This morning’s post brought with it a package from Cambridge University Press containing a copy of “The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521609097/junius-20 , co-edited by Crooked Timberite Harry Brighouse (with Gillian Brock) and including papers by both me and Jon Mandle. With such a heavy contribution from this blog, I hardly need point out that it is the duty of all regular readers to buy themselves a copy (as well as supplementary copies for friends and family)!
{ 1 trackback }
{ 16 comments }
dsquared 07.12.05 at 5:03 am
Presumably it will address such key texts of the Cosmopolitan philosophy as “Is Your Man Cheating?” “30 Ways to Drive Him Wild In Bed”, “The Ultimate Beach Diet” and “Does Lipstick Make You Fat?”.
Look, if I get it out of the way at the top of the thread, it’s done and everyone else can comment sensibly. Congratulations mate.
Eszter 07.12.05 at 6:07 am
Congrats, Harry, Chris and Jon!
des von bladet 07.12.05 at 6:14 am
A glance at the Amazon blurb suggests that this is fairly pure political philosophy a la Engleesh; would it be reasonable to say it isn’t all that closely related to the Ulrich Beck (_et al._) school of (debates about) cosmopolitanisme?
(If so, I’m holding out for Belle and Maria and Harry’s _Cosmopolitan Cookbook_. Sorry.)
Russell Arben Fox 07.12.05 at 6:21 am
You mean, you’re not going to send me a free copy for review purposes? I’m hurt.
(Congrats to one and all, you crazy cosmopolitans.)
Peter 07.12.05 at 9:07 am
To suggest people have no more duty to their fellow countrymen than to foreigners seems as strange to me as suggesting they have no more duty to their children than to their neighbour’s children.
Harry 07.12.05 at 9:41 am
Peter,
Richard Miller’s piece in the book argues quite carefully from a duty of universal equal respect to a permission for local partial concern; we included the piece because it counts as cosmopolitan on most understandings of cosmopolitanism. I think there are very good reasons for thinking there are duties and permissions to be partial toward our children, whihc have to do with the intimate character of the relationship; the partiality-justifying features of the parent-child relationship are just not present in the compatriot relationship.
You can get a hint of the difference in my paper with Swift: http://www.princeton.edu/~uchv/whatsnew/PEPA331.pdf
I’m looking forward to seeing the book!!
Harry 07.12.05 at 9:42 am
Belle, Maria, et. al. — what about taking up count des’s suggestion for a CT cookbook?
engels 07.12.05 at 7:27 pm
Though it pains me to say it, I… agree…. with…. Peter Cuthbertson, to a very limited extent, in that my feeling is that we owe differing duties to different sets of people. I say this, I hope, as some kind of liberal and not as any kind of conservative and, above all, not Peter’s kind.
Matt 07.12.05 at 10:01 pm
Harry,
Congrats on having the book come out- I’m looking forward to seeing it. Will we see more Harry blogging now? Let’s hope so.
Engels- there are quite good liberal arguments against taking a strong cosmopolitan view, dating back at least to Kant. Modern versions are found in Rawls, though his position is, I think, more often misunderstood than not (even by very smart people.) I’d recommend recent papers by Joseph Heath and Samuel Freeman on why, for example, social contract liberals ought not be cosmopolitans in a strong sense. (One of Freeman’s papers will be in a forthcoming issue of Social Philosophy and Policy, and Heath’s is avaliable on his web site. It’s excellent, to my mind.)
Tom Hurka 07.12.05 at 10:30 pm
In response to Peter’s question, Harry links to a co-written article with Adam Swift, but the justification that gives for familial partiality is very strained. (The reason I have a special duty to my child has to do with how caring for her is good for ME?) And a better account does show that what justifies partiality among family members is present, albeit to a lower degree, among compatriots: in each case it’s participation in a shared history of providing benefits, often to each other but sometimes to outsiders. The history is morally significant, and the appropriate response to it is extra concern for those who participated in it. (This is, obviously, very brief. It also applies only when families and nations have provided benefits and not when they’ve been harmful or oppressive. And since the relevant features are more present in family than in national histories, it explains why duties to compatriots are less strong than to family members.) In any case, the nation/family analogy can’t just be written off as quickly as Harry writes it off. More generally, isn’t the cosmopolitanism issue just another one where Rawls-inspired political philosophy is a gazillion miles removed from what anyone outside a university actually thinks?
Matt 07.12.05 at 10:41 pm
Tom-
Can you elaborate on that last bit? Rawls himself, of course, doesn’t favor a very strong cosmopolitan position. Many cosmopolitans don’t consider him cosmpolitan at all. I know people like Pogge and Beitz sometimes present their positions as Rawlsian, but they are certainly not a proper account of Rawls, and seem to not follow his contractualist approach at all. (See Heath on this especially).
Harry 07.13.05 at 7:46 am
Tom is right to criticise me for being so abrupt in my dismissal of the analogy, though I think that his interpretation of the paper I linked to is not entirely right (I shan’t go into why now). In defence of my dismissal, Peter wrote that rejecting partiality to fellowcountrymen is ‘as strange as’ rejecting it for children; and on Tom’s own account the one rejection is NOT ‘as strange as’ the other. What I would have said if I’d been giving it more thought would be that the analogy cannot just be stated, it has to be made out, in detail, with a real normative argument (of the kind that Tom provides in at least one of his papers). You cannot argue by analogy (as some have); you have to argue from first principles, and the analogy is then otiose (as it is in Tom’s account).
More later.
Tom Hurka 07.13.05 at 1:13 pm
Harry: That’s right: it was mostly the abruptness of the dismissal that bothered me. And I was only able to read your paper briefly, so I may well have misread it to some degree. But I thought I saw similarities between your justification of familial partiality and one of Scheffler’s that seems to me to go at the subject backwards.
Does everything then come down to normative argument? I think that ignores something about the burden of proof. Everyday morality thinks we should care more about people who stand in any number of special relationships to us: our children of course, but also our siblings, friends, classmates, departmental colleagues, compatriots, and so on. And it sees these various duties as very much of a piece. I think that places a heavier burden of proof on those who want to affirm some of the duties, e.g. to children, and deny others, e.g. to compatriots. That’s not to say the burden can’t in principle be met. But I don’t think the argumentative playing field is level, at least if we give some weight to widely held moral beliefs.
Matt: I said “Rawls-inspired” rather than “Rawls’s own,” though Rawls’s views themselves are often miles away from what 99% of people believe, despite the claims about “overlapping consensus.” But that’s a large other topic.
engels 07.13.05 at 1:46 pm
Interesting then, that on Harry’s view, the familial analogy has zero theoretical significance, when its rhetorical and cultural significance is clearly so great.
I’d also reject the “seems as strange as” part of Peter’s claim.
Brian 07.13.05 at 11:42 pm
Everyday morality thinks we should care more about people who stand in any number of special relationships to us: our children of course, but also our siblings, friends, classmates, departmental colleagues, compatriots, and so on.
One of the things on this list is very much not like the others. So much so that I’m really not sure it is part of ‘everyday morality’. A typical person may have fewer than 100 family members they have a special relationship with, and about that many friends, classmates, workmates etc, but many people have literally a million times that many compatriots.
When the numbers get that big I think we have a difference of kind here, and not merely a difference of scale. I can hardly comprehend what it would be for an Indian to have a *special* moral relationship to 1/6 of the people on the planet. Whatever relationship one stands in to a billion other people is not all that special.
Here’s a suggestion: you have to have de re attitudes towards a person before you stand in a special moral relationship with them. Or perhaps that to bear a special relationship to everyone in a group, you have to be at least capable of having de re attitudes towards every member of the group. That doesn’t rule out duties to friends, family, colleagues, class mates, even to members of the same village, but it would rule out people in Broome and St Kilda having duties to each other just because they happen to be born on the same continent, even if they don’t know of the other’s existence.
Matt 07.14.05 at 11:12 am
This is just about to fall off the page, but I wanted to make a quick (and very partial) reply to Tom Hurka-
Of course it’s true that most people don’t believe what Rawls argues for, but that, of course, doesn’t distinguish his position from any philosophically interesting one. And he doesn’t argue otherwise in any way that’s damagine to his view- what matters is what people can come to believe, now what they do now. (Common sense today is just some old philosopher’s original position from many years ago, as Mill said.) So, I think you both have an exaduration on the “99%” bit, and a misunderstanding of what Rawls is up to if you think this is a very serious objection. (Tom Hill’s paper “The Problem of Stability in Political Liberalism” [in his _Respect, Pluralism, and Justice_] is an excellent account of the issue.)
Comments on this entry are closed.