On cosmopolitan humility and the arrogance of states

ABSTRACT

One of the potentially most significant objections to a cosmopolitan moral approach charges an essential arrogance: cosmopolitanism disdains particularist moral insights even while – in what is said to be its most coherent form – it seeks to bind all persons within global political institutions. It is argued here that adopting a form of institutional cosmopolitanism actually helps to meet this sort of objection. An appropriately configured such approach will have a conception of equal global citizenship at its core. It will seek to place individuals in relations of political humility, understood not as plain deference to competing moral claims, but as concrete recognition of the equal moral status of others. It will seek to progressively empower as actual citizen equals those whose interests are often ‘arrogantly’ neglected in the current system, and to multiply mechanisms of input and challenge for them over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Cosmopolitanism
• global citizenship
• global democracy
• political humility
• universalism

Acknowledgments

I thank for their helpful comments Richard Shapcott, Brooke Ackerly, Haig Patapan, Terry Macdonald, Robyn Eckersley and Jamie Mayerfeld, seminar audiences at the Universities of Melbourne and Queensland, Griffith and Vanderbilt universities, and audiences at the 2016 Australian Political Theory and Philosophy Conference in Melbourne, and the 2017 Australian Political Studies Association meeting in Melbourne. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for this journal for their detailed and thoughtful feedback, and the editors for their guidance in revision. Any mistakes remaining are my own.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Ronzoni (2013, 158) makes an insightful additional distinction, highlighting a variant of ‘political cosmopolitanism’ focused on trans-state collective action by workers, critics of economic globalization, and others.

2. Peter Singer offered such a stringently impartialist view in the initial presentation of his act-utilitarian approach to addressing global poverty. He argued that the relatively affluent globally were obligated to give to the point where they made themselves as badly off as those in dire need (1972). Singer has more recently argued that if that very demanding principle would create a counter-productive backlash, a far less demanding one would be appropriate (2009). The salient point here would be that the egalitarian commitments of cosmopolitanism plausibly could be realized by a range of other principles, and the approach itself is not bound to a stringent consequentialism.

3. See Føllesdal (2016) on the operation of such regional courts as the European Court of Human Rights and Inter-American Court of Human Rights; see also Mayerfeld (2016); for a more critical view, see Bellamy (2008).

4. I critically examine recent associative accounts in more detail in Cabrera (2019).

5. Caney also notes here that concerns about domestic cultural imposition give reason to support cosmopolitan suprastate institutions. His proposed institutional scheme (Caney, 2006) would justify global democracy as a means of settling ‘reasonable disagreement’ among persons, rather than for its instrumental contributions to enabling protection of rights. Thus, his treatment does not give emphasis to legal or other challenge mechanisms for individuals operating alongside majoritarian democratic procedures.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Luis Cabrera

Luis Cabrera is Associate Professor of Political Science Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. He has published widely on issues of cosmopolitan theory, migration and global citizenship. He is completing a monograph titled The Humble Cosmopolitan: Rights, Diversity and Trans-state Democracy (forthcoming 2019, Oxford University Press).