Chapter One
Conscientious Objections to Cosmopolitanism: A Response

Objections continue to be raised against cosmopolitanism and are likely to continue, given the rising popularity of nationalism against what many perceive to be the leveling effect of globalization. In this chapter, I have abstracted from the popular objections against cosmopolitanism, the fundamental nature and irreducible premises on which they rest. The objections here are distilled versions of wider, and in several cases, conceptually strong and weak objections against cosmopolitanism.

Objection One: Cosmopolitanism advocates homogeneity of people. The rise of cosmopolitan societies would see the disappearance of cultural uniqueness and would lead to homogeneity among human beings.

Response: On the contrary. It is tribalists, especially those who fall in the ethnic nationalist camp, whose goal is the achievement and maintenance of ethnic and/or racial homogenous peoplehood. Nazi Germany, Serbia under Milosevic and all forms of ethnic nationalism were and are predicated on this ideal. Cosmopolitanism defends the uniqueness of individuals qua individuals and recognizes their unique singularity. Even identical twins, genetically homogenous as they are, are indubitably unique: they do not share the same consciousness and hence, their perception of the world, however similar, varies sufficiently to give each her own distinctness, a distinctness that is not at all reducible to culture. There is not any tribal label that can exhaust such singularity and uniqueness. The Cosmopolitan Rationalist’s position against tribal homogeneity should be brought into sharper relief by the following example. Moral cosmopolitanism is a pro-individual morality. If numerous intermarriages lead to the disintegration of a group, a culture and its traditional heritage, the Cosmopolitan Rationalist would say: Quite fine. Why? Because human beings are not reducible to their cultures, and, moral cosmopolitans cannot devalue the experiential lived life of the individual. In that space where two who are regarded as tribally distinct are brought together, lies an area in which humanity is vouchsafed; it grows, it becomes something that cannot be authentically subsumed under ethnic or racial labels. Therein lies its beauty. Its identity is deeper and more unique and, above all, subtler, than one that aspires to be subsumed under crude tribal labels—the worst of them being race, since such a phenomenon does not actually in the biological sense. It is now a consensus among biologists and anthropologists that human biological races do not exist. The 1998 American Anthropological Association asserts in its statement on race that the falsity of biological racial essentialism makes it unnecessary to argue against links between racial biology and culture—meaning cultural racial essentialism. The non-existence of race from a biological perspective is not meant to disqualify the existence of race as a social fact; nor is meant to deny the real injustices that follow from race prejudice. Cosmopolitan justice draws attention to the ways in which the invention of race and the categorization of persons under its taxonomies have structurally excluded them from inclusion in the wider pantheon of the human community.

Cosmopolitanism stands in contrast to pluralism. The latter views the world as a place where identities are neatly carved into distinct categories groups based on race, ethnicity or nationality. Homogenous peoplehood was achieved almost perfectly in the twentieth century in Nazi Germany and in Japan. Cosmopolitanism would question the merit of homogeneity that is achieved by a process of discrimination on the basis of non-moral criterion: accidents of birth such as skin pigmentation, nationality and ethnicity. These are non-moral characteristics for which human beings have historically been persecuted. Today, because of the spread of political liberalism and its cosmopolitan ethos (consider the distinction between civic nationalism and cultural nationalism where political liberalism champions the former), a Jew can also claim Polish nationality. This is a privilege that Jews living in Poland under the Ottoman Empire for example, could not have enjoyed.

Objection Two: Cosmopolitanism is too high a goal for humanity. The cosmopolitan demand that human beings wean themselves from their tribal affiliations is psychologically untenable. It is untenable because group identity is a constitutive feature of personal identity. It is natural for human beings to organize their civic, psychological, and emotional lives around the basic units that constitute group identity—race, ethnicity and nationality.

Response: This claim dismisses the essential function of morality: a command to rise to the best within oneself according to the precepts of a code of ethics one has accepted as proper and rational for the life of a human being. One is convinced that the edicts that guide one’s life are not inimical to a quality life. Instead, they are essential for the realization of such a life. All moral systems, including religious ones, are demanding because they require persons to challenge their beliefs, practices and attitudes towards others and to effect a change in their lives. The Christian imperative that requires one to turn the other cheek when slapped is predicated on a belief that violence begets violence. If this is true, then one cannot in any way practice values that are the antithesis of non-violence. It is only a self, strong enough to withstand the violence inflicted by another, one who turns his check towards an aggressor and who, in so, permits his body to function as a meditative site for moral reflection. This expression of pacifism is not a form of passivity. Rather, it is a skilled form of political activism that reveals the nature of the attackers in their naked and unabashed brutality. Physical abuse that is inflicted against one who does not defend himself isolates the nature of the abuse by allowing others to focus exclusively on two phenomena that become heightened into what Baudrillard would call hyper-reality: the naked brutality of physical violence; and human vulnerability in its most intimate form. Resisting impulse to retaliate in this instance is a conscious endorsement of one’s highest moral convictions. Gandhi’s non-violent principle of Satyagrha and Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights philosophy are examples of men committed to this line of moral reasoning. Indeed, aside from the utility and social justice of the non-violent imperative, as an edict in a moral system, it might be very difficult for most people in the empirical world to practice. The seemingly natural response after being slapped is to defend oneself by fighting back or at least by trying to escape. Turning one’s cheek in order to receive another slap seems too demanding an option for most people. This, however, does not diminish the moral correctness of the principle that justifies the imperative.

One could argue that human beings should then challenge themselves to be as resilient in the pursuit of their moral perfection as the marathon is runner is tenacious in his pursuit of victory. Human beings driven by moral ambitiousness are dedicated to win the moral competitions they face in life.
I have elaborated on the above point in order to establish a parallel between it and cosmopolitanism. If people find it psychologically too hard to practice, then an argument could be made that like all moral systems—especially those with a perfectionist goal—cosmopolitanism is no more demanding of the individual than other moral systems. As a reformist and an expansionist doctrine, cosmopolitanism must remain a high goal for human beings to accomplish if it is to achieve conceptual distinctness and moral credibility. Anything less demotes cosmopolitanism to a mere viewpoint, or to a sentiment, rather than a comprehensive system. Although they may contain explicit imperatives and may be demanding in what they require of human beings, viewpoints and sentiments can never be as compelling as a moral system.

My second response to the charge that cosmopolitanism is too high a goal for humanity is that the objection rests on a dilemma worth resolving before the objection can be made. The dilemma is: how does one abstract from the alleged capabilities of a select number of individuals as we observe them in the world, to a claim about humanity in general? This problem is not easy to resolve. It is, however, one that the objectors ignore. Another example is in order. We know from various reports as of this writing that vegetarianism is increasing in various parts of the world. The reasons for becoming vegetarian vary from person to person. They range from the political—political vegetarians—who might in principle object to the killing of any animal because they believe they have a right to their own existence and ought to be treated as ends in themselves and left free to live—to reasons of health. People chose a vegetarian lifestyle because they believe that a vegetarian diet is healthier than one that includes eating meat. Even vegetarians vary in their choice of diet. Some vegetarians are strictly non-meat eaters but eat seafood, eggs ad dairy products. Others are vegans. They abstain from ingesting any substance that comes from the body of any non-human organism. They do not consume honey, milk or cheese of any sort. Within the vegetarian camp, therefore, there is so much variation among consumers that it might be easier for some non-vegetarians to opt for one option over another. Therefore, on what grounds could we say that vegetarianism is too demanding an option for people, given the fact that several persons who never imagined it possible, given their constitutional make-up, have voluntarily opted for a non-carnivorous diet? Objections that rest on claims that certain principles are too high for humanity fail to establish strong empirical bases on which to ground their claims. Instead, they operate on some intuitive sense on what is, or is not difficult based on their perception of a limited number of individuals. Proper judgments about the efficacy and rightness of moral values, however, cannot be made in such a manner.

The too high for humanity objection, therefore, fails to establish the empirical basis of its own claims: how many people have tried to be good cosmopolitans but have failed because they find it too psychologically demanding? Merely pointing out that most people adhere to strong tribal notions of the self, or that they themselves have strong tribal identities, is not sufficient for securing a too high for humanity objection. Such persons may hold on to their identities because they have never been offered a viable alternative that secures for them, the fulfillment of needs they believe their tribal identities are successful in fulfilling.

My last response to the too high for humanity objection is that the objectors making this claim fail to examine other versions of cosmopolitanism. There are, as one philosopher pointed out to me, several cosmopolitanisms. Some of these cosmopolitanisms claim to be compatible with racial, ethnic and national group identities. “Rooted cosmopolitanism,” “Internationalism,” and strands of globalist theories that identify as cosmopolitanism are cases in point. Since these cosmopolitanisms lack a strong conceptual base but, nevertheless, identify as cosmopolitanism, the objectors ought to examine ways in which they might not be too high for humanity given the concerns expressed in the objection regarding the need for strong group identities based on ethnic, racial and national ties.

There is a moderate or weak cosmopolitanism that does have an historical perspective dating from the ancient Stoics up to the Enlightenment era. Its basic outlines are to be found in the works of philosophers Alaine Locke , Martha Nussbaum and Anthony Appiah. In two texts, Nussbaum sketched out a version of cosmopolitanism that she argues is compatible with local identities. There are crucial distinctions to be made between the moderate version of cosmopolitanism developed by Nussbaum and Appiah, and the more robust version being developed by Orthodox Cosmopolitanism. Although Orthodox Cosmopolitanism does pragmatically endorse tribal identities on strictly political grounds, that is, from the standpoint of advocacy where persons holding such identities have been marginalized or politically and economically disenfranchised for no other reason than that they are the holders of their marginalized identities, there is still room for debate about whether the two versions constitute a difference in degree or a difference in kind. I think that because of its radical departure from tribal identities as a cultural right, its antagonism to pluralism and because it regards tribalism as a form of psychic infantilism and pathology, Orthodox Cosmopolitanism exists as difference in kind rather than degree from moderate cosmopolitanism.

Objection Three: There are those who object to cosmopolitanism on the grounds that it contradicts a feature of human identity that is so central to human flourishing that it appears to be as fixed as a law of nature. Ethnicity, race, national consciousness of a cultural kind, and the identities created out of them are constitutive features of any human identity. Since the end of the sixteenth century, according to this argument, national self-consciousness has been an increasingly familiar and legitimate manner in which people make sense of who they are. It is also a way that individuals make sense of the inevitable group identities that they inherit. To argue against group identity is to argue against psychological realism where realism describes psychologically tenable forms of self-construction.

The second objection is two fold. It is a corollary of the first. Indeed, the objector will say, desirable political goals such as justice and the protection of individual rights—staples of any free and democratic society—are ones conferred by the nation state. The erosion of sovereignty advocated by supranational cosmopolitan institutions such as the United Nations, the World Court and the International Court of Justice does not begin with the implementation of cosmopolitan justice and international law by supranational bodies with coercive powers. It starts with the diminution of the nation/state in the person of each individual who is required to renounce what cosmopolitanism calls tribal identity. Moreover, cosmopolitanism lacks the pragmatic political machinery for assuming the demands of justice and individual protection of rights that is the de facto duty of the nation/state.

Response: I will respond to the first part of the objection by two methods; one empirical, the other analytical. The belief that ethnic identities are intractable features of human identity is due to historical ignorance. People defined themselves in ways other than being proud members of the nation state. Before the rise of the nation-state, individuals organized their lives around smaller units of association. Their associative and ascriptive identities were not and could not have been national ones. Their identities were organized around regional geographic units. Italy is a simple case in point. Long after the unification of what is today modern Italy, hundreds of thousands of individuals refrained from possessing what today would be called a strong Italian identity. The history of Italian unification is an interesting one. I will not attempt to discuss any part of it except to say that the ancestors of those alive today who either regard themselves as Italians, or worse—their North American transatlantic cognates who act as if their hyphenated Euro-American identities were handed to them by Moses—would be shocked to have seen how national self-consciousness was achieved. Individuals can and do develop alternative identities that supercede prior ones that were regarded as sacrosanct and nonnegotiable. Again, one ought to remember that the notion of a racial identity is a modern one, one that simply did not exist before the invention of racial taxonomies beginning in the seventeenth century.

Identities like those in the city poleis in ancient Greece may plausibly be regarded as tribal. Membership was based on criteria that were largely inherited. More importantly for cosmopolitan morality, those born outside the city polis were viewed disfavorably. The attribution of barbarism to outsiders captures the way in which the humanity of outsiders was deemed to be inferior to those in the city-state for reasons that were morally irrelevant. The Greek individual in the city-state was regarded as superior, not because he possessed the admirable virtues of character that were consistently exercised in a life devoted to reason and moderation. Indeed, there might have been countless individuals outside the city-state who might have possessed different but morally comparable virtues. Such virtues need not have been so qualitatively different from those prized by the Greeks as to earn them such a disreputable status. The rational Greek response would have been one that recognized the difference in polis affiliation but, nevertheless, one that acknowledged the shared humanity that arises from value affinities. This, incidentally, is just what the cosmopolitan Stoics and Cynics did. They, however, were exceptional. The individual in the Greek city-state was considered superior to outsiders simply because he was a member of this or that polis.

Individuals today as we find them in the empirical world have multiple identities. I think this holds true even for those outside western democracies—anthropological objections notwithstanding. These identities are both group based and singular. They give meaning and coherence to people’s lives. Individuals have religious identities, professional identities, parental identities, and perhaps very importantly for individuals in several countries, strong political identities on which their moral political values and principles are defended and maintained. Such identities are, in principle, not foreclosed to people who do not currently hold them. The choice-option clause in groups is important. It means that the affiliations, institutions and experiences out of which identities are born, are derived from choice based on shared values and experiences that are also available to others. There is an exit clause to such institutions, assuming they are just ones. The capacity to modify or change one’s identity remains a possibility for free and interested parties.

There is no insurmountable psychological impediment that prevents individuals from gaining more meaning from the identities they have as parents, as Catholics, as artists, or as academics than from their tribal identities. Actually, some people do feel that their professional identity, to the extent that it is an expression of a vocational calling, is more meaningful than their hereditary tribal identity that, on close analysis, is so broad that it is non-definable in any conceptually meaningful way.

Refugees and various classes of immigrants are empirical examples of people who are often unable to literally express their tribal identities. To the extent that they practice those customs, norms, and mores derived substantially from their tribal background, they are still retainers and practitioners of a tribal identity. The objectors to cosmopolitanism, however, fail to fully comprehend the extent to which such persons radically reorient themselves to their new milieu in ways that are deeply at odds with the tribal identity they once held when living in their original societies. The objectors fail to comprehend fully the following: a partial evacuation of the self takes places in myriad cases where one’s principles and customs are challenged by the customs of a host environment that are at odds with those dearest to ones’ heart. Consensual polygamy and polyandry come to mind. No western democracy permits consensual polygamy despite the fact that it is capable of existing without violating the individual rights of others, or that it passes John Stuart’s Mill’s Harm Principle. The latter is the reliable criterion used to determine the extent to which morality may be legislated by the state. If an act harms another person, its impressibility is sanctioned by the state.

The second part of the objection—that the nation state is the primary conferrer of justice and defender of individual rights, and that cosmopolitanism lacks the legal and political machinery to assume such responsibilities—results from two questionable factors.

The first is an exaggeration of the sphere of cosmopolitan influence in affairs that are traditionally the responsibility of the state.

The second is encoded in an implicit assumption held by the objectors. While it is not part of the objection itself it, nevertheless, colors the nature of the objection. The assumption is as follows: non-national or supranational institutions are inherently disqualified from exercising moral jurisdiction over the lives of those outside the legal boundaries of the nation-state.

The challenge to sovereignty is, therefore, regarded first not just as a political offense. In light of this let us ask ourselves the following: what premise would have to be presupposed for an unchallengeable notion of de facto sovereignty to be legitimate? The premise would be some political principle that secures the indisputable right of nation-states to exercise authority over those who fall within their geographical demarcations. This principle is rooted in a concept that is the justification for the exercise of political rulership by states over individuals: the will and consent of the people. To the extent that we are dealing with cases in which individuals elect officials who represent their interests and protect their rights, any challenge to the sovereign body whose duty is to protect such rights is, a fortiori, an assault against the will of the people. This further violates another moral principle that is the linchpin of liberal democracy: the intrinsic dignity and autonomy that all persons possess. To trump the will of a people is to disregard their capacity as rational agents to choose those whom they wish to govern them.

The Cosmopolitan Rationalist’s response is that cosmopolitan interference presupposes that a violation of the people’s will has already taken place by political actors who have reneged on their responsibility to protect the people’s rights. Since no person has the right to will another’s enslavement, and further, since no reasonable person ought to will his own enslavement—such a state is inimical to human flourishing and contradicts the goal of any rational human being, cosmopolitan intervention upholds the will of the people. That is, when the primary duty bearer who has the responsibility to uphold the rights of individuals—in this case, the state—fails to perform its duties, then some third party assumes the default duty of protecting the rights of individuals. There is no secure moral principle that can legitimately bar individuals from protecting the moral rights of persons because they are functioning as agents outside the jurisdiction of the traditional nation-state. Political morality could never succeed if it relied on the reverse principle. Think here, for example, of the many objectors to slavery who acted as moral resistors. They were often moral and political actors outside the domain in which slavery occurred. The answer to the question of when and how such a third party may act as the default defender of rights of citizens of the world is a strategic one. It depends on political factors that consider whether at any given moment an intervention is one that would yield the best results; one that measures the contribution that intervention makes against the harm it might do at a particular time. Such harm comes from a failure to strategically consider the relevant factors that need to be in place to secure the best results. This is especially true of humanitarian interventions.

The moral principle of defending the rights of citizens is morally unchallenged when a nation-state, enjoying the privileges of de facto sovereignty violates its own moral percepts. The same moral principle applies to an individual bystander or, more formally, the police in cases where the primary duty bearer—individual citizens—fail to uphold the right of each individual not to be harmed. So I have a right not to be harmed. Everyone else has the prima facie obligation to honor that right as I do in regard to the same right of others. When I, as the primary duty bearer, fail to uphold John Doe’s right not be harmed by stabbing him because we disagree over a philosophical point, the police (as an authorized law enforcing actor) assumes the default duty of protecting Doe’s rights. I am, justifiably, carted off to jail. As a non-authorized law-enforcing actor, a stranger would lack the political authority to arrest me. She would, however, have the moral right to do what is within her power to prevent me from being harmed. The range of activities that she could, or ought to undertake, is wide and varied. Some of them are debatable.
What remains a moral axiom for the Cosmopolitan Rationalist is that moral obligations in this sphere are neither justified by nor dependent on tribal affiliations. Once one has accepted that the value of the humanity of every person cannot be tied to any accident of birth, the dilemma of intervention is resolved.
The first part of the second objection exaggerates the sphere of influence of cosmopolitan agents. The assumption that cosmopolitan institutions would attempt to overtake the traditional responsibilities of the state is false and empirically implausible. It is in the interest of the various organs of cosmopolitan democracy to ensure that local legal and political institutions that protect rights be utilized. This includes all legal challenges in the courts and, when possible, various non-governmental local organizations that act as advocates for those violated. Once more, the default duty of protecting the rights of citizens of the world lies with local institutions whose legalese ought to insure the rights protection of those who fall within its geographic boundaries. Cosmopolitan institutions, when necessary, provide the moral and political apparatus that anchors the defense of rights of citizens of the world. Institutions such as the World Court, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the United Nations and its organs such as the Security Council, function in co-operation with the moral mantra of Universal Human rights which is: below a certain level we may not permit human life to fall.
The level of involvement depends on the degree and scope of rights violations and the extent of harms caused by such violations. Conditions that meet the requirements of the Harm Principle—those situations in which there is widespread suffering caused by the violation of rights of the people by the state—are those that oblige supranational agents to intervene. Such would have been the case of the genocide of Muslims in Bosnia by Serbia, the ethnic cleansing of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, Tutsis at the hand of Hutu murderers in Rwanda, and the systematic genocide of black Sudanese in Darfur by the janjaweed Arab militia, had non-national political actors—including nation-states—intervened on a principled platform.
Whenever the primary institutions whose responsibility is to protect the rights of citizens fail in their obligations—such as when the state discriminates against citizens on the basis of non-moral and accidental features of birth—then, in the absence of well-founded reasons for such discrimination, cosmopolitanism defends the intrinsic dignity of all persons by pointing to the immorality of such practices. It secures a principle of intervention on behalf of the disenfranchised citizens of the world. As a necessary aside, it will be helpful to qualify what is meant by implying that there can be well-founded reasons for discriminating on the basis of non-moral accidental features of birth. I leave this question open for further debate and will, in fleshing out the conceptual contours of cosmopolitanism, assert that cosmopolitans might have reason to ponder such “principled discrimination” and, that this might affect the degree of intervention by cosmopolitan actors.
The moral discriminator who discriminates on the basis of accidental features of birth, (ethnicity, race and nationality) may say that such discrimination can be contextually necessary. He may go further than this and argue that failure to discriminate on such bases may be immoral and harmful. If one were to find almost insurmountable barriers between two cultural traditions on a particular issue, then discrimination may prove to be necessary, the Cosmopolitan Rationalist might suggest. As an example, he will point to women from Culture A in a refugee camp who have been systematically raped and tortured over a period of months by a marauding group of guerillas from Culture B. The men in culture B are ethnically identical to the women in Culture A. Moreover, the women in culture A are governed by modest religious norms pertaining to dress, nudity, and sexuality. There is a huge shaming stigma attached to rape. Where rape occurs, women in Culture "A" are expected to refrain from any contact with men for at least six months. They are not forced to, however, compliance with the norm is the single most important way for them to redeem themselves in the minds of their peers. It would be unwise, argues the moral discriminator, to send a male doctor from Culture B to treat and/or counsel the raped women. Cosmopolitan agents may understand how trauma can suspend rational and reasonable comprehension in the person of the afflicted who, ashamed and humiliated as she is, would be more deeply humiliated in the presence of a male doctor who might just happen to bear a similar resemblance to the perpetrators who attacked her. The psychic rationality that is in place when say, women from other cultures are raped and are also treated by male doctors and are thus able to not have their medical and psychological treatment colored by their experience which has been inflicted on them by a man, is absent in the case of the women from culture A. The ability to differentiate between the assailant and the innocent doctor needs to be secured for them to be treated successfully. In this instance it is absent because of rigid gender roles and prevailing views of sex and sexuality that govern the women’s culture.
Might it be wise to have Orthodox Muslim women raped by American soldiers treated by male American military doctors?
The moral objector might agree that the moral cosmopolitan rationalist can both reject discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity and nationality tout court while being open to compelling contextual cases where the moral presumption is discrimination. Such discrimination is strategically relevant given the goals of the cosmopolitan rationalist.

Objection Four: A fourth objection to cosmopolitanism is one made most by communitarians. It accuses cosmopolitan rationalists of doctrinal schizophrenia, and of philosophical solipsism. It gains its appeal by yet another appeal to brute empiricism. It doesn’t stop there, however. The centrality of tribal markers—an undisputed fact in the modern world—is to be respected because they appeal to common sense notions of race and ethnicity, to name two restricted examples of tribal markers. Common sense understanding of these concepts, according to the objector, is what gives them their status as social facts. Cosmopolitanism, a concept that has little, if any, social currency among the public, entreats individuals to embrace a cosmopolitan identity that can only be intuited by the individual who is the holder of it. Because it lacks a visible public face, argues the objector, it is an imaginative ideal that cannot allow persons to live in a recognizable, and therefore, affirmative manner among their fellow world-inhabitants. Cosmopolitans, in crafting identities radically at odds with those bequeathed to them, which maintain strength and staying power through social conventions, behave solipsistically in that they fail to take seriously, the power of naming conventions. Naming conventions are necessary for binding people together as cohesive and comprehensible members of a community. Individuals are encouraged to hold private identities—cosmopolitan ones—that still retain features crucial for civic-mindedness and egalitarianism, while being forced by the naming conventions of society, to maintain their recognizable public ethnic, racial and national ascriptive identities.

Response: To the objector: Yes. And the same holds true for people accused of being criminals who are actually innocent; or for any person who holds an identity that we have good reason to believe is a sincere one, but which differs radically from his being-for- others identity. That is, the person he is taken to be by others.
The view of radical intersubjectivity advocated in the previous response should cancel any charge of solipsism against Orthodox Cosmopolitanism. Inter-subjectivity is not indulged in mindlessly. It presupposes some rational standard of morally evaluating those with whom one is engaging. All things being equal, those who engage in intersubjectivity do not engage with murderers, rapists, criminals, deceptive agents and so on. Assuming that the agents cosmopolitan rationalists have in mind are individuals who are not psychotic, we may say that this decent intersubjectivity, with the submissive agency of the individual at the center of human transactions—where such transactions have the capacity to modify, influence and change human identity—is a process of creative social intercourse. If by solipsistic, the objectors mean that cosmopolitan rationalists locate the proper study of society with the individual first, then it is an inescapable form of solipsism. As any rational astronomers could not allow himself to look at the starry sky above without examining individual stars and planets, so the cosmopolitan rationalist begins his exploration of human subjectivity with the individual as an individual, with the requirements of his nature as a human being that equip him to live a life of flourishing, value-affinity and deep admiration for his fellow human beings. That loose and essentially indefinable aggregate known as society is like an ineffable entity—opaque and impenetrable—if one does not first start with a study of its most important and inviolable phenomenon: the human individual. The implicit and unchallenged premise of the communitarian is that because of their function in communities, tribal identities along with the markers that validate them are an instantiation of the common good. This premise, however, besides being the lingua franca of tribal oficialese, leaves unanswered the following questions: what is the good in this context? How do we determine it?

Certain features of an individual’s existence are fixed, stubbornly so by the tribal markers she inherits. Cosmopolitan Rationalists echoe the voice of Dewey that says, “we take names always as namings, as living behaviors in an evolving world of men and things.”
Cosmopolitanism is an opportunity for the individual to navigate her way through the world and to live authentically, and to take ownership of those experiences and the identities culled form them. This she can do despite the fact that the larger culture not only has no public vernacular for such an identity, but resists them by making all identities subsumable under tribal ones. The individual is, therefore, provided with an alternative armor, a second skeleton, if you will, in which she can grow realize her experiences without always conceptualizing them into some coherent narrative that is subsumable under a tribal meta-narrative. Some of these experiences transcend concepts. They leave impressions on the mind without an exact tribal linguistic prism through which to filter them. There is no tribal vocabulary to identify either the experiences or the concomitant identity that is developed as a result of them.
But it exists.
This psychic space is the space where free living dwells. We may refer to that identity developed in that space as cosmopolitan in spirit.
Simultaneously, human subjectivity as it is partially constituted by a multiplicity of experiences, interior locutions, and hereditary traits, contains an infinite capacity for becoming and for the creation of “subtle identities” that fall outside public terminologies. The success of the latter make human subjectivity both containable, and consequently, more manageable. If we can name something, we can affix a nature to it. If we can conceptually patent the identity ascribed to that nature by prescribing the behavior appropriate for its upkeep, and if we can identify any behavior that seems contrary to the spirit of its nature as an aberration, then we have foreclosed any capacity for subjectivity to evolve beyond the locally sanctioned form we chose to recognize it in. This is not an anti-essentialist argument. It is a caveat against attempting to circumscribe the infinite capacity of human subjectivity for becoming by means of restrictive naming and false identification. Tribal identities do just that. Cosmopolitanism approaches subjectivity in the Wildean aesthetic spirit: recognition that the most perfect art is that which most fully mirrors the individual in all her infinite variety. This infinite variety is achieved by a human-being fully interacting with her world. We are not describing an attitude of someone looking for experience or variety in life. It is the attitude of one who, understanding that variety and experience are inevitable features of a heterogeneous world, does not prematurely filter these experiences that lead to an infinitely variable character, through tribal lenses. The latter can only bias the nature of her experiences and prevent an authentic incarnation of who she is, who she has become, and who she is becoming from coming into existence.

As for the accusation that cosmopolitanism is guilty of ignoring social facts, we ought to remember that social facts, in the strict sense in which social scientists such as Weber and Durkheim understood them, are contingent features of the natural world to which particular meanings have been cemented though historical and traditional usage and function.
Social facts are not metaphysical truisms. They are not fixed like laws of nature are. Their value is gauged by some standard that relates to human existence. By such a standard are neither necessarily intrinsically good, nor subjectively good; that is, good because one simply desires it.
The meaning attributed to social facts has deep ontological status in public consciousness. It matters to those interlocutors, communicators or anyone whose cognitive and emotional relationship to its meaning its influences their perception of reality. That said, I will add: cosmopolitanism is one social fact competing against others. For whom is it a social fact? For self-identified cosmopolitans, and for any number of unidentified individuals whose lives are guided by the concept’s essential characteristics.
If the objectors insist that this understanding of cosmopolitanism falls below a social popularity calculus required for a contingent of the social world to qualify as a social fact then, Orthodox Cosmopolitanism issues this rejoinder: cosmopolitan is a preliminary attempt to establish itself as a social fact through its engagement with human moral agency. It achieves this goal by establishing rules and attaching conceptual significance to a term whose usage and practical application is not widespread. But observe that in the early period of Christianity, in the age where Paul transformed a tiny Palestinian sect into what would become the major world religion, Christians did not necessarily capitulate to terminological characterization of their religion as heretic. A social fact need not satisfy the strong criterion that it be widely recognized as a fact by a public. There will be notable exceptions to the alleged consensus surrounding the phenomenon regarded as a social fact. And since we know that the numeric adherents to a theory or belief is no guarantee of its infallibility we may say that the popularity criterion is not too demanding but, instead unnecessary. People’s beliefs are determined by several social facts that they are not aware of. Any sphere in which human cognition renders an evaluative judgment on phenomena and in which human social intercourse occurs—regardless of size—constitutes what liberal theorist Jack Crittenden refers to as a sodality. A sodality is a social sphere that need not be a community or a society. It is simply any sphere where human social intercourse takes place. There, one can also assess and evaluate whatever it is that is regarded as a social fact. A sodality is a site of creation and contestation. It is a sphere where cultures and subcultures form and intersect with each other.
In light of what has been discussed consider the following: Racial terms are applied to those who may not have a strong racial identity and for whom the taxonomy of race is completely useless from a cognitive, psychological and moral standpoint. It may, however, serve as standpoint of political advocacy, which interestingly, makes it a strategic identity. Consider also that several persons in the United States who are currently classified as black would have been classified in a different time in America’s history as mulatto, octoroon, quadroon, and any other term deemed vital for a ruling class that exploited such terms for its own ends. Comparative racial taxonomies with those in Argentina, Brazil, the Caribbean and the United States reveal not only a great deal of variation among applied racial labels, but also the historical variations that reveal more than just case studies of nominalism in action. They expose the sociality and, therefore, modifiable nature of social facts. In some societies there is the marked absence of a biological understanding of race. People are identified according to a direct perceptive formula: the visual correlation between actual skin color and personal attribution: brown, white, yellow and black skins denote the respective individuals who match them. Pigmentocracy, therefore, cancels biological race taxonomies. If we ponder this phenomenon long enough and devote ourselves to comparative ethnic and racial taxonomies, we realize that social facts have a birthday, or, a series of birth dates. Their dissemination into the natural world began as all human artifices do, as inventions of the human imagination. They do not possess any metaphysically essential attribute that makes them any more real than others of their kind.
The objection—residing as it does on common sense notions of race and ethnicity—avoids a simple question whose answer would turn it on its backside: Common sense to whom? Common sense notions of race beg the question. They assume that the folk or common sense notion is already correct precisely because it is a common sense notion.
We uncover find similar question begging tacitly concealed in the communitarian defense of tribal markers. Tribal markers are defended because it is believed that their function in communities is an instantiation of the good. This premise, however, leaves unanswered the following questions: What is the good? How do we determine it?

Objection Five: The final objection is the anthropological version of moral relativism. It goes further than pointing to multiculturalism as a basic feature of our contemporary world. It argues that the existence of multiculturalism makes it impossible to discriminate rationally among cultural differences. The existence of different cultures makes a moot point of qualitative distinctions among cultures. Any such attempt results largely from nefarious moralistic, economically motivated, or value biased impulses on the part of reactionary anti-multiculturalists, goes the objection. Pluralism and multiculturalism are, in effect, the best checks and balances against the moral imperialism of cosmopolitanism. The latter while not directly attacking multiculturalism, adduces itself as evidence of multiculturalism’s shortcomings. The objector’s most succinct criticism against cosmopolitanism may be found in a classic study of tribalism that woefully dismisses as naïve and unrealistic, the cosmopolitan goals of human unification and the concomitant decreased importance of roots and ancestry in people’s lives. Harold Isaacs in his classic study of political anthropology, Idols of the Tribe writes: “Here to stay, then, are the idols of the tribes, full of their enchanting beauties and crushing brutalities….group membership organized around ethnic, national and racial lines in one form of another have been the essential order of human existence…. our tribal separateness are here to stay. Barring total extermination, they cannot be indefinitely contained.”

Response: Moral relativism has already been proven to be an untenable doctrine. Enough logicians and moral philosophers have revealed its fallacies. Its untenability will be discussed fully in the next chapter. Suffice it to say that going from a statement about a state of affairs in the world—multiculturalism exists—does not constitute either a proof about its moral value, nor does it preclude philosophers from making qualitative judgments about it. Difference in and of itself is not synonymous with equality, nor does it provide us with automatic recourse to qualitative distinctions that exist and need to be acknowledged. Some independent evaluative criterion or criteria is needed to make sense of qualitative judgments. Because cosmopolitanism’s premises secure a standard of value of human life for the individual as an individual, and further, because it starts out with an unbiased standard for judging human life competency, it is the best evaluative rubric under which the truthfulness of qualitative judgments about culture and cultural differences can be gauged.
What do I mean by saying that cosmopolitanism assumes an unbiased standard for judging human life-competency? I mean that Cosmopolitan Rationalists do not begin their moral evaluation with preferential treatment to any culture regarding its value, worth and essentiality in human development. Cosmopolitan Rationalists agree that culture is the milieu in which human socialization takes places; it is the place in which human beings learn their moral vocabularies. Cosmopolitan Rationalists, however, in realizing that human beings can and do matriculate under multiple systems, and that no human being is hard-wired for any one culture but is, instead, equipped to develop organically develop under culture, evaluate the worth and value of cultures according to how well they qualify individuals to live sustained flourishing lives.
The sphere of the good is left open enough for different lifestyles and values to counts as manifestations of the good. This is the gift of political liberalism that prioritizes the right over the good. However, as will become clearer in the proceeding chapters, Cosmopolitan Rationalists, like any value maker and value-judge, proceed from moral axioms that are the basis of any good human life. Such axioms are those that provide the moral foundation of political liberalism: freedom, autonomy and human dignity. Freedom, therefore, is best protected under the basic rights system that we find under liberal constitutional republics and representative democracies in general and liberal constitutional republics in particular.

Those few axioms that we inherit from political liberalism highlight the nature of those terms—freedom, autonomy and human dignity—and their indispensability for a type of life that is the best life for a human being. That is, our treatment of each other and the degree to which our interactions are classified as civil, presuppose dignity, freedom and autonomy. Certain classes of behavior are a priori wrong on the grounds that they violate principles of autonomy. To treat a person in X manner implies that we have ownership of him, where the treatment indicates that one is treating him like a means to our ends and never as an end in himself. If we had ownership of him then he would be unable, as an individual, to maintain his own existence. If he is unable to maintain his existence because we have treated him in a way that is contrary to the ends of his constitutional design—the preservation of his existence—then his own nature as a human being turns impotent. Ratiocination of a type that is undoubtedly Aristotelian in nature, shores up the necessity of these moral axioms with which Cosmopolitan Rationalists begin their moral judgments. But more of this later on. Suffice it to say that Cosmopolitan rationalists are required to abstract themselves from their own cultural background when making moral judgments about other cultures. This is not a superfluous point. At the heart of the debate centered around identity politics and multiculturalism is, as I have argued in previous work, the fact that moral reasoning and judgment are clouded—hijacked, one could say—by a logic of tribal separatism. This means that persons making moral judgments not just about cultures, but about human beings in general, tend to have their judgments filtered through tribal lenses. Human beings have their humanity tied to such markers, each of which is ranked according to some index of value-worth. Therefore, because certain human beings fall under certain tribal markers that are ranked below others, they are robbed of the intrinsic value and dignity they posses simply by virtue of being human. Although ethical systems entreat us not to commit this state of affairs, very few ethical systems—if any—have exhorted us to divest ourselves of tribal markers as meaningful markers of personal and moral distinction. In the absence of this imperative, Cosmopolitan Rationalists argue that moral reasoning will be stymied given the collaboration between psychological states that are indexed to tribal affiliation and moral reasoning.

In response to Isaacs’ testimony to the centrality of tribal markers and their ineradicable nature, I submit that human creative agency can fruitfully effect change by the exercise of moral imagination of value makers who invite us to higher forms of living. Innovative scholarship in evolutionary morality by Neil Levy, suggests that morality evolves as a result of our evolutionary history. This was a history that favored genetic selfish behavior and did away with altruism. Morality, however, also gives us the very concept “that leads us to condemn selfishness and approve of selflessness. Evolution provided us with a concept we can turn back against evolution. From the mindless and mindlessly selfish rose beings capable of rationality and morality.”
The history of moral development is not concerned with moral evolution, but also the type of evolution that this form of moral development assumes. Group formation and identity seem an uncontroversial perquisite for human development and moral matriculation. But the Cosmopolitan Rationalist is concerned with the criterion for membership and the negotiability of membership. Historians can readily point to the evolution of group identities from small clans, to the largest that we have to today—the nation-state, with moral philosophers pointing out the moral dimensions inherent in various modes of group formation. The history of Social Contract Theory dating to Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau does exactly this. Why is it that today, given our 21st century socio-political sensibilities that are undoubtedly influenced by phenomena such as racial/ethnic cleansing and National Socialism in Germany, we favor civic nationalism over ethnic or cultural nationalism? Could it have anything to do with the fact that somewhere in our moral epicenter, we understand that a person’s racial or ethnic background ought never to disqualify her from becoming the citizen of a foreign country? It is on this premise that the civic nationalism of the United States, Canada and France has distinguished itself from cultural or ethnic nationalism, where for the latter, the criteria for membership is blood.
“What was good for our anthropoid ancestors need not and cannot be good for us since we have evolved beyond the conditions and moral schemata that was their reality.” This is the abiding mantra of the Orthodox Cosmopolitan rationalist. It is a mantra that when followed and taken to its logical terminus, could see the emergence of a new post-human humanity.



1-Naomi Zack, Philosophy of Race and Science (New York: Routledge, 2002), 88. Zack does an excellent job of examining racial taxonomies throughout history and shows how they have failed all philosophical meaning tests as well as scientific verification. It is actually worth spelling out the “1998 AAA statement on `Race.’ The first part of the text reads: In the US both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on physical differences. With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct group. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that there is greater variation within racial groups than between them. This means that most physical variation, about 94% lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic racial groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. In neighboring populations there is much over-lapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions. Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species….Today scholars in many fields argue that race as it is understood in the USA was a social mechanism invented during the 18th century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: the English and other European settlers, the conquered Indian people, and those peoples of Africa brought in to provide slave labor. American Anthropological Association, “1998 AAA Statement on `Race,” Anthropology Newsletter 39, no.9 (1998): 3.
2-The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989)
3-Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 633.
4-Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997)
5-For a thorough discussion of moderate cosmopolitanism see chapter five of my Becoming a Cosmopolitan. There I steadfastly defended Nussbaum against a number of critics who criticized her moderate version of cosmopolitanism on several grounds. I also offer an explanation in that same chapter for why I believe moderate cosmopolitanism does an excellent job from the standpoint of advocacy, of addressing racial injustice. I discuss my own understanding of how political racial identities can be compatible with cosmopolitanism when such identities operate from the position of advocacy and are not upheld as robustly cultural ones.
6-I remind the reader that de facto sovereignty is not a political given. For a full view on the conditions that determine and then place restraints on sovereignty see Darrell Moelendorf’s Cosmopolitan Justice (Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 2002). Also for a rich discussion of differences between domestic and international sovereignty see Harvard Review Spring 20002. International sovereignty is largely based on the willingness of the political actors of countries to recognize a particular country as sovereign. South Africa under Apartheid and Afghanistan under the Taliban did not have international sovereignty although they had powerful domestic sovereignty.
7-There might be reasonable exceptions where citizen arrests are permitted. Even then, a law enforcement agent is required to formally enact the arrest.
8-See Jack Donnelly’s Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989)
9-John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, Knowing and the Known
10-See, F. James Davis Who is Black: One Nation’s Definition (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996) for an excellent discussion of this topic.
11-Harold Isaacs, Idols of the Tribe: Group Identity and Political Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 205, 216.
12-See, Jason D. Hill Becoming a Cosmopolitan: What it Means to Be a Human Being in the New Millennium (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000)
13-I appreciate the fact that for several persons, especially those with strong religious identities, there might be no distinction between personal identity and moral identity. The personal is the moral, and the moral is the personal for such individuals. They do not have what moral psychologists would call a bifurcated identity; one that is compartmentalized and in which one can live within various moral domains. One can exercise more moral consistency in some domains—those dealing with one’s identity as a parent for example—and less in others: one’s role as a husband. Because one’s role as a parent might be more central to one’s overall sense of self, this bifurcation allows some leniency and a more overall relaxed moral life.
14-Neil Levy, What Makes us Moral: Crossing the Boundaries of Biology (Oxford: One World Publications, 2004), 88.