The cosmopolitan tradition: a noble but flawed ideal

Abstract

How should we think about global ethics today? Particularist accounts—which hold that our moral values are formed and shaped within communities, and that we have duties first and foremost to those closest to us, from our kin to our fellow citizens—still hold water. Most of us do, in fact, feel a greater sense of obligation to those closest to us. Many of us share Cicero's view that we have a duty to serve and contribute to the well-being of our own republic, for it is the republic that makes our common life not merely bearable but also beneficial. In a globalizing world, however, the idea of humanity itself as a moral community is being transformed, from noble ideal to practical reality, inasmuch as the choices we make in our locales—choices about mundane things like what to wear, what to eat and how to generate power, as much as choices about...