There are issues in the conduct of human affairs in their production of good and evil which ā¦ are so central, so strategic in ā¦ that their urgency deserves with respect to practice, the names ultimate and comprehensive. These issues demand the most systematic reflective attention that can be given. āJohn Dewey
This book has been written in the attempt to mitigate the world catastrophe that lies waiting in the decades to come. While the usual transnational evils continue to plague usāgenocide, torture, terrorism, slavery, and wars of aggression, the most frightening, the most unsettling transnational evil is the worldwide destruction of the earthās biosphere.
Over two centuries ago Immanuel Kant attempted to mitigate one evilāwarāby arguing for a cosmopolitan world order. Kant proposed a āpeace federationā which, since 1945, has taken the form of the United Nations. In Kantās cosmopolitan world order individuals have rights as citizens of the world, above and beyond national rights. Kant forecast a world community which is the correlate to a cosmopolitan world organization. This book follows in the footsteps of Kant but examines additional transnational evils. Transnational evils are wrongdoings which by design severely harm people and other life forms, and occur in multiple places.1 Their agents are scattered about. Transnational evils involve agents who plan, create a budget, utilize a communications networkāin short, create a culture of wrongdoing and evildoing. Cosmopolitanism is essentially two things. It is the attempt to reduce transnational evils by precisely thinking about them, followed by recommendations that protect the dignity and world citizenship of people and their multifarious ways of living.2 Cosmopolitanism is also a theory of a new world order, together with recommendations for closer ties between people and culturesāan improved world community. In this work the new world order will be a greatly strengthened United Nations, with new structural components and increased legal power. The improved world community will be more appreciative of differences within the family of mankind. Proposals will be set out that are designed to bring human beings closer together, and these run the gamut across human values and institutions: education, art, hospitality, understanding strangers, citizenship, the ethics of care and respect, and cooperation.
Cosmopolitanism has its enemies. These are isolationism, extreme nationalism and populism, totalitarianism of every variety, political conservativism, racism, relativism, and subjectivism. The people who hold these beliefs are not necessarily bad people, though some are. Many are probably your neighbors. At this point in world history, what is imperative is cooperation among nations and world citizens, not the various political realities just cited.
Synchronous Catastrophic Causation: The World in Crisis
We are at this moment in time on the brink of disaster so disruptive it could bring down civilization itself. Our dear planet is now significantly overpopulated, and there is an unbreachable time lag that will occur even if steps are taken to decrease birth rates. Ten to fourteen million people will be alive, ceteris paribus, by 2050. On top of this, so to speak, there are disastrous permutations in the atmosphere adversely affecting human health, the health of ecosystems, marine life, and crop production. Lack of food due to crop failures, water shortages, and overpopulation will produce riots. Moreover, there is a looming energy crisis, such that it is increasingly more costly to extract traditional oil and gas as these resources dwindle. Forests too continue to dwindle. The stability of nation states is disrupted in multiple ways. Borders are more permeable, millions of people are on the move attempting to relocate for a better, safer life. There is now a sharp increase in gangs, hate groups, and terrorists.3 Political groups/parties are increasingly polarized, employ insults and harsh language. We are in the midst of what Gilbert Murray once called a āfailure of nerve,ā the abandonment of confidence in reason.4
The homogenization of technologies, cultures, and practices worldwide which has been taking place for decades means that if a crisis occurs, it will have a cascading effect throughout the system. Thomas Homer-Dixonās analysis of this is instructive. He states that
ā¦a socio-ecological crisis ā¦ will have an intricate causal, spatial, and temporal structure. For example, rather than a single critical transition at the planetary scale, smaller crises originating within particular systems or geographical regions might propagate across system boundaries, connect together, and then expand into a global crisis.5
His prognosis is gloomy indeed:
Humankind, I argue, is on the cusp of a planetary emergency. We face an ever-greater risk of a synchronous failure of our social, economic and biophysical systems, arising from simultaneous, interacting stresses acting powerfully at multiple levels of these global Systems ā¦ I believe that the next one hundred years will be a time of great instability and quite likely of extraordinary violence and human hardship .6
If the catastrophic events described above are underway, think about what will happen if concurrently tremendous amounts of ice melt in Greenland and western Antarctica. If this occurs, and it is likely underway now, estimates put ocean rise at nine meters or about 28 feet. Large cities will be flooded. Barricades and walls of concrete and steel will be completely inadequate. As a consequence millions of people will move inland, not all at once but in an ever-increasing stream. Social services such as clinics and hospitals will be overwhelmed. Police forces will be overwhelmed, even the military will be unable to stop angry looters and gangs of marauding killers. Bands of people will go after farms where they can overtake owners and steal crops, chickens, and livestock. Economies will collapse. Given these upheavals, leaders of countries least affected by rising oceans will be tempted to attack and take over the territory of weakened countries. Under these conditions an array of local evils, such as robberies and murders, will sharply increase. Slavery, genocide, even the use of weapons of mass destruction are real possibilities. Unless we become cosmopolitans and work together as a family of peoples, the certain forecast is the Fall of Mankind and global biotic destruction. What we are doing to the earthās biosphere is so destructive that it raises the question posed by the Fermi paradox: āGiven the likelihood of huge numbers of planets in the Milky Way and other galaxies, why have we not detected intelligent life?ā It may be that alien civilizations do not survive into the period in which they attempt contact with other planetary civilizations. They do not reach the point at which they could create von Neumann machines. āMachine assemblersā or von Neumann machines self-replicate by extracting minerals from asteroids or planets they find in the course of their various journeys through space. They would be accompanied by cargo vessels containing capsules of plutonium for the propulsion system of the replicated probes. The alien civilizations which created the mother or original machines would design them such that they constantly send out signals announcing their presence and requesting a reply. In the event they receive a reply they would be automatically rerouted to the planet originating the response. They would contain transmittable information as to where the home planet is that manufactured the probes, and what that civilization is like. Space should contain significant numbers of signaling machines. But SETI has detected no such signals despite years of scanning the heavens.
An original paper by Frank Tipler argued that since there are no von Neumann machines, no civilization survives its own collective behavior.7 This paper generated a wide-ranging discussion by mathematical physicists, astronomers, and philosophers. Reviewing the literature, it seems that probability would have it that if human beings self-destruct, it will be either by making the biosphere uninhabitable through pollution and changes in the earthās chemistry, or through detonation of nuclear weapons in a third world war, or both concurrently.
Our only hope of saving ourselves and the entire biotic community and avoiding Tiplerās cosmic fate is cosmopolitanismāa greatly strengthened world organization and world community. The suggestions offered in this work, or something like them, are a matter of urgency, not only to stop the destruction of the environment but also to reduce concurrent and long-standing transnational evils as well (such as slavery and genocide).
This work is divided into two parts of uneven length. Part I: Cosmopolitan World Organization and World Community begins with Chapter 2, a brief history of cosmopolitanism from Diogenes to Kant, with the main focus on Kantian cosmopolitanism. Chapter 3 sets out a cosmopolitan theory of dignity, not only for persons but for most of the entire biotic community. This is referred to as a biotic and enhancement theory of dignity. The argument will be that when value comes on the scene, dignity appears. Chapter 4 examines Kantās theories of cosmopolitan hospitality, care, and respect. This is part of Kantās efforts to develop a world organization and its correlate, a world community. The ethical treatment of immigrants and their paths to citizenship are clarified, and contemporary thinking on hospitality and the ethical treatment of immigrants is discussed, with insights from Derrida, Seyla Benhabib, Ben Jolloun, and K. Anthony Appiah. Chapter 5 proposes a revision of the world order, beginning with structural changes to the United Nations. These changes involve strengthening and expanding the legal powers of the United Nations, while leaving the sovereignty of nation states intact, but with one exception, the threat to global stability by transnational evildoing.
Part II: Cosmopolitanism and Evil begins with Chapter 6, a taxonomy of bad, wrongdoing, and evildoing. What forms of badness, wrongdoing, and evildoing are there? This chapter puts some order and precision in thinking about these concepts and their referents. A new definition of evil is offered. At the most general level transnational evils are inversions of civilization and deformations of life. Chapter 7 is an extended discussion of the destruction of the earthās biosphere, gleaned from technical research and reports from the scientific community. Active and passive wrongdoing are discussed in this context. Chapter 8, GENOCIDE, begins with Raphael Lemkinās pioneering work on genocide, leading to the ratification of the UN Convention on Genocide. The chapter advances an analysis of the concept and referents of this transnational evil, including critical appraisals of contemporary writers such as Claudia Card. Chapter 9 is a discussion of slavery, with critical assessments of the work of three main writers on this subject, Orlando Patterson, Kevin Bales, and Siddharth Kara. Chapter 10 continues the discussion of slavery, but focuses on child soldiers, a topic neglected by writers on slavery. Chapter 11 is an analysis of the concept of torture and an examination of the ethics of t...