Cosmopolitan Care

Abstract

I develop the foundation for cosmopolitan care, an underexplored variety of moral cosmopolitanism. I begin by offering a characterization of contemporary cosmopolitanism from the justice tradition. Rather than discussing the political, economic or cultural aspects of cosmopolitanism, I instead address its moral dimensions. I then employ a feminist philosophical perspective to provide a critical evaluation of the moral foundations of cosmopolitan justice, with an eye toward demonstrating the need for an alternative account of moral cosmopolitanism as cosmopolitan care. After providing an explanation of how care ethics in connection with Kantian ethics generates a duty to care, I consider one main feature of cosmopolitan care, namely the theory of obligation it endorses. In developing this account, I place special emphasis on the practical ramifications of the theory by using it to analyze gender violence in conflict zones.

Keywords:

• Moral Cosmopolitanism
• Cosmopolitan Care
• Cosmopolitan Justice
• Duty to Care
• Feminist Philosophy
• Care Ethics
• Kantian Ethics
• Gender Violence
• Darfur

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Christine Koggel for her helpful philosophical and editorial guidance.

Notes

¹Some important examples of such critical work include Lu (2000) and Scarry (2002).

²Cf. Engster (2005, 2007) and Manning (2002).

³The related literature offers multiple lists of needs (e.g. lists by Terleckyj, Drewnowski, and Offe), which are nicely captured in Braybrooke's helpful list compilation (1987, pp. 35-38). Not all such lists, however, have agency as their focus, as mine does. While conducting a comparative analysis of lists of human needs is not a primary task of this article, consideration of the distinction between my approach and one other well-known one does merit comment. Martha Nussbaum famously offers a list of 'Central Human Functional Capabilities' (2000, pp. 78-80). Although some overlap does exist between our lists, I believe that our approaches differ in terms of their main focus and aim. That which I identify as fundamental needs are necessary for agency. They are what people need in order to function as self-determining agents in their lives. In contrast, what Nussbaum develops is a list of human capabilities, with a main focus on the capabilities that are necessary for achieving flourishing or to live a truly human life.

⁴Of course, there will be limitations on the extent to which fostering agency and self-determination is possible in certain cases. The degree of human abilities spans a wide spectrum. Some individuals are not able to exhibit full agency and may not be self-determining. The duty to care is not designed to respond to such examples. My intent in developing the duty to care is not to exclude such individuals and their needs from the realm of moral consideration. A different avenue of argumentation, however, may be more productive for establishing a structure of obligation designed to meet their needs. One possible route would be an argument from human dignity.

⁵Exact numbers of the dead and displaced are not available. One reputable source, John Holmes, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, provided the estimate of 300,000 deaths as a result of the Darfur conflict to a meeting of the United Nations Security Council in New York in April 2008 (BBC News 2008). It is likely that the numbers have climbed since then.

⁶As is true with many national populations, the inner workings of the ethnic and racial differences are somewhat complicated. This is particularly so in Darfur, a region in which the assignment of ethnicity has been fluid, a situation resulting from substantial patterns of intermarriage between Arab herding communities and non-Arab farming communities. Beyond issues of ethnicity, the role of race in the conflict is deeply complex and contested. One way to characterize this complexity is to examine the tension between two competing sets of claims: (1) reports from many Darfuri women and girls that their attackers spoke of wanting to infiltrate the bloodline of their group by impregnating them so they would give birth to light-skinned babies and (2) critical claims that the Western media have oversimplified the conflict as one between races or between lighter- and darker-skinned peoples (Coates 2004).

⁷For a recent and excellent study of sexual violence in Darfur, please see Physicians for Human Rights (2009).

⁸An arrest warrant has already been issued for the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, on seven charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes. International Criminal Court judges named rape as an aspect of those charges in the indictment. Whether he will face charges of genocide remains unclear. On 3 February 2010 the ICC's appeal chamber overturned a ruling that maintained that there was insufficient proof to bring charges of genocide (Black 2010).

⁹Cf. West (2003, 2004).