Chapter 6: Summing Up and Concluding Remarks
”If we accept the cosmopolitan challenge, we will tell our representatives that we
want them to remember those strangers. Not because we are moved by their
suffering – we may or may not be – but because we are responsive to what Adam
Smith called “reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitants of the breast.” The
people of the richest nations can do better. This is a demand of simple morality.
But it is one that will resonate more widely if we make our civilization more
cosmopolitan.” (Appiah, 2006, p.174)
Let me review where we stand, as the thesis draws to an end: In chapter 1, I
sketched the problems created in the current culture of rights by the simultaneous
recognition of universal rights and denial that they generate universal duties. I
attributed these problems to the fact that the twin premises of liberal individualism
and national sovereignty, do not easily integrate in a system of universal rights.
Those, I concluded, that wish to affirm universal individual rights but maintain
limitations of duties along lines of citizenship must therefore explain how these
limitations are to work, and why they are justified. I defined the evaluation of
proposed arguments to support this position as the task of this thesis.
I proceeded, in chapter 2, to analyse the concept of a right, demonstrating first that
the distinction between positive and negative rights is untenable, and that a
universal right will therefore not generate duties to act or not act, but simply limit
the scope of allowable actions to those that do not result in the right being violated.
This raises the stakes for the discussion of limitations of duties, because allowing
harm can no longer count as a legitimate way of meeting a duty. I then showed
that a universal right will generate universal duties, barring the introduction of a
disanalogy factor to limit either the scope or the extent of the duties. Finally, I
clarified the difference between limiting duties on the one hand, and either
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abrogating a right because the duty encounters a threshold or alienating a right on
the other hand. For a number of the arguments I have since reviewed it holds that
although they fail to limit duties they do point to factors that need to be evaluated
when considering whether a threshold has been met.
I then described, in chapter 3, cosmopolitanism as the position that accepts the
existence of universal duties, contrasting it with statism and internationalism as
the two positions that deny the existence of universal rights and universal duties,
respectively. I argued that descriptively, cosmopolitanism has a strong case for the
existence of a global community in both an economic, political and cultural sense,
which affects the validity of arguments that attempt to establish the nation-state as
a privileged cooperative scheme or cultural group. I also noted that within
normative cosmopolitanism we must distinguish between institutional, cultural and
moral cosmopolitanism, pointing out that institutional cosmopolitanism is often
the point of contention in internationalist arguments, but that this misses the point
of moral cosmopolitanist claims.
In chapter 4, I reviewed internationalist arguments for the institution of the state
as disanalogy property. I examined one type of argument, which focuses on the
state as an institution that coordinates and enforces collective and individual
responsibilities, and argues that while rights may be universal the duties they
generate are limited to subjects who submit to the same state authority. One
variant argued that duties simply fall upon the state, as the agent capable of
enforcing them. The state in this view is limited by its sovereignty, while
individual duties are limited by submission to state coercion. Another variant
argued that individual duties depend on being enforceable, and that again this sets
limits. Neither variant, I showed, is persuasive, so that it does not seem plausible
that the state as a coercive institution can function as a disanalogy property.
2
I then examined another type of argument, which focuses on the state as an
institution that creates and regulates a public sphere of exchange and sharing of
resources, and argues that while rights may be universal the duties they generate
are limited to members who participate in the same scheme of cooperation. One
variant argued that all such schemes must follow the same model, so that all
individuals would hold the same rights, but that the duties only regulate
relationships within a cooperative scheme. Another variant argued that
membership of a cooperative scheme generates special relationships of reciprocity,
which counterbalance the requirements of universal duties. Again, I showed that
neither variant is persuasive, so that it does not seem plausible that the state as a
cooperative institution can function as a disanalogy property.
Finally, I pointed out that internationalist institutional arguments suffer from a
fundamental inability to justify the boundary-drawing procedures that necessarily
precede the framing of duties inside and between separate institutions: first,
because the existing boundaries are morally arbitrary in an institutionalist
perspective, and secondly because liberal institutionalism lacks criteria by which to
draw boundaries in a way that will justify limited duties.
In chapter 5, I reviewed culturalist arguments for the national community as
disanalogy property. I analyzed one type of argument which focuses on a culture as
a valuable entity, and argues that universal duties are limited by the weight
attributable to cultural affiliation. One variant argued that culture has intrinsic
value, because it forms the necessary context of choice for the lifeplans of
individuals, and as such must enter and be protected from the demands posed by
universal duties on the contractual level. Another variant argued that culture has
intrinsic value as an important end of the lifeplans of individuals in cultural
communities, and as such must be must be protected from the demands posed by
universal duties on the level of implementation. Neither variant is, I argued,
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convincing – the most that they can establish is that the value of culture may in
some cases count towards the meeting of a threshold – so that the value of culture
cannot function as a disanalogy property.
I then analyzed a second type of argument, which focuses on discrimination as an
unfortunate but unavoidable feature of a system of rights and duties, and argues
that discriminating along cultural lines will produce the least possible infraction of
individual rights. One variant defended the idea that the parity of the liberal state
is an illusion, and that as the state must necessarily discriminate it is necessary to
draw lines of separation, including the separation of the relevant duties, along
cultural lines. Another variant held that the cultural affiliations of individuals will
make universal duties unacceptable and thus impracticable, so that the choice is
between discriminating along cultural lines or denying duties whatsoever. Both
variants, I argued, fail to properly establish cultural discrimination as a disanalogy
property.
Finally, I demonstrated that the differential concept of culture which is the premise
of culturalist arguments is inherently problematic, so that both on an empirical and
theoretical level it is questionable that culture could constitute the type of
community that could work as a disanalogy property.
Often the two types of disanalogy argument combine so as to cover each other’s
weaknesses: once attention is drawn to the indeterminacy of liberalist boundarydrawing, culturalism suggests the cultural unit as the natural limiting unit. Once
attention is drawn to the insufficiency of cultural attachment as a principal
disanalogy property, institutionalism suggests that the state can explain why
limitations should enter on the principal level. The fusion of the nation and the
state in the nation-state allow the two approaches to support and supplement each
other, albeit in the final analysis not in a coherent or ethically significant way.
Rather, I believe to have determined that given universal rights universal, duties
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will follow, and that despite the existence of various types of pragmatic
reservations duties will not be principally affected by citizenship.
1.1
Supra- and Post-National Communities: Where to Now - and With
Whom?
The two features of the nation-state that I have been analyzing as potential
disanalogy
properties
nonetheless
pose
important
challenges
to
moral
cosmopolitanism, not as principal limitations, but as practical problems of
implementation. We can neither expect people to discard their sympathies towards
state and nation in favour of cosmopolitanism nor the imminent emergence of a
global institution capable of regulating and enforcing universal duties, and would
undoubtedly end up disappointed if we did. So while, as we have seen, the
institution of the state and the community of culture cannot justify principal
limitations to cosmopolitanism, they do constitute significant topics for more
pragmatic enquiry. The aim of such will be two-fold: to find a way of re-organizing
our political institutions so as to provide better protection of universal individual
rights than the society-of-(sovereign)-states on the one hand; and to establish a
viable balance between the requirements of universal duties and the nonuniversalizable, or even anti-universalist, interests of individuals living in
(imagined) communities on the other hand. It calls, I would suggest, for the
development of realistic cosmopolitanism as the strategy for best realizing our
universal duties under the adverse conditions of the current international system.
Several prominent cosmopolitans have offered interesting ideas for how to realize
what I here call realistic cosmopolitanism, among them centrally Jürgen Habermas.
Let me sketch briefly, drawing upon his work in these areas, how I believe that
cosmopolitans could proceed.
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1.1.1 Realistic Institutional Cosmopolitanism and the Dispersal of
Sovereignty
The first premise of realistic institutional cosmopolitanism is the recognition of the
need to maintain the republican constitutional foundation as the post-metaphysical
source of normative legitimacy for the rights granted by individuals to each
other: ”Modern constitutions owe their existence to a conception found in modern
natural law according to which citizens come together voluntarily to form a legal
community of free and equal consociates. The constitution puts into effect precisely
those rights that those individuals must grant one another if they want to order
their life together legitimately by means of positive law.”1 (Habermas, in: Gutmann
(ed.), 1994, p. 107) A realistic institutional cosmopolitanism will need, therefore, to
explore new ways of framing sovereignty, both of territory and population, not
simply imitate the nation-state on a larger scale.
The answer, for Habermas, is not to relinquish the republican constitutionalism
found in the public sphere of the national community, but to supplement it with
supra-national institutions capable at once of coordinating and regulating the
relations of states to each other and the duties owed to individuals across lines of
citizenship. Specifically, he advocates a legal regime involving increased
integration at the regional level under institutions loosely modelled on the EU, as
well as upgrading the judiciary powers of global institutions, such as the UN. The
latter is not intended to replace the UN’s function as a forum for debate on political
issues, but to ensure that such debates constitute a process that can supply
genuinely moral solutions to the conflicts of interests and common problems faced
Similarly in “Between Facts and Norms”, where Habermas explains the need for republicanism as founded in
the dilemma that: “If the rational will can take shape only in the individual subject, then the individual’s moral
autonomy must reach through the political autonomy of the united will of all in order to secure the private
autonomy of each in advance via natural law. If the rational will can take shape only in the macrosubject of a
people or nation, then political autonomy must be understood as the self-conscious realization of the ethical
substance of a concrete community; and private autonomy is protected from the overpowering force of political
autonomy only by the nondiscriminatory form of general laws.” (Habermas, 2004, 103)
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by state-actors, and not rubber-stamps on the exercise of real-politik reflecting the
power-relations of sovereign states. (Habermas, 2005)
Habermas’ approach is fraught with problems, both because of the vagueness on
critical issues of the division of powers between the three levels and because of the
recurrence of the issue of republican constitutionalism as the necessary condition
justifying the legal regime. (cf. Walker, 2005). Nonetheless, he manages to sketch
an appealing cosmopolitan alternative to the various competing conceptions of
international relations, whether realist or based in benign hegemonic dominance.
David Held suggests similar solutions, arguing furthermore that institutional
cosmopolitanism, understood as a regime that is multi-levelled, fragmented and
dispersed, has already supplemented, replaced or superseded on all aspects of the
sovereignty defined in the classic regime of the nation-state. Rather than a
revolution, realistic cosmopolitanism therefore advocates the development of a
stronger cosmopolitan regime on those areas of law, politics, economy and culture
where it has already established a foothold. (Held 2002 & 2005) In short, we need
not resort to the false choice between the impracticability of the inclusive worldstate and the unjustifiable exclusion of the nation-state. The shaping and
strengthening of a more promising cosmopolitan regime, through its numerous
overlapping and supplementary institutions, is the project of institutional
cosmopolitanism in the 21st century.
1.1.2 Realistic Cultural Cosmopolitanism and the Inclusion of the Other
Similarly to above, the first premise of realistic cultural cosmopolitanism must be the
recognition that our lives will inevitably be conducted in relations with other individuals
who have equal moral status, but at the same time hold conflicting and nonuniversalizable interests. While moral cosmopolitanism can attempt, with varying
degrees of success, to establish definitive universal rights, these will both need to be
implemented in contexts where they compete with the non-universal rights individuals
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claim. The problem emerges in Habermas’ work as the question of what role
national patriotism and cultural heteronomy should play in the forming of
legitimate groups, especially in relation to the discussion of multicultural societies
in Europe and the challenges they face.
On the other hand, cosmopolitanism must insist on the decoupling of citizenship
from privileges, including those that follow from recent shifts in naturalization
from national criteria towards market-rationalized, so that, as David Jacobson
observes: ”Citizenship increasingly takes on a contractual character wherein issues
are framed in terms of the economic contributions and costs of immigration rather
than in terms of national belonging and identity…” (Jacobson, 1997, p.xxx)
Lacking an ontological grounding, e.g. in the form of the differential concept of
culture and the entity of the nation, there are no justifiable principles for
inclusion/exclusion on the basis of nationality and culture, nor must the
instrumental logic of the marketplace be allowed to colonize the lifeworld of our
moral relations. (cf. Nørager, 1993)
This leads Habermas to affirm a strongly inclusive community which must
simultaneously remain sufficiently open to individual idiosyncrasies. This
community must be inclusive not only in the sense of including what is identical in
individuals, i.e. their formal universality as moral beings, but of including precisely
what is different in their individuality: ”Equal respect for everyone is not limited to
those who are like us; it extends to the person of the other in his or her otherness.
And solidarity with the other as one of us refers to the flexible “we” of a community
that resists all substantive determinations and extends its permeable boundaries
ever further. This moral community constitutes itself solely by way of the negative
idea of abolishing discrimination and harm and of extending relations of mutual
recognition to include marginalized men and women. The community thus
constructively outlined is not a collective that would force its homogenized
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members to affirm its distinctiveness. Here inclusion does not imply locking
members into a community that closes itself off from others. The “inclusion of the
other” means rather that the boundaries of the community are open for all, also and
most especially for those who are strangers to one another and want to remain
strangers.” (Habermas, 2002, p. xxxvf)
This has two implications for a realistic cultural cosmopolitanism: the first is that
the duty of inclusion, in the sense of recognition as a part of the moral community,
has an extremely high threshold, if a threshold at all. Habermas makes it clear that
failure to secure the rights of individuals in the context of immigration cannot be
excused with reference to cost – unless perhaps such cost reaches a point where it
threatens the viability and continued existence of the community as such. This
breaking point, as he observes, is certainly not one that Western states are
threatened by in the foreseeable future. (Habermas, in: Gutmann (ed.), 1994) The
second implication is a strong commitment to non-national liberalism, affirming
the priority of the individual over collective identities, which at once tempers the
demands individuals can make on behalf of cultures and affirms the mutual duties
to respect the individual right to form and pursue non-universalizable interests:
“Equal treatment means equal treatment of unequals who are nonetheless aware of
their interdependence. Moral universalism must not take into account the aspect of
equality – the fact that persons as such are equal to all other persons – at the
expense of the aspect of individuality – the fact that as individuals they are at the
same time absolutely different from all others.” (Habermas, 2002, p. 40) For
Habermas, these conclusions support the development of discourse ethics as the
normative theory capable of providing answers to moral dilemmas in the relevant
sense. Viewed in a wider context, they point to the fact that conflicts of individual
interest do not allow of universal solutions, but must be reviewed on a basis that
takes account of their individuality. This too is a project, or projects, as any
number of cases of applied ethics, for cosmopolitanism in the 21st century.
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1.2 Conclusion
I have shown over the course of the past hundred some pages that if we first accept
universal individual rights, then recognizing universal duties, untrammelled by
limits of citizenship, follows as an inevitable next step. None of the arguments I
have examined coherently justified limiting duties in either scope or extent along
the lines of state or nation. This, as is also clear, does not mean that we have
universal duties. To conclude that these in fact exist, we need to establish universal
rights. But for those of us, individuals or state actors, that affirm universal rights
the responsibilities that follow are clear. And they are much more extensive and
encompassing than the responsibilities we currently assume.
I have further suggested two projects for cosmopolitanism that build on the
recognition of moral cosmopolitanism, as pragmatic and concrete tasks to
supplement the theoretical task of establishing the ethical foundations. There, I
believe, lie the real challenges of cosmopolitanism – not in its principles, which are
sound, but in its practice, which still carries the fragility of its infancy.
I expended considerable energy to criticize the limitations inherent in the
cosmopolitanism of Immanuel Kant. Perhaps it is only fitting to let him have the
final word, and recognize the part of his work that, paradoxically, supports a more
ambitious cosmopolitan ideal. Noting, as I have here, the signs of cosmopolitan
infancy in the development of a transnational public sphere and an international
regime of supra-state legitimacy, he offers the faintest of idealist glimmers, when
stating that: “…this encourages the hope that, after many revolutions, with all
their transforming effects, the highest purpose of nature, a universal cosmopolitan
existence, will at last be realized as the matrix within which all the original
capacities of the human race may develop. ” (Kant, 2006, p. 51)
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