Cosmopolitan Responsibility

Global Injustice, Relational Equality, and Individual Agency

Jan-Christoph Heilinger

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783110763003
• eBook ISBN: 9783110611281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The world we live in is unjust. Preventable deprivation and suffering shape the lives of many people, while others enjoy advantages and privileges aplenty.

Cosmopolitan responsibility addresses the moral responsibilities of privileged individuals to take action in the face of global structural injustice. Individuals are called upon to complement institutional efforts to respond to global challenges, such as climate change, unfair global trade, or world poverty.

Committed to an ideal of relational equality among all human beings, the book discusses the impact of individual action, the challenge of special obligations, and the possibility of moral overdemandingness in order to lay the ground for an action-guiding ethos of cosmopolitan responsibility.

This thought-provoking book will be of interest to any reflective reader concerned about justice and responsibilities in a globalised world.

Jan-Christoph Heilinger is a moral and political philosopher. He teaches at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany, and at Ecole normale supérieure, Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Part I The cosmopolitan ethos

The chapters of part I introduce the three central elements of my theory of cosmopolitan responsibility: the idea of world citizenship; an account of global relational equality; and a pragmatic understanding of ethics, action and habit. The moral ideas and concepts developed in these chapters form the normative core of the cosmopolitan ethos that can shape how individuals feel, think, talk and act in response to global issues in an interconnected world.

Chapter 1 Cosmopolitanism. The ideal of global justice, past and present

The idea that all humans form a morally relevant global community has a long history that continues to inspire and shape debates until today. This chapter introduces and explicates the notion of cosmopolitanism and will establish it as the first core element of a cosmopolitan ethos. It does so by discussing the idea of global citizenship and its normative content; and the major phases of its historical development to the present—with a particular focus on the Cynics, Stoics and the Enlightenment philosophy of Immanuel Kant. It provides a brief overview of the contemporary debate about global justice, some basic distinctions with regard to metrics and patterns of justice, and explains the relationship between thinking about global justice and about global ethics.

With this, the idea of world citizenship is introduced as the first and foundational normative element of my theory of cosmopolitan responsibility. Agents who understand themselves and others as citizens of the world will acknowledge the numerous morally relevant connections that link people across the globe. The scope of justice and the scope of one's moral concern will then no longer be limited by national borders; and global structural injustice—that links the advantages enjoyed by some with the disadvantages suffered by others—becomes a matter of urgent moral concern also for the privileged who, initially often unknowingly, benefit from it.

1 Global citizenship

The word “cosmopolitan” is of Greek origin and means “citizen of the world”. It is a compound noun combining the words “cosmos” (world, order) and “polites” (citizen). The tension between these two components generates something akin to an oxymoron: after all, the notion of a citizen of the world seems to contradict itself. Citizenship is generally understood to be individual legal membership with a defined national, social and political community. The term as currently and conventionally used specifies a particular subgroup of humans who form a distinct—and by definition not an all-inclusive—community. In the classical Greek context, citizenship was linked to a specific polis, a city-state like Athens or Sparta. Later on, the nation-state became the primary unit specifying citizenship. Today, supranational institutions like the European Union have emerged that provide citizens of member states with an emerging, new form of supra-citizenship, although this is still dependent upon their prior national citizenship. What such developments demonstrate is that, whatever the current organising unit, the size, constitution and complexity of citizenship-conferring communities has varied over time and space, and continues to do so.

Citizenship refers to a special status that individuals possessing it enjoy, including a specific range of expected, required and permitted actions. Citizens are normally expected to participate in their community, to express their voice through, for example, voting on issues of communal importance. Furthermore, citizens, in exchange for following the laws governing their community, are entitled to certain advantages, such as the use of common goods or the privilege of traveling with a passport of the respective community. Such special status, defined by a specific set of expectations, obligations and entitlements, can only be conferred by a community that is institutionally organised in specific ways (Carens 2000). Due to this legal (or political) understanding of citizenship, citizenship in the cosmopolitan sense of being of the world may appear nonsensical.

However, a closer analysis of the word “cosmos” reveals an innovative and provocative idea that dispels the oxymoron. Unlike our contemporary understanding of “cosmos” as outer space (all that lies beyond our planet world as such), “cosmos” in the classical Greek sense had a very different connotation: it referred to the world as an already structured and organised harmonious whole. Cosmos signified for the Greeks the universal order governed by logos, and was the opposite of “chaos,” the unstructured, formless and lawless void—in other words, the term had a meaning quite opposite to the one we currently attach to it. The assumption of such a meaningful and harmonious cosmic order, which is governed by natural (or divine) eternal laws, moderates the oxymoron in the word “cosmopolitan”. It points to the possibility of perceiving individuals as members in a structure that expands beyond the polis or nation. Here, citizenship is understood as an anthropological or a psychological¹¹ phenomenon that is largely independent of actual political or legal arrangements. The presumed contradiction fades away under this assumption and makes room for an admittedly optimistic ideal of coherence, and for allegiance to a community that transcends local groups. In this sense, humans as humans can be understood to form a community for which all contingent discriminatory characteristics like nationality, religion, culture, class, ethnicity, sex, gender or sexual preference, etc. are irrelevant for community membership purposes.

The cosmopolitan claim of a single, normatively relevant community of all humans endorses the normative anthropological claim that, in spite of all factual and circumstantial differences between individuals, all living human beings are equally entitled to membership in this overarching human community, which includes certain rights and entitlements, but also brings with it certain duties and obligations.

2 Moral cosmopolitanism as egalitarian universalism

Cosmopolitanism, the idea of “world-citizenship,” is grounded in the fundamental idea that all human beings are jointly members of one global order, which is based on the widely shared normative assumption of the equal moral worth of all. Cosmopolitanism thus expresses a normative stance that gives rise to a moral project in several domains, most notably the political, cultural and moral. In its different forms, it (1) addresses a set of questions about living together, (2) shares a diagnosis, and (3) tends to agree on a set of central claims and commitments.

(1) The assumption of the existence of a single overarching human community that justifies regarding all individuals as “citizens” (at least metaphorically) suggests that there are certain expectations, requirements and entitlements connected to this status. Indeed, cosmopolitanism’s central question is how should human beings coexist? How should we live together?¹² More concretely, this question can be split into several sub-questions: Which normative rules should govern human action in order to coexist well on planet Earth?¹³ Which rights and entitlements do human individuals have as citizens of the world? And which obligations and duties do they have to meet, towards one another and also towards non-human animals and the environment?

(2) Asking these questions follows from the particular diagnosis of what I have called in the introduction the de facto “circumstances of cosmopolitanism”. They consist of three elements. First, all humans, whatever the differences between individuals, are strikingly similar with regard to trans-temporally, trans-culturally, and inter-individually stable features. Human beings generally all have a roughly similar body, basic needs and interests, they also have standardly a capacity to have experiences, feel emotions and to reason, even if the concrete ways in which these capacities are used and experienced may differ to some degree between individuals, groups and cultures. Humans are able to interact and to communicate with one another, establishing relations that can bridge existing differences, including differences of language and culture. The obvious differences in, say, languages, fashion, parenting styles or burial rites thus must not obscure the striking similiarities between humans accross time and regions: all are needy creatures, all relate to and depend from others (at least during some periods of their lives), all can standardly govern their behaviour through employing reasoning and deliberation, and all have an interest in being well.¹⁴ These features ground the idea of a community of humans.

Second, we live in an increasingly interconnected world in which actions have both direct and indirect impact on the lives of many others. I would argue that this was already true at the very beginning of human history: rare in the historical record are individuals or communities that were permanently self-sufficient. New human groupings and settlements originated from the interactions and movements of older ones, and even when groups seek to define themselves as self-sufficient (or even hostile to other groups), those others are by definition the counterpart of such self-understandings. Once population levels increase in any area, meeting and interacting between groups becomes inevitable: it is and remains nearly impossible to abstain permanently from interaction with others. Nor is it possible not to have an impact on the lives of others, or not to be influenced by their actions (Appiah 2007). Such interaction and mutual impact is not impeded by the demarcation of groups, nor, in more recent times, by national boundaries. Today, global trade and climate change are but two particularly striking examples of the far-reaching entanglement of all human lives. The products we buy have often been produced in far away places, and so a long causal chain of interactions connects individual consumer decisions with the working conditions of manufacturers, sometimes very far away. Individual actions that generate CO₂-emissions directly contribute to processes like global warming: flying anywhere in the world, from Albania to Zambia, materially adds to the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that influence weather phenomena elsewhere. And even those living in remote areas of the planet, e. g. the Maldives, are not merely heavily affected by the activities of others in far away places that contribute to changing weather patterns and rising sea levels; entire islands are at risk of disappearing completely and forever as a result.

The significance of these two elements of the diagnosis of the de facto circumstances of cosmopolitanism—the possibility and inevitable reality of human interconnectedness—is heightened by a third observation: the striking contrast between the living conditions of humans in different places on the planet, which are defined by an almost unimaginable scale of inequality with many people not even having sufficient means to live a minimally decent life, due to poverty, exploitation, environmental degradation, etc.¹⁵ The existing inequalities indicate a problem that can appear in an absolute and a relative form: Absolute deprivation is always morally problematic, because the basic needs of people are not met. Relative inequality might turn out to be less worrisome from a moral perspective, if those worse off are still reasonably well off and are able to live a decent life. Relative inequality, however, becomes particularly problematic, if the worse off are denied the opportunity to live a decent life all the while the relatively better off not only have access to the conditions of a decent life, but enjoy massive amounts of privileges and advantages, that are generated and upheld, at least partly, even at the expense of the worse off. This is the morally outrageous situation of our current world, constituting the third element of the descriptive diagnosis of the circumstances of cosmopolitanism.

(3) On these grounds a distinctively cosmopolitan position will take a normative stance. The particular normative commitment of cosmopolitans is that of egalitarian universalism taken seriously, with real world outcomes as the yardstick. The cosmopolitan perspective can be used in two senses: it can normatively evaluate and assess a given state of affairs, and it can be guide and demand particular forms of action and reform¹⁶—always based on the grounds of the equal moral standing of all.

The fundamental claim about equal moral status of each individual does not—in my view—stand in need for a specific justification beyond the widely shared description of circumstances of cosmopolitanism.¹⁷ The onus of proof lies, rather, on the side of those denying the fundamentally equal moral standing of all humans: those who might claim that some persons (women, people of colour, children, homosexuals or atheists, for example) do not have the same basic moral weight as others do, must provide arguments to defend the moral relevance of distinctions made on the grounds of gender, sexual preference, skin colour, age or religion. In the last few generations, many such distinctions have come rightfully under attack, some have already fallen. While the political realities in many parts of the world currently indicate challenges to such progress, even attack past achievements and institute regressive change, I assume that, based on the fundamentally self-evident insight into the moral equality of all, genuine progress will remain possible.¹⁸

Cosmopolitanism in any case argues that the fundamental claim about the moral equality of all has to be taken seriously. And because cosmopolitanism stresses this prima facie uncontroversial assumption, it becomes controversial, thus calling for further reflection. Three central normative elements can be identified within the cosmopolitan commitment to the equal moral standing of all: normative individualism, egalitarianism/impartiality, and universal scope.¹⁹

First, each and every human individual, as such, is a basic unit of moral concern (Pogge 1992, 48). No additional conditions beyond humanness are necessary to qualify a human individual as fully morally relevant.²⁰ Notably, it is impermissible to make any exceptions and to exclude some from the moral concern because of their ethnicity, religion, nationality, family membership, sex, gender, sexual preference, culture, etc. Furthermore, only human individuals are such units of concern. ‘Races,’ religious groups, nations, families, etc., have no independent moral standing, as normative collectivists might argue. For normative individualists, collectives matter morally only insofar as the individuals that are constitutive of the group matter.

Second, each of the individuals is to be seen as an equally important basic unit of moral concern. Not only are all human beings relevant, but they are equally relevant. Kings and beggars, criminals and saints, friends and strangers are indi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The challenge. Global injustice and the individual agent
• Part I The cosmopolitan ethos
• Part II Challenges
• Conclusion The ethos of cosmopolitan responsibility
• Bibliography
• Index