Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

This essay explicates and defends a version of moral cosmopolitanism. It builds on the work of Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah, who in turn build on Cicero and Kant. It is an update in a contemporary idiom of a classical cosmopolitanism. In a time when Enlightenment ideas are widely discounted, it gives expression to an Enlightenment view arguing that there should be a fundamental allegiance to the ideal of a worldwide community of human beings where each human being, just be cause he/she is a human being, is equally a subject of concern and is taken to be of equal worth. Any patriotic concern for nation, or particularly groupings, should be subordinate to that ideal. It defends such a conception against the charge of elitism, unrealistic utopianism, anthropological naiveté and irrelevance, and of the charge that it involves a failure to attend to the importance of particular attachments.

S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.24(4) 2005: 273-288