https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1804-3119
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ABSTRACT
An important issue within the field of global ethics is the extent or scope of moral obligation or duties. Cosmopolitanism argues that we have duties to all human beings by virtue of some common property. Communitarian ethics argue that one's scope of obligation is circumscribed by one's community or some other defining property. Public virtues, understood to be either a property that communities possess to function well or a moral excellence constitutive of that community, offer an interesting challenge to this binary by positing moral goods or excellences that are constitutive of a community yet global in application. Virtues such as tolerance, charity, moderation, or benevolence might be examples of such goods or excellences endorsed by a community but applied to individuals who are not members of the community, or, as in the case of environmental ethics, even to entities that are not moral agents. Unlike cosmopolitan ethics, the scope of the obligation does not depend on identifying universal properties, such as rationality, human dignity, or utility, but could be defined entirely by and within a community.
Acknowledgement
Previous versions of this paper were presented at the Jubilee Centre for Character & Virtues conference at Oriel College, Oxford, and at the North American Association for Philosophy & Education conference in Chicago, IL. I wish to thank conference participants as well as Robert Audi and anonymous referees and editors of this journal for their helpful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Warren J. von Eschenbach is an associate vice president and assistant provost at the University of Notre Dame and holds a concurrent faculty appointment in the Department of Philosophy and is a faculty fellow at the Nanovic Institute for European Studies.
ORCID
Warren J. von Eschenbach http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1804-3119