On cosmopolitan humility and the arrogance of states

Abstract

One of the potentially most significant recent objections to a cosmopolitan moral approach charges an essential arrogance: cosmopolitanism disdains particularist moral insights even while -in what is said to be its most coherent form --it seeks to bind all persons within global political institutions. It is argued here that adopting a form of institutional cosmopolitanism actually helps to meet this sort of objection. An appropriately configured such approach will have a conception of equal global citizenship at its core. This will seek to place individuals in relations of political humility, understood not as plain deference to competing moral claims but as concrete recognition of the equal moral status of others. It will seek to progressively empower as actual citizen equals those whose interests are often 'arrogantly' neglected in the current system, and to multiply mechanisms of input and challenge for them over time.

The ”foreign” virus?

“…The argument would run along roughly two lines: how border closures lead to damaging exclusionary nationalism and how they destroy social cohesion. We also argue in that earlier draft that interesting parallels exist with the works of Blake (2002), Egan (2020) and Cabrera (2020), as well as with the empirical data in Elias and others (2021). We thank our reviewers for convincing us that such a consequentialist argument needs to be expanded before it can be published in its own right.…”