domestic justice. Rawls has formulated a goal meant to guide only the design of a society’s major social institutions.
Various critics (Cohen, 1997; Murphy, 1999) have rejected this focus as incoherent.
They argue that if the goal specified in Rawls’s principles of justice is one that social
institutions ought to be designed to promote, then it must be worth promoting and thus
valuable. And if it is valuable, then it ought to be promoted not merely through a society’s institutional order, but also through its culture as well as by its associations and
citizens in their personal lives. If the goal specified by the difference principle is the
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correct goal for the design of a society’s economic order, then it must also be the correct
goal for social customs and conventions, for corporations, churches and organizations,
and for individual economic agents: workers, consumers, investors, employers and
executives.
Let me respond to this critique in two phases, showing first that the contrast is not
as important as it may appear and then second that social justice cosmopolitanism
escapes the threat of incoherence.
The contrast is less important than it appears because the way social institutions are
shaped has very profound implications for iudicanda of all other kinds. One such implication has already been discussed: a conception of social justice focused on institutional
design entails duties of social justice for all human agents in regard to social institutions. In addition, many of the most profound effects of institutional design on individual human lives are indirect. For example, the institutional order of a society
influences its culture and conventions and, partly through these, the values and dispositions of its citizens. These indirect influences of institutional design must be taken into
account in institutional design. Therefore, even if the moral standard guiding institutional design is not used for shaping iudicanda of other kinds directly, this standard will
nonetheless have a considerable indirect impact on them. If a good design of the global
institutional order maintained a very high level of human rights fulfilment and a reasonably balanced socio-economic distribution, it would do so in large part indirectly,
by shaping political decisions and policies, cultures and conventions, values and dispositions (Pogge, 2000, pp. 164–5).
As for the remaining divergence, the anti-monism of Rawls’s theory and of social
justice cosmopolitanism can be defended against the charge of incoherence. One way
of doing this appeals to the desirability of an overlapping rather than comprehensive
consensus. It is highly desirable that those living together under a shared institutional
order should morally agree on its design. Such morally based agreement presupposes
a shared moral standard in light of which this institutional order can be justified and
adjusted. Morally based coexistence does not presuppose, however, that people agree
on all other aspects of morality – on what makes a human life worthwhile, on the best
ways of shaping friendships or family life, on how to run religious organizations. Insofar
as comprehensive moral agreement across all iudicanda cannot be achieved in the
modern world without massive coercion, there is good reason then to agree on respectful disagreement insofar as such disagreement can be accommodated within a single
institutional framework supported by a shared moral standard.
But how can we respect communities and citizens who endorse with us a certain
goal (or system of goals) G for the domain of institutional design and then endorse some
different goal(s) for other domains of human life? Endorsement of diverse goals for different domains need not indicate either incoherence or lack of real commitment.
Morally important goals may be such that some iudicanda are good at promoting them
and others not. This suggests a division of labour: some kinds of iudicanda are to be
heavily devoted to a certain goal while others may largely ignore it. For example, the
rules of the tax code are especially suitable for moderating socio-economic inequality
– while individuals in their roles as customers, workers or managers are very poor at
this task. It may then make good sense to design the tax code with extra heavy devotion
to this goal while, in compensation, relieving economic agents from the responsibility
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to consider it in their ordinary market transactions. It is entirely possible that the goal
of moderating socio-economic inequality is best achieved by subjecting the design of
the tax code to the powerful demand of Rawls’s difference principle while asking of
economic agents only that they politically support and personally comply with the
optimal tax code.
Relatedly, goals are sometimes best achieved through iudicanda aiming at different,
even conflicting goals. Thus, an efficient resource allocation may be best achieved in a
market system whose participants do not aim for it. Punishment of all and only the
guilty may best be achieved through a criminal justice system that involves defence
lawyers working against such punishments. These considerations break both links in
the incoherence argument: the fact that some class of iudicanda ought to be directed
towards a certain goal does not show that this goal is of any ultimate importance. And
the fact that some goal is of ultimate importance does not show that all iudicanda ought
to be devoted to it.
These considerations do not merely defend social justice cosmopolitanism against
the charge of incoherence. They also indicate a problem with monistic theorizing: there
is not one goal or system of goals that can plausibly be assigned to iudicanda of all kinds.
This is so not merely because iudicanda differ in what they are good at promoting, but
also because it would be morally offensive to try to shape mothers, say, to be animated
by the same impartial concern for all children that we rightly expect from social institutions. By calling for all iudicanda to be devoted to one common goal, monism indeed
falls prey to the complaint that that it leaves no room for any kind of partiality towards
family, friends or personal projects.
Monism can avoid this problem by understanding differently the role it assigns to
the common goal it postulates. So far, we have thought of this role inspirationally, of
the goal as a common object of overt commitment. Such a supergoal is one to which all
iudicanda ought to be devoted – a goal that animates human agents to strive to serve
it and one that is recognized and celebrated in our culture, conventions, laws and
institutional order.
The other way of making a goal normative involves an instrumental relation.
Employing this understanding, monism would demand not that all iudicanda be overtly
committed to one common goal, but that their respective overt commitments be shaped
so that these iudicanda optimally co-operate towards fulfilling one common goal which,
so understood, I call the mastergoal. As is well known from discussions of utilitarianism,
a mastergoal may not be optimally fulfilled through overt devotion: happiness will not
be maximized by devoting all to happiness maximization – and analogously for other
mastergoal specifications. A mastergoal is then likely to entail that the various iudicanda be overtly devoted to different and possibly diverse goals.
Such differentiation of goals is welcome insofar as it allows reconciliation of an
impartial common goal with partiality of some (and impartiality of other) iudicanda.
The optimal co-operation of all iudicanda towards fulfilling the impartial mastergoal
may well permit or even require that individual human agents be biased towards their
own family, friends or personal projects. This is so because human beings – children,
for instance – tend to thrive better with focused love from a few than with impartial
concern from billions of adults (Goodin, 1988). Similar inspirational departures from
the common goal may be licensed for other iudicanda as well: our culture, conventions,
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laws and institutional order need not be shaped overtly to recognize and celebrate the
mastergoal. Rather, each iudicandum ought to be shaped and designed in whatever
way will cause them all optimally to co-operate towards fulfilling the mastergoal.
But this reconciliation is problematic in two ways. What approval it bestows on our
personal loyalties and commitments is half-heartedly instrumental: a mother’s love for
her own children is a good thing – but only because and insofar as such love contributes
to, or at least does not detract from, the justice of the world impartially conceived.
Moreover, such approval is also precariously contingent: it is entirely possible that a
very different division of devotions across iudicanda would – now or in the future – do
better by the impartial mastergoal. If so, monism would mandate that our social world
be re-engineered so as to inculcate the combination of optimal commitments in human
beings and all other iudicanda we can affect. Persons, associations, human conventions, cultures and subcultures – the worlds of art, music, sport, cooking, poetry,
tourism – all ought to be fine-tuned so that they, together, optimally promote the
mastergoal.
These rather totalitarian implications of monistic cosmopolitanism can be mitigated.
One can specify the common goal not as an optimum (such as the largest attainable
aggregate happiness or the most equal attainable distribution of freedom), but as some
comfortably attainable threshold. An example would be a sufficientarian conception
that regards justice on earth as fully achieved when all human beings worldwide have
secure access to the objects of their human rights. Such a specification would leave
open many diverse ways in which iudicanda might permissibly be shaped – the universal fulfilment of human rights is compatible with a wide diversity of cultures, partialities
and modes of economic organization.
This mitigation may render the goal of justice on earth implausibly modest, however.
Can we really accept as fully just a world in which the poor (though their human rights
are fulfilled) have such inferior opportunities that the gap between them and the more
affluent is inexorably increasing beyond all reasonable bounds? A further problem with
the mitigation is that it cannot solve the problem in a world like ours, which, due to
widespread non-compliance, displays massive human rights deficits. In such a world,
partiality towards family, friends or personal projects is not for the best, impartially
conceived. The basic human rights of children worldwide would be better fulfilled, for
instance, if the partiality of the more affluent adults towards their own children were
greatly reduced in favour of impartial concern for all children. This point remains valid
even when ‘receiving love from one’s own parents’ is incorporated into the mastergoal:
in a world like ours, affluent adults can add far more such love by combating the
destructive influences of disease, starvation and overwork on poor families than by
giving love to their own children.
Seeing that mastergoal cosmopolitanism offers little prospect for a plausible moral
theory that can accommodate the partiality objection, one may be tempted by a dilution of supergoal monism. The basic idea is to affirm that all iudicanda should be
devoted to the cosmopolitan supergoal without affirming that this must be their only
goal. Human persons, for example, should be inspirationally committed to justice on
earth impartially conceived, but may also have other morally mandatory or worthwhile or at least permissible goals besides. Among these other morally acceptable goals
are agent-relative ones that lead persons to show special concern for their loved ones
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and personal projects. Showing such special concern, persons are permissibly compromising cosmopolitan justice. So diluted, a common-goal theory is no longer monistic.
With the dilution, certain additional goals are deemed permissible for human beings in
order to leave room for partiality. These additional goals are not suitable for all iudicanda. And there will then, in a diluted theory, not be one goal or set of goals to which
all iudicanda ought to be devoted or directed. Dilution thus trades away monism’s
attractive unity, simplicity and elegance.
Asserting merely that all iudicanda ought to be devoted to the cosmopolitan supergoal as one goal among others, diluted cosmopolitanism has precious little content.
Dilution, after all, is a matter of degree: moral conceptions and persons become ever
less cosmopolitan the more distant they are from full and exclusive devotion to the
monistic goal of justice on earth – much like a man becomes ever less bald as we
imagine hairs on his head to increase in length or number. People may have justice on
earth among their goals even while this goal is routinely outweighed, marginalized or
drowned out by other goals.
To have any bite, diluted cosmopolitanism must then be specified: by laying down
what other loyalties and ambitions (moral or non-moral, personal, agent-relative or
agent-neutral) are permissible for human beings and how much weight each may merit
relative to the supergoal. And likewise in regard to all other iudicanda for which diverse
competing goals are deemed admissible. A great difficulty here is to justify weights or
weight limitations for the various competing moral and morally significant considerations. No moral theory along these lines has been worked out in any detail.
I conclude that monistic cosmopolitanism fails in both its supergoal and mastergoal
versions. Whether a plausible moral theory can be constructed by diluting a variant of
monistic cosmopolitanism remains to be seen. Compared to such a dilution, social
justice cosmopolitanism enjoys the advantage of greater elegance. It restrains not the
strength, but the range of the cosmopolitan goal. This goal applies only to the design of
social institutions – but reigns supreme in this domain. Human agents are then to be
guided by this goal indirectly: they must see to it that social institutions are appropriately related to the goal. Thus it is only in respect to their responsibilities in regard to
social institutions that human agents must completely set aside their personal goals
and agent-relative moral concerns (which is not to say, of course, that it would be
wrong for them to promote the cosmopolitan goal in other ways as well – more on this
in the next section).
Monistic cosmopolitanism is consequentialist in spirit. What ultimately matters is
success in regard to the common goal. All iudicanda ought to be devoted (supergoal)
or designed (mastergoal) optimally to contribute to such success. What a iudicandum’s
optimal contribution is depends on its impact on other iudicanda and on how its effects
interact with those of other iudicanda. Whether a human agent ought to promote
justice on earth by giving money to the poor, by supporting a political campaign in
Uganda, or by helping to reform agricultural production in North Korea, say, depends
then on expected impact alone, regardless of how the agent is related to the human
beings potentially affected by her conduct.
Social justice cosmopolitanism, by contrast, because it renounces the idea of a
common goal, coheres well with a non-consequentialist understanding of morality. It
can assign agents an especially weighty responsibility in regard to social institutions in
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whose design or imposition they participate, thereby rendering the concern for social
justice agent-relative. And it can also (as we have seen) give greater weight to harms
that social institutions require or authorize than to harms they merely engender or fail
to prevent. Monistic cosmopolitans reject the incorporation of these two nonconsequentialist elements along with the confinement of impartial concern for the
interests of all human beings to the domain of institutional design. They might protest
as follows: all these elements detract from the optimal promotion of justice on earth.
What if the greatest injustices in the world, and ones that I could well mitigate, are not
traceable to social institutions in whose design or imposition I participate? Social justice
cosmopolitanism then perversely implies that I should focus on lesser injustices that
are so traceable.
Of course, the implication is perverse only on the assumption of a thoroughgoing
consequentialialist morality. And this assumption is quite disputable. It is more fruitful
for our topic, however, if we leave this well-known debate aside to examine instead how
our two kinds of cosmopolitanism might differ in their implications for the actual world.
This examination is especially important if we think of moral conceptions not as
value theories covering all possible worlds but as cultural products with a practical
social task.
In the actual world, the social justice cosmopolitans’ focus on institutional design is
not a significant limitation because nearly all serious harm that human beings suffer
is, insofar as it is humanly avoidable at all, avoidable through institutional design.
Social institutions are all-pervasive and profoundly shape the human world in large
part through their influence on other iudicanda. Nor is it a significant limitation if
agents give special weight to harms traceable to social institutions in whose design or
imposition they participate. All the more powerful agents in a position to effect meaningful change are participants in a highly consequential global institutional network
that is deeply involved in most of the great harms we are witnessing. As one example,
I have already mentioned the global IPR regime with its dramatic effects on poor people’s access to advanced medicines. Here global rules accepted by nearly all the world’s
governments require what obviously harms the global poor: that cheap generic versions
of even life-saving medicines under patent must not be manufactured or sold without
authorization from the patent holder. By incentivizing pharmaceutical innovation
through monopoly pricing powers, the same rules also engender dramatic neglect of
diseases that disproportionately affect the poor. Of the 1393 new medicines approved
between 1975 and 1999, only 13 were specifically indicated for tropical diseases and,
of these 13, five were by-products of veterinary research and two had been commissioned by the military.
Another example illustrates how the design of global institutions can do great harm
by influencing profoundly how national regimes are structured. Consider the global
rules authorizing any person or group holding effective power in a country – regardless
of how they acquired or exercise it – to sell the country’s resources and to dispose of
the proceeds of such sales; to borrow in the country’s name and thereby to impose debt
service obligations upon it; to sign treaties on the country’s behalf and thus to bind its
present and future population; and to use state revenues to buy the means of internal
repression. This global practice goes a long way towards explaining why so many
countries are so badly governed. The practice enables even the most hated, brutal,
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oppressive, corrupt, undemocratic and unconstitutional juntas or dictators to entrench
themselves. Such rulers can violently repress the people’s efforts towards good governance with weapons they buy abroad and pay for by selling the people’s resources to
foreigners and by mortgaging the people’s future to foreign banks and governments.
Greatly enhancing the rewards of de facto power, the practice also encourages coup
attempts and civil wars, both of which often provoke opportunistic military interventions from neighbouring countries. And in many (especially resource-rich) countries,
this practice makes it all but impossible, even for democratically elected and wellintentioned leaders, to rein in the embezzlement of state revenues: any attempt to hold
military officers to the law is fraught with danger, because these officers know well that
a coup can restore and enhance their access to state funds which, after such a coup,
would still be replenished through resource sales and still be exchangeable for the
means of domestic repression.
I conclude that most of the harm human beings suffer in our world could be avoided
through reforms of the global institutional order for whose design and imposition all
the more powerful human agents bear some direct or indirect responsibility.
(Governments and inter-governmental organizations negotiate and impose the rules
and thus are directly responsible; citizens, corporations and other associations influence governments and inter-governmental organizations and thus are indirectly
responsible.) It is then not correct, in the world as it is, that social justice cosmopolitanism disconnects or diverts the more powerful human agents from the greatest harms
suffered by human beings.
In fact, social justice cosmopolitanism may attribute greater moral significance to this
connection. Monistic cosmopolitanism faults powerful human agents for doing too little
to address the great injustices in the world. Social justice cosmopolitanism faults these
agents for doing too much to contribute to these monumental harms. By contributing to
the imposition of global institutions that, especially through what they require and
authorize, foreseeably and avoidably cause great harms to human beings, powerful
human agents are not merely letting harm happen, but inflicting it. The distinction
between positive duties to avert harm and negative duties not to inflict harm is, to be sure,
one that consequentialists find morally insignificant. Still, to those who do find it morally
significant, the social justice cosmopolitan critique will appeal more powerfully.
Because most privileged and powerful human actors show very little concern, if any,
for the great avoidable harms human beings suffer, some who do care may find themselves unable to effect any reform of global institutions that would render them less
harmful. Social justice cosmopolitanism is not reduced to telling such agents that, if
they cannot effect change through institutional reform, they need do nothing. Instead,
it can affirm that those who contribute to the design or imposition of, or profit from,
unjust institutions – even when they have no reasonable alternative – have a compensatory duty of justice. The more powerful human agents, affluent citizens in the rich
countries, for instance, will be in this position. Even if we cannot effectively influence
our government to help bring about meaningful reform of global institutions, we should
at least make up for the benefits we derive from unjust global institutions and/or for
our indirect contributions to the harms these unjust institutions cause. Through our
taxes, labour, and in many other ways, we strengthen our state which then, with
others, designs and imposes unjust global institutions in our name. And we often
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benefit from such injustice. In doing so, we violate negative duties of justice, unless we
compensate by also working to protect some of the victims of this injustice.
Ethical Cosmopolitanism
The foregoing discussion of monistic cosmopolitanism contains the reasons why a
cosmopolitan conception of ethics is implausible. Human beings need to have the
option, at least, to have special relationships with friends and family that cause their
conduct to be at variance with the cosmopolitan requirement of impartiality. Similarly,
collective human agents, such as cities, churches, associations and states need to have
the option, at least, to show special concern for their members as against outsiders. So,
ethical cosmopolitanism strictly conceived is a non-starter.
If individual or collective human agents cannot plausibly be required to have an
exclusive commitment to a cosmopolitan conception of ethics, then the live question
may seem to be one of degree: ought individual and collective human agents be more
cosmopolitan than they are now by reducing, in their ordinary conduct, the difference
between the concern they show for the interests of their nearest and dearest and the
concern they show for the interests of distant strangers?
Martha Nussbaum (Nussbaum and Cohen,1996) takes up these questions in her
critique of US patriotism as celebrated by Richard Rorty (1998) and others. She explicates her critique primarily in regard to education: children should be taught that
foreigners, too, are citizens of this world, equal to us in dignity and human rights. And
they should also be taught concretely about foreigners, about the history, culture,
problems and prospects of their societies. This point is also stressed and defended by
Jeremy Waldron (2000), who associates (ethical) cosmopolitanism especially with the
willingness to engage with those who are not members of our own community, culture
and state, who do not share our own values and habits, in an open dialogue about how
we might live well together in this one world we must share.
As can be learned from our examination of social justice cosmopolitanism, there is
another way of restraining a cosmopolitan conception of ethics. Rather than reduce its
strength (through dilution), one might limit its range. One might hold, for instance, that
all human agents have certain most stringent negative duties not to harm human
beings in certain ways – not to violate their human rights, let us say – and that these
negative duties are exceptional in two ways: first, they are exempt from the moral
privilege otherwise enjoyed by human agents to show greater concern for the interests
of the nearer and dearer. Holding circumstances fixed, it is perfectly acceptable to be
far more willing to help a family member than a neighbour, a neighbour than a compatriot stranger, a compatriot stranger than a stranger abroad. But it is not acceptable
to have such a sliding scale in one’s concern not to violate human rights. It is not
acceptable, for example, to take greater drink-driving risks abroad on the ground that
those one is endangering there are only foreigners. In seeking to avoid violating human
rights, any agent must give exactly the same high weight to the human rights of every
human being. Human rights as side constraints on human conduct come with the
same very strong imperative of compliance, regardless of how the agent is related to
the potential victims of this agent’s conduct.
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The second exceptional feature of these negative duties is their exclusionary force.
In decision contexts where these duties are in play, lesser reasons lose their standing.
We described this model earlier in regard to certain public roles bearing on social
justice. A public official, deciding among competing tenders, must not allow herself to
be influenced at all by her own or her friends’ financial interests. Her duty to make this
decision for the public good is not one that, in virtue of its stringency, usually leaves
her competing partialities with little influence on her decision. Rather, her duty is
exclusionary by completely banishing such partialities from consideration. We can
extend this model to human agents’ duty to avoid violating human rights in their
personal conduct. When this duty is in play, all reasons unrelated to human rights,
even when they involve the agent’s most cherished commitments, are to be left out of
account.
This model provides a telling response to Miller and Scheffler, who assume that an
agent’s partialities must be dilutive: if special responsibilities and associative duties
increase what an agent owes to some, then they necessarily decrease what this agent
owes to others. For ‘part of what it is to have [special] responsibilities to one’s associates
is to be required, within limits, to give their interests priority over the interests of nonassociates, in cases where the two conflict’ (Scheffler, 2001, p. 87). This is right, of
course. But it does not follow from the fact that the agent owes outsiders less than she
owes her associates that she owes outsiders less than she would owe them in the absence
of her special commitments. For involvement in special relationships might increase
what one owes one’s associates without decreasing what one owes outsiders.
It may be objected that the increase and the decrease are inseparable. Owing greater
consideration to some, one can no longer be required to give equal consideration to the
rest. This objection succeeds if, in the absence of special relationships, human agents
owe equal consideration. But this can be denied: it seems perfectly permissible for
someone to help one needy stranger and not another (even when the latter’s needs are
somewhat greater), to give to one beggar and not to another, to pay one poor stranger’s
medical treatment and not another’s, and so on. And one may do this because one likes
the story of the one, or her face, or because one is in a good mood, or for no reason at
all. In short, within certain limits one may give priority, in one’s beneficial conduct, to
some human beings over others even when there is no special relationship that could
rationalize this unequal treatment. When a special relationship, say friendship with
Jane, enters the picture, this moral discretion may disappear. One then owes it to Jane
to help her in preference to a stranger. But this does not show that one has come to
owe the stranger less if, even in the absence of the friendship, one would have been
morally free to prefer Jane.
Maybe this response to the objection is too strong. Perhaps special relationships and
projects do sometimes decrease what an agent owes to distant strangers. Even then,
there could still be some duties to distant strangers whose stringency is wholly unaffected. One owes them just social institutions, whose design takes equal account of the
interests of all human beings affected (social justice cosmopolitanism). And, pursuant
to a plausibly restrained ethical cosmopolitanism, one also owes them the nonviolation of their human rights.
Our world is very far from acceptance of these duties – let alone compliance. Those
who design the rules of the world economy give more weight to the interests of the
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100,000 richest shareholders in Europe and the USA than to the poorest 3 billion
human beings. And governments habitually bomb foreign civilians to promote their
policy objectives – not to speak of the grotesque human rights violations they have
made routine since 9/11. Far from refuting cosmopolitan values, these facts show the
urgency of better cosmopolitan theorizing.
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