Vedrørende Appiah:
”We’ve identified three kinds of disagreement about values: we can fail to share a
vocabulary of evaluation; we can give the same vocabulary different interpretations;
and we can give the same values different weights. Each of these problems seems
more likely to arise if the discussion involves people from different societies.”
(Appiah, 2006, p.66)
Appiah on Cosmopolitanism
“So there are two strands that intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism. One is the
idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we
are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared
citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of
particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that
lend them significance.” (Appiah, 2006, p.xv)
But the universalism of cosmopolitanism raises a second question of comprehensiveness:
how much of our lives should be regulated by universal principles? Appiah’s version of
cosmopolitanism is limited in a number of significant ways: “Because there are so many
human possibilities worth exploring, we neither expect nor desire that every person or
every society should converge on a single mode of life. What ever our obligations are to
others (or theirs to us) they often have the right to go their own way.” (Appiah, 2006,
p.xv)
Additionally, Appiah wants to argue that while we have universal responsibilities, there
are some responsibilities that we have only to our countrymen. That is, that being a
member of a country or a nation or a culture, can generate duties that are a) not generated
by being a member of the human race, and b) directed only at the other members of the
country, nation or culture: “…the one thought that cosmopolitans share is that no local
loyalty can ever justify forgetting that each human being has responsibilities to every
other. Fortunately, we need take sides neither with the nationalist who abandons all
foreigners nor with the hard-core cosmopolitan who regards her friends and fellow
citizens with icy impartiality. The position worth defending might be called (in both
senses) a partial cosmopolitanism.” (Appiah, p.xvii)
Appiah on lack of cosmopolitan empathy (nationalist only empathy?) empirically wrong, because: “Some American Christians send money to suffering
fellow Christians in Southern Sudan; writers, through PEN International, campaign
for the freedom of other writers, imprisoned around the world; women in Sweden
work for women’s rights in South Asia; Indians in the Punjab worry about the fate of
Punjabis in Canada and Britain. I care about some people in other places, people
whose oppression would engage me particularly, just because I have read their
philosophical writings, admired their novels, seen them play spectacular games of
tennis on television. So, if we change the examples to suit the case, do you. […] the
great lesson of anthropology is that when the stranger is no longer imaginary, but real
and present, sharing a human social life, you may like or dislike him, you may agree or
disagree; but, if it is what you both want, you can make sense of each other in the
end.” (Appiah, 2006, 98)
“Then, as I said at the start, we cosmopolitans believe in universal truth, too, though
we are less certain that we have it all already. It is not skepticism about the very idea
of truth that guides us; it is realism about how hard the truth is to find. One truth we
hold to, however, is that every human being has obligations to every other.
Everybody matters: that is our central idea. And it sharply limits the scope of our
tolerance.” (Appiah, 2006, p.144)
Appiah - From tolerance to obligations to strangers:
“If cosmopolitanism is, in a slogan, universality plus difference, there is the possibility
of another kind of enemy, one who rejects universality altogether. “Not everybody
matters” would be their slogan. The fact is, though, that, whatever may have been the
case in the past, most people who say it now don’t really believe it. Bernard Williams
wrote in Ethics and the limits of Philosophy that “morality” – in the sense of norms
that are universally binding – “is not an invention of philosophers. It is the outlook
or, incoherently, part of the outlook of almost all of us.” […] The real challenge to
cosmopolitanism isn’t the belief that they don’t matter very much. It’s easy to get
agreement that we have some obligations to strangers. We can’t do terrible things to
them. Perhaps, if their situation becomes completely intolerable and we can do
something about it at reasonable cost, we may even have a duty to intervene. Perhaps
we should stop genocide, intervene when there is mass starvation or a great natural
disaster. But must we do more than this? Here’s where easy assent starts to fray.”
(Appiah, 2006, p.151ff)
Appiah, in arguing for his limited cosmopolitanism, objects to the universalist
principle of consequentialism: “All this talk of mandarins and foreign children can
make it seem that Unger’s paradox is a special problem for cosmopolitans. It is not.
Forget the starving children of Africa and Asia if you can. Wherever you live in the
West, there are children’s lives to be saved in your own country. […] The problem
with the argument isn’t that it says we have incredible obligations to foreigners; the
problem is that it claims we have incredible obligations. Whatever has gone wrong,
you can’t blame it on us cosmopolitans.”(Appiah, 2006, p.159f)
To explicate the alleged error, he turns to another drowning example, concerning a
small child drowning in a pond and the ruination of your suit in the process of
rescuing it. This is in response to Peter Singer and Peter Unger, and Appiah raises
two points: first that Singer’s consequentialist principle 1 does not respond well to the
drowning example, because leaving the child to drown and spending the time and
Appiah sums up Singer’s arguments in the following principle, dubbing it the ”Singer principle”: ”If you
can prevent something bad from happening at the cost of something less bad, you ought to do it.” (Appiah,
2006, p.160) This is a fairly standard formulation of the principle found, with small variations, in different
types of consequentialist ethics.
1
money lost in saving it to help children in Africa, Asia or wherever would create
better consequences. The second is that actually figuring out which potential action
will lead to the best consequences is literally impossible. Both are stock objections to
consequentialist ethics, but not easy to maintain when combined with some form of
cosmopolitanist ethics. The first in addition seems to involve a strange confusion
about consequences: if the situation literally involves a choice between saving one
child or saving many, e.g. if you were on your way to the office of an NGO with a
cheque, and knew (somehow) that delivering the cheque would save the lives of 10
children, but that it will (somehow) be destroyed in the rescue attempt, then wouldn’t
it be reasonable to accept that rescuing the 10 children is more important than
rescuing the one? It’s a strange hypothetical scenario, and an uncomfortable
conclusion, but it would seem absurd to support an ethics that allowed us to kill 10
people tomorrow to save one today. In reality, it is a scenario that is unlikely to occur.
Most of the time we are more likely to be obligated to do both than we are to be in a
situation, in which we have to choose which of our obligations to meet, because of
circumstance outside of our control.
The deeper difficulties in defending both cosmopolitanism and a limited universalism
become obvious when we look at the principle that Appiah suggests as an alternative
to the Singer principle: “If you are the person in the best position to prevent
something really awful, and it won’t cost you much to do so, do it.” (Appiah, 2006,
p.160) Apart from the obvious difficulties of determination that it shares with the
consequentialist principle,2 it just isn’t very obvious why either of the two significant
changes are justified. Why does the fact that I am only the second-best person
qualified to help alleviate my moral responsibility to do so? To stay with the
drowning example, would we really accept as a legitimate excuse for not trying to
help the child that “there was another guy who was closer to the water than me. He
didn’t do anything, and the child drowned, but he was in a better position than I to
help it, so I didn’t have any moral responsibility.” That doesn’t seem reasonable.
Particularly if, as is the case with the global problems we are discussing here, the
person(s) who are in a better position than I to help either can’t or won’t solve the
problem. At least not solve all of it. Either because they simply do not have the
resources to solve them, or because they refuse to assume moral responsibility. As for
the second major change, it seems no less obvious that we can justify that the cost to
myself has to be insignificant compared to the evil I am preventing. Why? Would we
accept an excuse from the potential rescuer that he was on his way to an important
business-meeting, and that stopping to rescue the drowned child would have cost him
an enormous sum of money? It might provide some understanding of his
psychological motivation for failing to rescue the child, but it could hardly excuse his
negligence to do so in moral terms.
How do figure out who is “the person in the best position to prevent something really awful”, how bad
does something have to be to qualify as “really awful” and how much is “it won’t cost you much to do it”?
It seems that the difficulties of determination may be even greater for this principle than for the Singer
principle.
2
Unfortunately, Appiah is brief on the subject, and does not provide supporting
arguments. Barring that, Appiah falls back on moral intuitionism: “I have no doubt at
all that I should save the drowning child and ruin my suit. […] There are many
arguments that I might make in defense of this view, especially to someone who was
seriously convinced that he was free to let the child drown. But I am less certain of
most of those arguments than I am that I should save the child.” (Appiah, 2006,
p.162)
Not only does Appiah fail to provide an explanation of why these changes are
justified, it seems doubtful that a persuasive explanation of this type is even possible.
It seems, instead, that he succumbs to a common problem for defenders of
intuitionism: Because our empathy works stronger for people and events that we
witness personally, intuitions tend to make smaller demands of us when dealing with
strangers. But until it can be demonstrated that the lack of empathy in a given
situation is a valid disqualifier of moral responsibility, this invalidates intuitionism and
supports the use of moral principles, rather than the other way around.
For a society of states/limited cosmopolitanism:
“…the primary mechanism for ensuring these entitlements remains the nation-state.
There are a few political cosmopolitans who say they want a world government. But
the cosmopolitanism I am defending prizes a variety of political arrangements,
provided, of course, each state grants every individual what he or she deserves. […]
Accepting the nation-state means accepting that we have a special responsibility for
the life and the justice of our own; but we still have to play our part in ensuring that
all states respect the rights and meet the needs of their citizens. If they cannot, then
all of us – through our nations, if they will do it, and in spite of them, if they won’t –
share the collective obligation to change them; and if the reason they fail their citizens
is that they lack resources, providing resources can be part of that collective
obligation. That is an equally fundamental cosmopolitan commitment.”(Appiah, 2006,
p.163f)
Vs. global state/cosmopolitanism:
“A global state would have at least three obvious problems. It could easily accumulate
uncontrollable power, which it might use to do great harm; it would often be
unresponsive to local needs; an it would almost certainly reduce the variety of
institutional experimentation from which all of us can learn.”(Appiah, 2006, p.163)
Limited cosmopolitanism:
Singer offers four additional constraints on cosmopolitanism:
1) “Each of us should do our fair share; but we cannot be required to do more.
This is a constraint, however, inchoate, that the Shallow Pond theorists do not
respect. The Singer principle just doesn’t begin to capture the subtlety of our
actual moral thought. […] Our ordinary moral thinking makes distinctions the
principle doesn’t capture.” (Appiah, 2006, p.164)
2) “Even if we could get everyone to agree on the virtues of the plan; and even if
we could determine how each of us, depending on our resources, should
contribute his or her fair share, we can be pretty confident that some people
would not give their fair share. That means there would still be some unmet
entitlements. What is the obligation of those who have already met their basic
obligation?” (Appiah, 2006, p.164f)
3) “Whatever my basic obligations are to the poor far away, they cannot be
enough, I believe, to trump my concerns for my family, my friends, my
country; nor can an argument that every life matters require me to be
indifferent to the fact that one of those lives is mine.” (Appiah, 2006, p.165)
4) “Any plausible answer to the question of what we owe to others will have to
take account of many values; no sensible story of our obligations to strangers
can ignore the diversity of the things that matter in human life. […] Would
you really want to live in a world in which the only thing anyone had ever
cared about was saving lives?” (Appiah, 2006, p.165f)
In support of this, Appiah criticizes two of the premises of consequentialist
arguments: “Part of the strategy of Unger’s argument is to persuade us that not
intervening to save someone because we have something else worth doing is morally
equivalent to killing him in the name of those other values. We should resist the
equation.” (Appiah, 2006, p.167) Why the two are not morally equivalent and we
should therefore resist the equation is, unfortunately, not well-explained. It seems to
rest on a combination of intuitionism and the argument of relations alleviating
responsibility; that is, because we intuitively feel more morally responsible for the
people close to us, and more responsible for actions we take that directly affect
people than actions we take that indirectly affect them, the equation doesn’t hold.
Unless we accept the principle of intuitionism this obviously does not hold.
The second is a variation and combination of two previous points on the difficulty of
evaluating consequences and the critique of narrow conceptions of the good: “Death
isn’t the only thing that matters. What matters is decent lives. And if what you save
[the dying children] for is just another month or another year or another decade of
horrible suffering, have you really made the best use of your money? Indeed, have
you really made the world less bad?” (Appiah, 2006, p.167) and he continues: “When
you spend your dollars – or Euros or Pounds – isn’t it worth also spending a moment
or two to ask whether they are being spent intelligently? However much you give,
doesn’t it matter that none of it is wasted? Part of the trouble with Peter Unger’s
focus on those starving children is that it blocks thought about the complexity of the
problems facing the global poor. Ask the people OXFAM and UNICEF whether
they think that all that matters is keeping children alive a while longer.” (Appiah, 2006,
p.171f)
Conclusion:
”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)
But the universalism of cosmopolitanism raises a second question of comprehensiveness:
how much of our lives should be regulated by universal principles? Appiah’s version of
cosmopolitanism is limited in a number of significant ways: “Because there are so many
human possibilities worth exploring, we neither expect nor desire that every person or
every society should converge on a single mode of life. What ever our obligations are to
others (or theirs to us) they often have the right to go their own way.” (Appiah, 2006,
p.xv)