(Download) "States of Risk: Should Cosmopolitans Favor Their Compatriots?(Critical Essay)" by Ethics & International Affairs " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: States of Risk: Should Cosmopolitans Favor Their Compatriots?(Critical Essay)
- Author : Ethics & International Affairs
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Politics & Current Events,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 292 KB
Description
If cosmopolitans were like Diogenes the Cynic, who expressed scatological contempt for organized society, or like Charles Dickens's comic creation Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House, who advocates for good works in "Africa" while her own children suffer various severe indignities and deprivations, the answer to the question above would be simple: no. Such cosmopolitans, on their own moral view, should attach no special weight to birth, proximity, or personal attachment. But recent cosmopolitan political theorists have suggested that, within a view that gives equal moral weight to the interests of all human beings, it is not only proper but required to take special care of some: family members and personal friends, naturally, but even compatriots with whom one has (generally) no experiential connection. Robert Goodin, for example, maintains that one should view the nation-state as a vehicle for giving local effect to universal human duties, which would otherwise be less effectively executed. (1) Andrew Mason advances the view that shared citizenship is a locus of distinctive goods. (2) Christopher Wellman claims that there are reasons to promote equality among citizens that do not apply in the case of outsiders. (3) Richard Miller argues that a principle of cosmopolitan respect is consistent with giving special weight to the demands of social trust among compatriots. (4) A recent series of sophisticated articles in the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs develops reasons for giving preference to compatriots that do not depend at all on appeals to shared nationality or ethnicity; they appeal, rather, to the moral consequences of coercion, of implication in collective decisions, or of reciprocity. (5) There is, then, quite an array of argumentation that can be deployed in order to distinguish the reasonable contemporary cosmopolitan from Diogenes, or Mrs. Jellyby. But in the debate over cosmopolitanism that has taken place in the last two decades or so, every candidate argument has been strongly challenged, or qualified in ways that seriously blunt its purpose. (6) We must take these challenges seriously, for unless they can be met, cosmopolitan theorists cannot occupy the critical stance that they tend to favor: that is, a stance that accepts the continued existence of distinct national communities while pressing upon them a sense of wider obligations. If their basic moral stance cannot accommodate the existence of distinct national communities, then cosmopolitans, to be consistent, must either abandon their view as impractical or else move on to some radical proposal for global political unity. That choice was set for them, in fact, some years ago by David Miller in his seminal book, On Nationality. Unless they can find good reasons for the special obligations that we have to compatriots, Miller argued, cosmopolitans occupy an untenable halfway house: they should either adopt a stronger form of global order that would displace national states, or admit that their moral starting point is defective in failing to give basic weight to the value attached to partial identities, such as national ones. (7)
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