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‘Citizen of Nowhere’ or ‘The Point Where Circles Intersect’? Impartialist and Embedded Cosmopolitianisms

Toni Erskine
University of Cambridge

International Studies Association

March 1998

Introduction

Cosmopolitanism can be understood to mean (at least) two different things. It might be equated with the potential achievement of world government and the global political institutions that would presumably accompany it. Alternatively, cosmopolitanism might be thought to entail a universal scope of ethical concern. In other words, it is possible to speak of political or ethical cosmopolitanism, neither of which necessarily entails the other. 1 We can assume that when Diogenes the Cynic uttered the frequently cited phrase, “I am a citizen of the world,” in the fourth century BC, he had the latter meaning in mind. 2 Questioning the exclusive moral claims of local affiliations (along with a good number of social conventions), he claimed to be a member of the ethical cosmopolis. According to an ethical cosmopolitan perspective, moral commitments extend beyond political borders as well as ethnic, ideological, socio-economic and religious divides. Put in another way, the scope of moral concern is co-terminous with no particular community or group of communities (other than the community of human individuals world-wide). 3 It is on this understanding of cosmopolitanism and its compatibility (or, indeed, incompatibility) with different sources of value and legitimacy that the subsequent discussion will be focused.

The idea of ethical cosmopolitanism is both the subject of intense debate and the object of deep mistrust. This is colourfully illustrated in the passionate response to an essay by Martha Nussbaum published in a special issue of the Boston Review in the autumn of 1994. 4 In this essay, a direct rejoinder to the idea of patriotism, Nussbaum enthusiastically champions “the very old ideal of the cosmopolitan, the person whose primary allegiance is the community of human beings in the entire world.” 5 Many of her respondents remain unconvinced. As one sceptic counters, “cosmopolitanism has a nice, high-minded ring to it, but it is an illusion, and, like all illusions, perilous.” 6 The root of this charge lies in what this critic sees cosmopolitanism as entailing (or, more accurately, neglecting):

Above all, what cosmopolitanism obscures, even denies, are the givens of life: parents, ancestors, family, race, religion, heritage, history, culture, tradition, community — and nationality. These are not “accidental” attributes of the individual. They are essential attributes. We do not come into the world as free-floating, autonomous individuals. We come into it complete with all the particular, defining characteristics that go into a fully formed human being... 7

This challenge to cosmopolitanism is motivated by what is perceived to be a flawed, and potentially dangerous, understanding of individual moral agency. According to this criticism, the moral agent of a cosmopolitan ethic is stripped of layer after layer of presumed contingency until there is no ‘self’ left. The rejection of Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan ideal stems from the eschewal of abstraction and impartiality in moral theory. What is under attack, therefore, might be referred to as impartialist cosmopolitanism. Not only does this reaction reflect current movements in contemporary ethical thought, but it should be viewed as having great significance for anyone concerned with exploring ethics, and, specifically, sources of value, within the discipline of International Relations.

An important question for both moral philosophers and normative theorists of International Relations is how we get from where we are currently standing, steeped in our own immediate circumstances, with our own particular ties and commitments, to concern for those with whom we share neither kinship nor country, neighbourhood nor nation. One answer to this question is that we must remove ourselves from such particular (and potentially prejudicing) loyalties in order to achieve an inclusive scope of moral consideration. It is this answer that has incited heated disagreement about the very nature of moral agency, judgement and value. Some positions — inter alia ‘communitarian’ political thought and certain streams of feminist theory — reject the notion that morality must aspire to an impartialist world view and argue instead that morality is ‘embedded’ in particular social, historical and affective commitments. 8 As the transcendence of context and particularity has been seen as the means of arriving at transnational normative discourse, the possible implications of these firmly anti-impartialist positions cannot be ignored. If we deny an Archimedean point for moral deliberation, what does this mean for ethics at a global level? I will suggest an alternative way of conceiving of ethical cosmopolitanism — a way that might satisfy the critics of an impartialist conception of morality without denying the potential for morally relevant allegiances that are undeterred by borders. I will call this hypothetical position ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’.

This paper will be divided into three parts. In the first section I will explore ‘impartialist cosmopolitanism’ as a focus of criticism for those who assert that morality is impossible in the absence of context and particularity. I will then put forth a position that is meant to provide a stark contrast to impartialist cosmopolitanism. This position, which I will arrive at through a discussion of patriotism, will be called ‘communitarian realism’. After briefly addressing the view that state borders have value in a strictly instrumental sense (a sense compatible with an impartialist view of morality), I will look at what the idea of the morally constitutive state might mean for defining the scope of ethical concern. The final section of this paper will suggest the relative merits (and demerits) of an alternative to both impartialist cosmopolitanism and communitarian realism. This alternative will be evaluated for its potential to sustain an ‘embedded’ account of moral agency, to address the deeply problematic issue of the moral relevance of state borders, and to accommodate an inclusive scope of ethical concern.

“Citizens of Nowhere”: The Limits of Impartialist Cosmopolitanism

By ‘impartialist cosmopolitanism’, I mean an understanding of morality that binds a universal scope of inclusion inextricably to an account of agency according to which moral deliberation requires one to abstract from the perceived prejudices of particular ties and loyalties. It is important to establish from the outset that the label ‘impartialist cosmopolitanism’ does not, for the purposes of this discussion, represent a single philosophical perspective. Rather, I will construct this position in order to illustrate the site of opposition for those (equally diverse) theorists who maintain that morality must have a particularist moral starting-point. This discussion will proceed from two related assumptions: that impartialist cosmopolitanism is better understood as a perceived theoretical point of departure than as a single, monolithic position (that all too easily might be propped up and knocked down); and, that proponents and critics of impartiality in moral theory are often engaged in somewhat asymmetrical arguments. As Brian Barry insightfully observes, “what the opponents [of impartiality] are attacking is not what the supporters are defending.” 9

What the supporters of impartiality are defending is, simply, the view that morality depends on an impersonal standpoint from which equal consideration is given to all persons. According to this position, abstraction, or limiting knowledge of subjective particulars, is a feature of moral deliberation that is necessary to ensure that a privileged position is granted to no one person or group of people. It is important to note that strong arguments support the assertion that impartiality in moral deliberation need not be accompanied by a lack of attention to particularity. 10 Indeed, any division between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ ethics requires myriad qualifications. Those who claim to reject abstraction for context in moral reasoning often seem to illustrate an impartialist account of morality that is more caricature than accurate portraiture. Yet, despite the frequent over-simplification of their theoretical foil, the advocates of a particularist moral starting-point articulate positions that are in many respects compelling and worthy of careful examination. It is the implications of these positions for normative theorising in International Relations with which I will be concerned.

Critics of an impartialist cosmopolitan position lament its failure to acknowledge the role of community and social relationships in constituting both selfhood and agency. They reject the perceived underlying assumption of impartialist cosmopolitanism, that we can be removed from our social contexts and still possess a rich enough embodiment of who we are in order to arrive at moral decisions. The vision of the moral agent as independent of particular attachments is disparaged as lacking substance: Iris Murdoch calls it “thin as a needle”, 11 and Alasdair MacIntyre describes its “attenuated, ghostly quality.” 12 Carol Gilligan, in her influential challenge to conventional developmental psychology, criticises the “skeletal lives” of make-believe people invoked in abstract moral dilemmas. 13 Responding to Nussbaum’s essay, Benjamin Barber charges that Nussbaum “understates the thinness of cosmopolitanism,” claiming that “the idea of cosmopolitanism offers little or nothing for the human psyche to fasten on.” 14 An image of cosmopolitanism as an anaemic ethic thereby emerges — one requiring metaphysical leaps that are impossible for real flesh-and-blood moral agents. To extend the metaphor common to MacIntyre, Murdoch, Gilligan and Barber, the self is ethically emaciated. 15

This analysis has serious implications for ethics at a global level if an inclusive scope of concern is seen to rely on an impartialist understanding of morality. If one adheres to this view, a moral perspective that claims to be constituted by particular relationships can only promise exclusive moral enclaves and not moral commitments that ‘travel’. A particularist moral starting-point would thereby undermine the potential for ethical cosmopolitanism. MacIntyre, for one, seems content with this formulation. He insists that tradition and culture constitute our “moral starting-point” and give life “its own moral particularity”:

We all approach our own circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity. I am someone’s son or daughter, someone else’s cousin or uncle; I am a citizen of this or that city, a member of this or that guild or profession, I belong to this clan, that tribe, this nation. 16

MacIntyre is critical of attempts to posit an ethical perspective that transcends these social and political loyalties. He provides an uncompromising rejection of both an impartialist world-view and ethical cosmopolitanism. By “aspiring to be at home anywhere”, MacIntyre chastises, we have become “citizens of nowhere”. He describes this modern malady as “rootless cosmopolitanism”. 17 His ‘cure’ is to accept a delimited scope of ethical concern, a concession that he acknowledges entails some degree of relativism. 18 The question that must be addressed by the normative theorist of International Relations in light of the anti-impartialist movements within moral philosophy, political theory, and, most recently, within International Relations itself, can then be worded as follows: If one challenges the alleged ‘rootlessness’ of an impartialist position, is one then doomed to conceding MacIntyre’s moral parochialism?

This is a complex question. Demand for ethical discourse that would recognise the ‘embeddedness’ of our moral experience is vulnerable to the charge that it would also require us to prefer those with whom we share this experience. Such a preference could be argued to exclude broader moral obligations. Moreover, an embedded ethical perspective can be accused of precluding a critical measure by which accepted values might be questioned. One might argue that challenges to the perceived moral boundaries of ‘primary’ loyalties and conventional relationships are thereby resisted. The objection that an embedded understanding of morality is both partial and conservative is raised in the liberal indictment that the communitarian politics of the ‘common good’ fosters prejudice and intolerance. Similarly, Seyla Benhabib cautions with respect to Gilligan’s ‘ethic of care’ that “group solidarity may often be achieved at the expense of moral disregard and contempt for individuals who are not group members.” 19 When one makes the jump from the local to the global, from interpersonal relations to international relations, it is necessary to examine this risk of exclusion as arising not only from a sense of primary loyalty and affection in the forms of familial relations and communal ties, but also between the (often analogously portrayed) bonds of fellow citizens. This possibility of exclusion can be illustrated by momentarily turning from cosmopolitanism to a discussion of patriotism.

State Borders and the Situated Self: The Ethic of Patriotism

The purpose of this section is to explore the understanding of moral agency as dependent on notions of citizenship and statehood. Although patriotic sentiment is often condemned as immoral, I am concerned with the attempt to justify patriotism as a moral position through the appeal to constitutive attachments. According to this line of reasoning, it is because moral value is located within a particular relationship, namely citizenship, that the individual is justified in her over-riding commitment to the well-being of the state and to the preferential care of her compatriots. However, before exploring this account of patriotism — one that is forcefully articulated by MacIntyre — it is necessary to say something further about the nature of patriotism and, more specifically, the disparate accounts of agency with which it might be associated.

Patriotism for Impartialists

I will take patriotism to involve the granting of primary loyalty to one’s own state and one’s fellow citizens. 20 It is important to recognise that it is possible (although, perhaps, counter-intuitive) to conceive of an impartialist justification of patriotism. Two quite different examples of such a justification can be found in both consequentialist and rights-based arguments. In order briefly to show how it might be possible to construct an argument for the preferential treatment of compatriots that does not rely on a particularist moral starting-point, I will outline the consequentialist and rights-based positions put forth by Robert Goodin and Alan Gewirth, respectively. 21 These defences of state-centric spheres of concern will provide important points of contrast for the understanding of patriotism as arising from morally constitutive bonds of citizenship — the account upon which I will subsequently focus.

There are two significant aspects of the positions of Goodin and Gewirth with respect to the current discussion. First, they do not present the preference for compatriots and the accompanying delimited sphere of moral concern that define patriotic sentiment as ethical positions by virtue of the constitutive value of the particular relationships themselves. Instead, the moral license to give priority to compatriots is argued to arise from universal duties or principles. Second, this circumscription of moral concern is necessarily qualified. Loyalty to particular others (compatriots) and the concomitant recognition of duties that are unique to these others can never completely eclipse the duties that one has to everyone qua human being. Charles Beitz refers to a similarly qualified understanding of patriotism as “patriotism for cosmopolitans” — his own variation on which he describes as “a patriotism based on loyalty to a just constitution, and which acknowledges obligations to outsiders that could override obligations to compatriots.” 22

Goodin’s position fits easily into Beitz’s classification while also giving meaning to Tennyson’s prima facie contradictory verse that “[t]hat man’s the best cosmopolite/ that loves his native country best.” 23 Goodin argues that general duties are most effectively fulfilled if they are “subdivided”. 24 He thereby champions a moral parochialism that is both artificial and functional. His delimitation of the scope of moral concern presupposes a universal moral horizon: the very partitioning of ethical consideration is justified because it benefits everyone. Goodin portrays a “rule of universal partiality” 25 as the most efficient means of allocating responsibility for moral actions. He explains special duties as follows:

My preferred approach to special duties is to regard them as being merely “distributed general duties”. This is to say, special duties are in my view merely devices whereby the moral community’s general duties are assigned to particular agents. 26

Suggesting that national boundaries provide subdividing functions, Goodin reveals what might be called a consequentialist approach to patriotism. According to this approach, to which Goodin refers as the “assigned responsibility model”, citizenship is merely “a device for fixing special responsibility in some agent for discharging our general duties vis-à-vis each particular person.” 27

All that distinguishes Goodin’s view from the impartialist cosmopolitanism discussed above is that a global scope is deliberately reduced in favour of what is argued to be a universally beneficial moral parochialism. The account of moral agency embraced by the two positions is identical. In fact, Nussbaum, criticising pro-patriotic arguments in favour of an impartialist cosmopolitan stance, articulates a position that is remarkably similar to Goodin’s notion of distributed general duties:

If we really do believe that all human beings are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights, we are morally required to think about what that conception requires us to do with and for the rest of the world. Once again, that does not mean that one may not permissibly give one’s own sphere a special degree of concern. Politics, like child care, will be poorly done if each thinks herself equally responsible for all, rather than giving the immediate surroundings special care. 28

If we consider those in our ‘immediate surroundings’ to include our fellow citizens, then the positions of Goodin and Nussbaum are compatible. 29 For Goodin, special duties — such as those recognised between compatriots — are not actually ‘special’ at all: “[a]t root, they are merely the general duties that everyone has toward everyone else worldwide.” 30

Goodin’s subsuming of “special” duties under “general” duties in the previous statement — to the extent that he feels able to deny the existence of special duties altogether — might seem a particularly unhelpful way of providing a moral justification for patriotic loyalties. In fact, it might appear that he is rejecting the idea that duties to those with whom one stands in a particular relationship have any moral backing at all. Yet, Goodin’s argument is more sophisticated than a prolonged focus on his professed annulment of special duties might lead one to believe. He maintains that there are special duties in the sense that one might have obligations to fellow citizens that one does not have to the rest of the world. It is necessary to go back to the terminology of H. L. A. Hart upon which Goodin draws in order to get beyond the apparent ‘doublespeak’ of this position. Goodin denies that there are any “special” duties only in the sense that such duties arise out of some particular relationship in which individuals stand to each other. (This is the way in which Hart employs the label.) 31 Goodin’s consequentialist angle allows him to remain faithful to this denial while still advocating the partial treatment of compatriots: duties to particular others are, indeed, morally justified, but only because they are a means of realising universal, impartially derived, obligations.

Like Goodin, Gewirth aims to provide a universalist justification for giving preferential consideration to people with whom one has a special relationship. Yet, Gewirth is deeply critical of such arguments if they justify particular loyalties by presenting them “as means to the universalist end of advancing some kind of overall equality taken as a fundamental value.” 32 In other words, he would reject the consequentialist position put forth by Goodin. Gewirth argues instead that the principle of human rights is able to establish “intrinsic justifications of certain kinds of ethical particularism.” 33 Gewirth describes his position as falling under the “‘Kantian’ principle of human rights” 34 and focuses on accounting for the “particularist priorities of one’s country.” 35 He acknowledges that the term ‘patriotism’ can be used to describe such a focus of concern, but cautions that the particularist priorities for which he is attempting to provide justification would exclude forms of patriotism that involve violations of human rights. 36 “Within the limits set by such violations,” Gewirth continues,

there are justified kinds of loyalty to one’s country...whereby one has special concern for its flourishing both collectively and distributively. The objects of concern may range from its national security and welfare policies to its political institutions and economic workings, social and cultural arrangements and traditions, and even aesthetic considerations, as well as the communal relationships fostered by living together in a political society. 37

His defence of these ‘justified loyalties’ rests on the belief that human rights are necessary for the protection of agency and that the state — specifically the democratic state — is the protector of human rights. “Given these universalist justifications of the minimal and democratic state,” he reasons, “the state’s protection of basic and other rights serves, in turn, to justify the particularist allegiance of its members to its own flourishing...” 38

I will now turn to a justification of the morality of patriotism that appeals directly to a particularist moral starting-point and thereby treats this justification as neither derivative of, nor subservient to, universal principles. This account of patriotism relies on the idea of morally constitutive attachments; namely, those that exist within the state. The fundamental difference between the accounts of patriotism addressed above and the idea of patriotism as a manifestation of morally constitutive attachments is simply that only the former can claim an impartialist account of morality. Whereas consequentialist and rights-based variations on patriotism rely on a conception of the moral agent as existing independently of the state (even if the state is seen to be necessary in order to protect the capacity for agency, as Gewirth argues), the very idea that the state constitutes morality means that it is impossible for the moral agent to be removed from the context of her role as citizen of the state.

Communitarian Realism

A useful illustration of the idea of the morally constitutive state is drawn by MacIntyre in a lecture on the ‘virtue’ of loyalty to one’s own particular country. 39 While MacIntyre does not present this position as his own, but rather as a characterisation of one pole on a spectrum of conceptions of patriotism (at the other end of which such loyalty is disclaimed as a vice), his argument follows his own philosophical commitments and rejects any attempt at impartialist justification. MacIntyre argues that agency is acquired through membership in a particular community. “Deprived of the life of that community”, he maintains, “I would have no reason to be moral.” 40 In the course of this essay, MacIntyre ties this view of agency to the issue of the moral relevance of the state. For MacIntyre, the conviction that we are defined by the associations to which we belong provides a strong foundation for the position that patriotism, or loyalty to one’s political community, is indeed a virtue. “A central contention of the morality of patriotism,” he argues, “is that I will obliterate and lose a central dimension of the moral life if I do not understand the enacted narrative of my own individual life as embedded in the history of my country.” 41 This blending of a communitarian account of agency with a commitment to the moral relevance of the state produces a distinctly moral realist position. MacIntyre’s depiction of the moral basis of patriotism might be described as exhibiting a ‘communitarian realism’. (If one employs this title, however, it is necessary to bear in mind the important qualification that, thus modified, realism does not connote an amoral perspective, but a moral perspective by which ethical consideration is curtailed by state borders.) In order to fully justify this ascription it is necessary to turn to MacIntyre’s account of the scope of ethical concern that accompanies his illustration of the morally constitutive state.

Invoking MacIntyre is helpful as he is never one to evade the less palatable aspects of his avowed particular “moral starting point”. The position supporting patriotism as a virtue has serious implications in terms of one’s moral bearing to those outside one’s country. True to form, MacIntyre readily acknowledges these implications:

[E]verything that I have said on behalf of the morality of patriotism is compatible with it being the case that on occasion patriotism might require me to support and work for the success of some enterprise of my nation as crucial to its overall project, crucial perhaps to its survival, when the success of that enterprise would not be in the best interests of humankind... 42

According to the logic of this position, giving predominance to the state, even when this means abandoning the possibility of ethical appeals that might be argued to extend beyond it, is a moral position because the survival of the state is a moral necessity. 43 This argument for granting a special degree of moral concern to compatriots thereby has potentially harsher implications for those beyond the borders of the state than would be allowed under the impartialist positions looked at above. The delimited sphere of moral concern advocated by Goodin, conceded by Nussbaum, and defended by Gewirth allows treating the needs of fellow citizens first, but not (if the positions are to remain internally consistent) to the detriment of ‘outsiders’. As Goodin acknowledges,

[i]f special duties can be shown to derive the whole of their moral force from their connections to general duties then they are susceptible to being overridden (at least at the margins, or in exceptional circumstances) by those more general considerations. In this way, it turns out that “our fellow countrymen” are not so very special after all. The same thing that makes us worry mainly about them should also make us worry, at least a little, about the rest of the world, too. 44

Conversely, in keeping with the ethic of patriotism illustrated by MacIntyre, moral concern may stop at the borders of the state without qualification.

Communitarian realist and impartialist cosmopolitan perspectives — at least in their idealised forms — are two normative approaches to International Relations that are diametrically opposed. While communitarian realism relies on an embedded account of agency, the moral agent of an impartialist cosmopolitan perspective is necessarily removed from the context of moral deliberation. Communitarian realism concedes that moral concern is co-terminous with the borders of the state; impartialist cosmopolitanism claims a global moral horizon. Finally, the state is the locus of value according to communitarian realism, whereas this political association is a mere contingency from the perspective of impartialist cosmopolitanism. These two positions provide the theoretical points of departure for the discussion that follows. The position tentatively labelled ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’ would combine a situated account of agency with an inclusive scope of ethical concern — an alternative ruled out by both communitarian realism and impartialist cosmopolitanism.

“The Point Where Circles Intersect”: Towards a Theory of Embedded Cosmopolitanism

The ethic of patriotism extracted from MacIntyre’s work might be seen as an extreme example of how an embedded moral perspective would deal with questions of transnational, or more accurately ‘trans-statal’, concern. 45 (Perhaps due to his avowed, and long-held, anti-liberalism, MacIntyre is not as moved by aspirations of inclusion as some of his more liberal ‘communitarian’ contemporaries, including Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer.) 46 Indeed, there are theorists who, unlike MacIntyre, propose a situated account of moral agency without conceding a scope of ethical concern that ends abruptly at state borders. An embedded account of moral agency that also aspires to an inclusive purview might give rise to a number of different manifestations. Significant examples are the following: Mervyn Frost’s neo-Hegelian project of reconciling state sovereignty with human rights through a “constitutive theory of individuality”; 47 John Rawls’ recent attempt to arrive at global principles of justice while maintaining his “political” interpretation of liberalism; 48 and, Walzer’s suggestion that we might achieve an inclusive ethic from within our own morally defining community (his metaphorical cave) by “vicariously endorsing” the positions of those beyond its boundaries. 49 These theories differ radically from each other, yet each claims an account of the moral self that is constituted (to various degrees) by the community. Moreover, all three positions provide an important challenge to the conviction that an embedded account of moral agency necessarily entails a limited scope of ethical consideration. My concern with them is that they assume the morally constitutive community to be spatially bounded, if not explicitly state-centric. The result is a moral perspective that is defined in terms of a determinate group of outsiders. While these positions provide alternatives to communitarian realism, they necessarily fall short of achieving an inclusive ethic. 50

It would, however, be premature to reject embedded cosmopolitanism as a viable ethical perspective. Two (very different) philosophers give some indication as to how one might begin to construct an inclusive ethic and still claim a particularist source of value. Both do this while questioning the same boundaries that define MacIntyre’s virtuous patriotism and impede the aspirations to global inclusion that characterise the positions of Frost, (the most recent ‘later’) Rawls, and Walzer. Onora O’Neill has woven into her commitment to trans-statal justice a challenge to the assumption that identities exhibit either the singularity or the permanence that could justify bounded states. 51 Marilyn Friedman’s sympathy with the idea that communities are morally constitutive is tempered with a denial that they need to be either inherited or territorially defined. 52 Neither O’Neill nor Friedman are obvious allies to whom one would make appeals in support of embedded cosmopolitanism. O’Neill is deeply suspicious of positions that lay claim to a particularist or embedded moral starting point. 53 Friedman embraces the notion of the socially constituted self but balks at the possibility of then achieving a cosmopolitan scope of concern. 54 Nevertheless, by very briefly turning to both O’Neill’s inquiry into the “legitimacy of the institution of boundaries,” 55 and Friedman’s project to “transform the communitarian vision of self and community into a more congenial ally for feminist theory,” 56 it might be possible to sketch a more sophisticated conception of the ‘embedded’ moral agent and an understanding of community that neither takes for granted nor ignores the moral significance of borders. Both moves are vital to establishing a viable theory of embedded cosmopolitanism.

Multiple Identities, “Dislocated” Communities and Overlapping Memberships

O’Neill challenges the notion that appeals to identity, whether cultural, historical or national, can be used to lend legitimacy to state structures. The understanding of identity that she puts forth in order to make this argument provides a lens through which it might be possible to bring into clearer view the route to exclusion taken by some who define morality through particular attachments, while also refocusing the idea of the ‘embedded’ moral agent. Underlying O’Neill’s illustration of identity is an unwavering concern for inclusion. “To have a sense of identity is to have a certain constellation of oneself,” O’Neill explains, “of whom one recognises as other, of who will recognise one as fellow countryman or woman or as foreign, as of the faith or as infidel, and to feel appropriate sentiments of affiliation and its lack.” 57 It is perhaps due to this acute awareness that identity (when it is based on anything more local than our common humanity) creates outsiders that she refuses to grant any single ‘identity’ the capacity to be exclusively determinate. Instead, O’Neill asserts that one’s sense of self “is not an unquestionable, singular and non-negotiable given.” 58 From this important qualification she arrives at the complexity of identity: “It is this indeterminacy of (senses of) identity that makes multiple identities possible.” 59

Yet, this is only half of O’Neill’s position on identity. After all, the idea that identities are multiple corresponds effortlessly with the image of concentric circles of morally defining associations, a position that is itself compatible with the conviction against which O’Neill is arguing: that identities justify bounded states. The second half of O’Neill’s depiction of identity is both critical to her own argument and extremely valuable to mine. O’Neill maintains that while some identities might correspond with territories, other identities are irreducible to location. Not only does O’Neill provide us with the helpful reminder that while states are territorial, membership within them need not be, 60 but she frequently returns to a theme of “the non-coincidence of national and other identities with territory.” 61 The significance of this position for an embedded cosmopolitan perspective can be elucidated by turning to Friedman’s discussion of community.

Feminist critics of communitarian political thought make the point that the morally constitutive community is often a realm of oppression and exclusion. 62 It is within this context that Friedman discusses the possibility of dislocating the community. “The problem,” she observes, “is not simply to appreciate community per se but, rather, to reconcile the conflicting claims, demands, and identity-defining influences of the variety of communities of which one is a part.” 63 Friedman counters the merely instrumental conception of social relationships found in the impartialist cosmopolitan position addressed above. 64 Nevertheless, she is critical of the sources of value invoked by many of those theorists who would assert a particularist moral starting point. “Communitarians,” Friedman charges, “invoke a model of community which is focused particularly on families, neighbourhoods, and nations.” 65 Borrowing from sociology, Friedman refers to such bounded communities as “communities of place.” These are the types of communities that Friedman claims “have harboured social roles and structures which have been highly oppressive to women.” 66

Friedman, like O’Neill, is sensitive to the possibility of exclusion and denies that it is inevitable by emphasising that no single association, attachment or commitment defines the self so as to preclude the influence of other affiliations: “Human beings participate in a variety of communities and social relationships, not only across time but at any one time.” 67 Instead of accepting that the communities constitutive of moral identity are determinate, exclusive, and unalterable, Friedman suggests the moral relevance of what she refers to (not unproblematically) as “communities of choice”: “for mature self-identity, we should also recognize a legitimate role for communities of choice, supplementing, if not displacing, the communities and attachments that are merely found.” 68 By combining an embedded account of moral agency with a powerful critique of the communitarian penchant for invoking associations with borders, set territories and given memberships, Friedman offers an alternative to a strictly state-centric or spatially bounded interpretation of the morally constitutive community. In an argument that corresponds at many points with O’Neill’s depiction of identity, Friedman evokes the image of communities that can have geographically dispersed memberships as well as communities that are integrated with, or projected upon, other communities. This reconstitution of the morally relevant community provides the basis for an embedded account of agency that might be compatible with an inclusive scope of ethical concern.

Before giving some substance to what is now little more than critique and conjecture, it is necessary to address a likely criticism of Friedman’s understanding of community. Friedman’s proposed conception of the self, as constituted by social relationships and yet somehow ‘free’ to chose between them, is one that might be argued to be burdened with an inherent contradiction. Is she not herself adopting the ‘pre-social’ self of her impartialist point of departure? Although the semantics of Friedman’s distinction between ‘found’ and ‘chosen’ communities is misleading (the phrase ‘dislocated’ community, which she uses interchangeably with ‘chosen’ community, is perhaps more appropriate), Friedman’s position need not be undermined by this charge. Her theory of an alternative (and complementary) understanding of community — the dislocated community — does not entail replacing communities that are ‘found’; nor does it assert the moral relevance of associations that are capricious, temporary or idiosyncratic. The self does not shed all morally defining associations in order to experiment with new ones. Rather, Friedman simply acknowledges that after being born into a set of circumstances, one can establish new relationships and participate in different communities — communities that might be every bit as significant in defining the self as communities that are inherited. This is what O’Neill calls the “malleability of senses of identity”; 69 this is Friedman’s idea of the complex social self who is defined by “her various and variant identity constituents.” 70

What does this all mean for an analysis of sources of value in international relations? Friedman suggests that inclusion may be compatible with a socially constituted account of agency if we radically rethink the nature of the communities that are taken to be morally defining. Three possible manifestations of her challenge to ‘communities of place’ provide exciting possibilities for understanding ethics in international relations: the idea of morally constitutive transnational (trans-statal) communities, the notion of communities that are both morally defining and overlapping, and the recognition of morally relevant communities that are non-territorial (in other words, communities that have geographically dispersed memberships). I will address the capacity of each variation on the idea of community to bring us closer to accounting for the moral standing of those beyond hearth and home, outside circles of families and friends, and on the other side of political borders, from an ethically particularist starting point.

One variation on the idea of the morally constitutive community that arises if the community is to be defined neither by state nor national borders is that of the morally constitutive trans-statal community. Yet, while the notion of a morally constitutive trans-statal community might support a position that is more inclusive than the communitarian realism extracted from MacIntyre’s work, it would be naive to assume that it gets us beyond the problem of a moral starting point that relies on a determinate group of outsiders. A potential example of a morally constitutive trans-statal community (that is also extremely interesting in light of current political changes) is Europe. Just as being European could be co-extensive with one aspect of one’s identity, the recognition of others who warrant ethical concern could be co-terminous with this association. This introduces a grave short-coming for the possibility of the morally constitutive trans-statal community allowing an inclusive moral purview.

At this point, it is necessary to take seriously Friedman’s critique. Friedman’s idea of community, if we recall her argument, is meant to challenge the exclusive appeal to ‘communities of place’. The intended result is not merely that we acknowledge morally relevant associations that extend beyond the nation, neighbourhood or state, but that we recognise our memberships within these communities as cutting across (and not merely encircling) more local affiliations. The second important variation on the morally constitutive community that follows from this qualification is the idea of overlapping memberships in morally relevant associations. While this conception owes much to the view that individuals have multiple and multifarious identities, the potential for a truly cosmopolitan scope of ethical concern is enhanced by the further suggestion distilled from the arguments of Friedman and O’Neill: that these overlapping memberships are also constituted by non-territorial affiliations. As O’Neill states, “membership of communities is usually neither inclusive nor exclusive within any given territory.” 71 Morally relevant communities include those that are free of borders that can be mapped.

The reality of multiple identities allows the argument that one is constituted by more than one ‘community’. These might be ‘communities of place’: Scotland, Britain and Europe, for example. Yet, the combination of this idea of multiple identities (membership in multiple morally constitutive communities) with overlapping and non-territorial affiliations creates a radically different picture. Instead of evoking an image of concentric circles of morally constitutive communities (nation, state, regional union of states) this idea of community summons the figure of a web of intersecting and overlapping morally relevant ties. A particularist account of agency thereby does not entail that being a member of any one community requires seeing a non-member of that particular community as being outside the scope of moral concern. Here, O’Neill’s position on multiple identities has particular resonance: “Only if a sense of identity were fully determinate, if it could saturate our lives, would it be incompatible with all other senses of identity.” 72 Instead, the scope of ethical concern, understood in terms of multifarious and overlapping morally constitutive communities, has the potential to be inclusive in scope.

A Distinct Theoretical Perspective?

In the place of the impartialist cosmopolitan position with which this discussion began, I have suggested a more mundane view of cosmopolitanism — one that recognises (and relies upon) the moral force of particular associations. By reconceptualising the idea of the community as a particularist moral starting point (or source of value) for normative theorising in international relations, I have started to piece together a case for a cosmopolitan scope of ethical concern that would neither require nor allow abstract appeals to our common humanity. Instead, I have proposed that the realm within which claims of moral duty, solidarity and loyalty to ‘fellow moral agents’ provide intelligible appeals is determined by membership within an intricate web of variously coinciding, morally defining memberships. I will briefly recount how embedded cosmopolitanism differs from both its impartialist counterpart and communitarian realism by distinguishing the account of individual moral agency upon which it relies, the moral relevance that it attributes to the state, and the scope of ethical concern that it allows.

Embedded cosmopolitanism rejects the notion of a pre-social self that is seen as requisite to impartialist cosmopolitanism. Whereas according to an impartialist cosmopolitan position the standpoint of the moral agent is independent of all social particularity, embedded cosmopolitanism locates the standpoint of the moral agent in the multifarious communities to which she belongs. The moral agent is thereby not abstracted from all particularity but remains embedded in any number of different morally constitutive associations. Although the moral agent is never removed from the ‘subjective particulars’ of her life, membership in various different communities might be seen to allow her a critical edge that begins to answer the charge of conservatism levied against proponents of ‘embedded’ moral perspectives. As Friedman observes, such complex selves “do not simply replicate a small cohesive set of norms.” 73 Furthermore, this account of agency neither blindly accepts, nor carefully avoids, the difficult issue of the moral relevance of borders.

Allying herself with Goodin and Gewirth, Nussbaum assumes a strictly instrumental conception of social relationships, including citizenship, in her impartialist cosmopolitan stance. 74 She would denounce situating value in the state as “that morally questionable move of self-definition by a morally irrelevant characteristic.” 75 Conversely, an embedded cosmopolitan perspective would not (indeed, could not if it is to remain internally consistent) deny the potential moral relevance of state borders. Nevertheless, here it differs markedly not only from impartialist cosmopolitanism but also from communitarian realism. Embedded cosmopolitanism does not take the ethical significance of borders for granted. To the contrary, embedded cosmopolitanism challenges the assumption that bounded communities, including states, have an exclusive capacity to define moral agency. This, as I have intimated, is profoundly important for the scope of ethical concern that might be allowed by this theory.

Embedded cosmopolitanism is not bound to the moral parochialism of communitarian realism. While moral commitments cannot be derived from our ‘common humanity’, inclusion arises from respect for the ethical standing of a fellow moral agent where agency is constituted by particular, often transnational, overlapping (territorial and non-territorial) communities. Nevertheless, it would be misleading to assert that embedded cosmopolitanism is problem-free. Unlike its impartialist counterpart, it cannot claim a prima facie inclusive moral purview. This point becomes especially salient when one realises that the two cosmopolitanisms are necessarily defined with different points of emphasis. If we look at Nussbaum’s (impartialist) definition, cosmopolitanism involves “primary allegiance” to “the human beings of the entire world.” 76 Embedded cosmopolitanism must be defined negatively as preventing the scope of moral concern from being co-terminous with any particular community or group of communities (a definition that I employed in the opening paragraph). This is more than a mere fancy piece of rhetoric — it points to the limits of an attempt to accommodate the ‘situated self’ and an inclusive scope of ethical concern. In the absence of overlapping associations that would foster acknowledgement of the agency of the other, the scope of ethical concern is truncated. An inclusive moral purview is possible when moral agency is embedded in particularist communities (a concession denied by both communitarian realist and impartialist cosmopolitan positions); however, it can not be guaranteed.

Conclusion

Both the promise and the potential weaknesses of an embedded ethical cosmopolitanism find resonance in “The Recruit”, a poem written by a soldier during the second world war:

Pried from the circle where his family ends,
Man on his own, no hero of old tales,
Discovers when the pose of lone wolf fails
Loneliness and, miraculously, friends.
Finds how his comradeship with one depends
On being both from London, say, or Wales,
How with the next a common job prevails,
Sport with a third, and so the list extends.
Nation and region, class and craft and syndicate
Are only some: all attributes connect
Their own with his kind, call him to vindicate
A common honour; and his self-respect
Starts from the moment when his senses indicate
‘I’ as the point where circles intersect. 77

This poem begins with the speaker being dislodged from one set of identity defining relationships and finding a community of friends. (This provides an interesting parallel with Friedman’s notion of replacing ‘found’ communities such as the family with ‘chosen’ communities. She uses friendships as her primary example of the latter. 78 ) The soldier’s ‘constellation of himself’ (to use O’Neill’s terminology) is shown to be defined by a multiplicity of affiliations — including territorially defined communities such as city and nation and non-territorial affiliations such as ‘sport’, ‘class’, ‘craft’ and ‘syndicate’. We are given the sense that these various ties provide the young recruit with an extended scope of moral concern. (The scope of moral concern being the domain within which claims of moral duty, solidarity and loyalty to ‘fellow moral agents’ provide intelligible appeals.) And yet, with all the apparent potential for using this poem as an epigraph for embedded cosmopolitanism, one cannot escape the fact that “The Recruit” is, in the end, an ode to patriotic loyalty and honour.

According to a theory of embedded cosmopolitanism, in a world in which there were a multitude of diverse (territorial and non-territorial), overlapping morally constitutive communities, we could claim a particularist moral starting point and still confidently assert the potential for moral commitments that extend beyond borders. However, in a world in which multiple identities (and overlapping morally constitutive communities) were somehow reduced or made incompatible, we would be left with the risk that values would not be able to travel beyond a plethora of divisions. As O’Neill considers, “[t]here are imaginable future worlds in which one can no longer be Scots and British, or Catalan and Spanish, or in which one can no longer be Christian and capitalist, or Muslim and socialist.” 79 How can embedded cosmopolitanism respond to such imaginable future worlds (not to mention the incompatibilities within our present one)?

There are two strong responses to this possibility that I can imagine by those who would, nevertheless, argue that an embedded cosmopolitan position that recognises the self as existing ‘at the point where circles intersect’ is preferable to an impartialist cosmopolitanism that reduces the self to a ‘citizen of nowhere’. The first response might be defensive in character. There is solace, one could reply, in the suggestion that embedded cosmopolitanism as outlined above allows that exclusion be countered by acknowledging potentially morally relevant communities that are currently neglected (actively denied or simply unnoticed) or by establishing ties that are, at present, non-existent. A second response might be the more offensive counter-attack of simply asserting that impartialist cosmopolitan positions are, in fact, no more inclusive than an embedded perspective whose ‘overlapping communities’ have been reduced. As Immanuel Wallerstein suggests to Nussbaum, “[t]he stance of the ‘citizen of the world’ is deeply ambiguous. It can be used just as easily to sustain privilege as to undermine it.” 80 Implicit in this criticism is a suspicion that claims of impartiality in moral reasoning behave as no more than a façade for the cultural and political imperialism of those with power. 81 This response, of course, must be uttered with due humility: while ‘impartialist cosmopolitanism’ can be accused of covertly embodying the interest of a particular group, those who would reject an impartialist position must face the same charge head-on. Nevertheless, by questioning the nature of the particularist sources of value invoked in an anti-impartialist position, embedded cosmopolitanism provides a normative framework within which this charge can be intelligibly addressed.

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Endnotes

Note 1: Regarding this statement of their potential mutual exclusivity, I mean two things. First, a system of states need not preclude (and arguably might be conducive to) a trans-statal scope of ethical concern. Second, a world government would no more ensure global justice or a global scope of ethical concern than does the state entail universal justice within its own borders. Back.

Note 2: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol.II, trans. by R. D. Hicks (London: Heinemann, 1958), p.65. This proclamation has also been attributed to other figures. Derek Heater takes the following passage from Montaigne’s Essays in World Citizenship and Government: Cosmopolitan Ideas in the History of Political Thought (London: MacMillan, 1996): “When someone asked of Socrates of what country he was, he did not reply, ‘Of Athens’, but ‘of the world’. His was a fuller and wider imagination; he embraced the whole world as his city, and extended his acquaintance, his society, and his affections to all mankind.” In “Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism”, The Journal of Philosophy, 5 (1997) 1-25 (p.5), Martha Nussbaum quotes Marcus Aurelius’ assertion that “it makes no difference whether a person lives here or there, provided that wherever he lives, he lives as a citizen of the world,” and attributes Kant’s penchant for this phrase to Aurelius’ influence. Back.

Note 3: That ethical cosmopolitanism generally is seen to be co-terminous (and not merely co-extensive) with the community of human individuals is a significant, and often overlooked, qualification. For positions that would characterise this understanding of ethical cosmopolitanism as exclusive see arguments that the scope of ethical concern should extend to non-human animals in, inter alia, Steve F. Sapontzis, “Moral Community and Animal Rights”, American Philosophical Quarterly 22 (1985), 251-257; to all living things in James K. Mishi, “The Limits of Moral Community and the Limits of Moral Thought’, Journal of Value Inquiry, 16 (1982), 131-142; and (taking this argument to somewhat bizarre and currently irrelevant lengths), to extra-terrestrials in Donald Scherer, “A Disentropic Ethics”, Monist, 71 (1988), 3-32. Back.

Note 4: Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism”, Boston Review, XIX (October/November 1994), 3-6 (repr. in For Love of Country, ed. by Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996) pp.3-17). Back.

Note 5: Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism”, 3. Nussbaum’s essay responds to Richard Rorty’s article, “The Unpatriotic Academy”, op-ed piece (13 February 1994) The New York Times, E15. Back.

Note 6: Gertrude Himmelfarb, “The Illusions of Cosmopolitanism”, For Love of Country, pp.72-77 (p.77). Back.

Note 7: Himmelfarb, p.77. Back.

Note 8: Those considered communitarians — predominantly an ascribed classification and not a term of self-description — include the following: Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1985); Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983) and Interpretation and Social Criticism: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 1985 (London: Harvard University Press, 1987). Feminist theorists who put forth similar critiques of impartialist morality include Virginia Held, Feminist Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), and Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (London: Routledge, 1993), all of whom are influenced by Carol Gilligan’s work in moral developmental psychology. See Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (1982), 2nd ed., (Harvard University Press, 1993). Back.

Note 9: Brian Barry, Justice as Impartiality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p.191. Back.

Note 10: See, for example, Onora O’Neill, “Ethical Reasoning and Ideological Pluralism”, Ethics (Vol. 98, No. 4, 1988), 705-722 and “Justice, Gender and International Boundaries”, British Journal of Political Science (Vol. 20, No. 4, 1990), 439-459. Back.

Note 11: Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p.53. Back.

Note 12: MacIntyre, “How Moral Agents Become Ghosts or Why the History of Ethics Diverged From That of the Philosophy of Mind”, Synthese, 53 (1982), 292-312 (p. ). Back.

Note 13: Carol Gilligan, In A Different Voice, p.100. Back.

Note 14: Benjamin R. Barber, “Constitutional Faith”, Boston Review, XIX (October/November 1994), 14-15 (p.14), emphasis mine. Back.

Note 15: In Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), Michael Walzer uses the same image of a ‘thin’ universalism but claims to do so without the pejorative connotations. Back.

Note 16: MacIntyre, After Virtue: a study in moral theory (London: Duckworth, 1981), pp.204-205. Back.

Note 17: MacIntyre, ‘Whose Justice? Which Rationality?’ (London: Duckworth, 1988), p.388. Back.

Note 18: MacIntyre, ‘Whose Justice? Which Rationality?’, pp.352-367. Back.

Note 19: Seyla Benhabib, “The Debate over Women and Moral Theory Revisited”, in Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp.178-202 (p.188). Back.

Note 20: This definition becomes problematic when one considers that both statehood and citizenship (and their respective relationships with the concepts of nation and nationality) involve theoretical ambiguities as well as, in practice, hotly contested claims. One can safely assume the object of proclaimed loyalty to ‘my state’ or ‘my fellow-citizens’ no more than one can readily discern the degree to which the speaker might intend congruence between them. In “Cosmopolitanism and boredom”, Radical Philosophy, 85 (Sept./Oct. 1997), 28-32 (p.28), Bruce Robbins makes the astute point that particular political allegiances cannot a priori be accepted as directed towards concrete and easily categorised entities. The complexity of both moral identity and the idea of morally constitutive borders will be considered in the final section of this paper. Nevertheless, in this explication of patriotism it is necessary momentarily to accept that such clear-cut allegiances and unambiguous categories are possible. Back.

Note 21: Robert E. Goodin, “What Is So Special about Our Fellow Countrymen?” Ethics, 98 (1988), 663-86; Alan Gewirth, “Ethical Universalism and Particularism”, Journal of Philosophy, 85 (1988), 283-302. Back.

Note 22: Charles Beitz, “Patriotism for Cosmopolitans”, Boston Review, XIX, No.5 (October/November 1994), 23-24, (p.23). Back.

Note 23: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Hands All Round’, (1885). Back.

Note 24: Goodin, “What’s So Special about Our Fellow Countrymen?”, 681. Back.

Note 25: Goodin, “What’s So Special about Our Fellow Countrymen?”, 664, fn.2. Back.

Note 26: Goodin, “What’s So Special about Our Fellow Countrymen?”, 678. Back.

Note 27: Goodin, “What’s So Special about Our Fellow Countrymen?”, 686. Back.

Note 28: Nussbaum, ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, p.6. Back.

Note 29: That Nussbaum would take this step is apparent in another version of the same argument. In “Reply”, in Love of Country, pp.131-144 (pp.135-136), Nussbaum acknowledges that “[n]one of the major thinkers in the cosmopolitan tradition denied that we can and should give special attention to our own families and to our own ties of religious and national belonging. In obvious ways, we must do so, since the nation-state sets up the basic terms for most of our daily conduct, and since we are all born into a family of some sort. Cosmopolitans hold, moreover, that it is right to give the local an additional measure of concern. But the primary reason a cosmopolitan should have for this is not that the local person is better per se, but rather that this is the only sensible way to do good.” (Emphasis mine) Back.

Note 30: Goodin, “What’s So Special About Our Fellow Countrymen?”, 681. Back.

Note 31: Hart, in fact, uses the label “special” to qualify rights. Nevertheless, as Goodin explicitly takes the labels “general” and “special” from Hart (see Goodin, “What’s So Special about Our Fellow Countrymen?” p.665, fn.3), we might assume that (for him) they serve the same function in qualifying duties. In “Are There Any Natural Rights?” Philosophical Review, 64 (1955), 175-191, (p.183), Hart defines special rights as follows: “When rights arise out of special transactions between individuals or out of some special relationship in which they stand to each other, both the persons who have the right and those who have the corresponding obligation are limited to the parties to the special transaction or relationship. I call such rights special rights to distinguish them from those moral rights which are thought of as rights against (i.e., as imposing obligations upon) everyone...”. (Emphasis mine) Back.

Note 32: Gewirth, “Ethical Universalism and Particularism”, 289. Back.

Note 33: Gewirth, “Ethical Universalism and Particularism”, 289. Back.

Note 34: Gewirth, “Ethical Universalism and Particularism”, 288. Compare this position to that of Richard Dagger in “Rights, Boundaries, and the Bond of Community: A Qualified Defense of Moral Parochialism,” American Political Science Review, 79 (1985), 436-447. Dagger argues that the principle of fair play can ground a special obligation to give priority to the needs of compatriots. Back.

Note 35: Gewirth, “Ethical Universalism and Particularism”, 298. Back.

Note 36: Gewirth, “Ethical Universalism and Particularism”, 298. Back.

Note 37: Gewirth, “Ethical Universalism and Particularism”, 299. Back.

Note 38: Gewirth, “Ethical Universalism and Particularism”, 301. Back.

Note 39: Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Is Patriotism a Virtue?’ in Theorising Citizenship, ed. by Ronald Beiner (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 209-228. Back.

Note 40: MacIntyre, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?”, p.217. Back.

Note 41: MacIntyre, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?”, p.224. Back.

Note 42: MacIntyre, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?”, p.222. Back.

Note 43: One might reasonably question the implications for this position when what MacIntyre calls the ‘enacted narrative’ of one’s life is embedded in the history of a country committed, for example, to principles of human rights. Back.

Note 44: Goodin, “What’s So Special About Our Fellow Countrymen?”, 679. Back.

Note 45: ‘Transnational’ is generally the adjective used to describe associations that extend beyond the borders of any one state. However, this term is both out-of-date and potentially confusing. If we accept that the modern state is only rarely superimposed on a single nation, then it seems clear that the more appropriate descriptive is ‘trans-statal’. I owe this suggestion to Onora O’Neill. (Many states are, of course, transnational.) Back.

Note 46: “Interview with MacIntyre”, Kinesis, 23 (1996), p.47: “My critique of liberalism is one of the few things that has gone unchanged in my overall view throughout my life. Ever since I understood liberalism, I have wanted nothing to do with it — and that was when I was 17 years old.” One recent, completely anomalous and somewhat puzzling essay by MacIntyre implies that he might be becoming concerned about inclusion. In “How can we learn from what Veritatis Splendor has to teach?” The Thomist, 58 (1994), p.187, MacIntyre responds to some of his critics by adopting a definition of the person as a “culture transcending rational animal”. Yet, he does not seem able to reconcile this Thomist position with his avowed commitment to a particular moral starting-point. Back.

Note 47: Mervyn Frost, Towards a Normative Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Ethics in International Relations: A Constitutive Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Back.

Note 48: John Rawls, “The Law of Peoples”, in On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993, ed. by Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (New York: Basic Books, 1993); “50 Years After Hiroshima”, Dissent (Summer 1995), 323-327. While I think one misrepresents Rawls to call him a ‘communitarian’ (a view not shared by Sybil Schwarzenbach in “Rawls, Hegel, and Communitarianism”, Political Theory, 19 (1991), 539-571), his post- A Theory of Justice writings move towards a situated understanding of the moral agent. In “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical”, Philosophy & Public Affairs (Vol. 14, No. 3, 1985), 223-251, Rawls claims that the liberal conception of the self as abstracted from social and historical context is not a metaphysical presupposition, but a means of agreeing upon the good. Rawls locates these conceptions of the self and reason firmly within the culture of democratic society in “The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good”, Philosophy & Public Affairs, (1988), 251-276 (p.252). Back.

Note 49: Walzer, Thick and Thin. I take this position to be fundamentally different from the “reiterative universalist” stance that he describes in “Nation and Universe”, The Tanner Lecture on Human Values XI (Salt Lake City: Utah University Press, 1990), pp.507-56. Back.

Note 50: I come to these conclusions regarding the work of Walzer and Frost in, respectively, “Michael Walzer’s ‘View-from-the-Cave’ and Normative International Relations Theory”, paper presented at the Contemporary Research in International Political Theory (CRIPT) workshop, 2 Nov. 1996, University of Sussex; and, “Confronting the Morally Constitutive Community with Cosmopolitan Duties: The Case of the Non-Combatant’s Ethical Standing in Time of War”, paper presented at the British International Studies Association (BISA) Conference, 16 Dec. 1997, University of Leeds. O’Neill ‘unveils’ the importance of boundaries and closed societies in Rawls’ political interpretation of liberalism in “Kantian Constructivisms”, Conference Proceedings of the Deutsche Gesellschaft füer analytische Philosophie (forthcoming) (to be repr. in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. by Samuel Freeman); and “Political Liberalism and Public Reason”, The Philosophical Review (forthcoming). Back.

Note 51: O’Neill, “Transnational justice: permeable boundaries and multiple identities,” in Socialism and the Common Good: New Fabian Essays (London: Frank Cass, 1996), pp.291-302. O'Neill articulates a less developed argument along the same lines in her earlier essay, "Justice and Boundaries," in Political Restructuring in Europe: Ethical Perspectives, ed. by Chris Brown (London: Routledge, 1994), pp.69-88. Back.

Note 52: Friedman, “Modern Friendship: Dislocating the Community,” Ethics, 99 (1989), 275-290 (repr. in What Are Friends For? Feminist Perspectives on Personal Relationships and Moral Theory (London: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp.231-255). Back.

Note 53: The neo-Kantian philosophy of O’Neill provides a nuanced and compelling articulation of what I have labelled ‘impartialist cosmopolitanism’. Back.

Note 54: Friedman, “The Social Self and the Partiality Debates”, in Feminist Ethics, ed. by Claudia Card (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1991), pp. 161-179 (p.176) (repr. in What Are Friends For?). Back.

Note 55: O’Neill, “Permeable boundaries and multiple identities,” 291. Back.

Note 56: Friedman, “Modern Friendship,” 277. Back.

Note 57: O’Neill, “Permeable boundaries and multiple identities,” 299. Back.

Note 58: O’Neill, “Permeable boundaries and multiple identities,” 297. Back.

Note 59: O’Neill, “Permeable boundaries and multiple identities,” 299. Back.

Note 60: O’Neill, “Permeable boundaries and multiple identities,” 292. Back.

Note 61: O’Neill, “Justice across boundaries,” p.85. Back.

Note 62: Elizabeth Frazer and Nicola Lacey, The Politics of Community: A feminist critique of the liberal-communitarian debate (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp.130-162; Friedman, “Dislocating the Community”; Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family (Basic Books, 1989), pp.41-73; Joan Tronto, “Beyond Gender Difference to a Theory of Care”, Signs, 12 (1987), 644-663 (p.662); and, Iris Marion Young, “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference,” Social Theory and Practice, 12 (1986), 12-13. Back.

Note 63: Friedman, “Modern Friendship”, 282. Back.

Note 64: Friedman, “The Impracticality of Impartiality” (repr. in What Are Friends For?), The Journal of Philosophy, 86 (1989), 645-656; “The Social Self and the Partiality Debates”; “Feminism and Modern Friendship”. Back.

Note 65: Friedman, “Modern Friendship”, 277. Back.

Note 66: Friedman, “Modern Friendship”, 277. Back.

Note 67: Friedman, “Modern Friendship”, 282. Back.

Note 68: Friedman, “Modern Friendship’, 284. Back.

Note 69: O’Neill, “Permeable boundaries and multiple identities,” p.300. Emphasis in original. Back.

Note 70: Friedman, “The Social Self and the Partiality Debates,” 171. Back.

Note 71: O’Neill, “Justice and Boundaries,” p.73. Back.

Note 72: O’Neill, “Permeable boundaries and multiple identities,” p.299. Back.

Note 73: Friedman, “The Social Self and the Partiality Debates”, 171. Back.

Note 74: Gewirth would likely object to the term ‘instrumental’ being used with reference to his work, but I cannot see that this is an unfair description. Back.

Note 75: Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism”, 3. Back.

Note 76: See note 5 above. Back.

Note 77: John Manifold, “The Recruit”, The Terrible Rain: The War Poets 1939-45, ed. by Brian Gardner (London: Magnum Books, 1966), p.31. I am indebted to Nicholas Denyer who not only took the time to discuss with me ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’, but recalled (and tracked down) a war-time poem that reminded him of this position. Back.

Note 78: Friedman, “Modern Friendship”. Back.

Note 79: O’Neill, “Permeable boundaries and multiple identities,” p.300. Back.

Note 80: Immanuel Wallerstein, “Neither Patriotism, Nor Cosmopolitanism”, Boston Review, XIX (October/November 1994), 15-16 (p.16). Back.

Note 81: Iris Marion Young makes just such a criticism of ‘impartialist’ positions in “Impartiality and the Civic Public: Some Implications of Feminist Critiques of Moral and Political Theory,” Praxis International, 5 (Jan. 1985), 381-401 (pp.385-386). Back.