Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006) is a philosophical text written by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah, a philosopher and ethicist who teaches at New York University, grew up in Kumasi, Ghana, where his father was a Ghanaian political leader and his mother a British expatriate. His family’s multicultural background, as well as the experience of growing up in diverse Kumasi and then attending school in the United Kingdom, informed Appiah’s thinking about communicating across boundaries. In this text, Appiah proposes his view of cosmopolitanism, or the concept that we are not just members of our own city, nation, tribe, or family, but members of a global community that transcends local loyalties.

This study guide references the first edition published by W. W. Norton & Company.

Summary

Being a member of the global community comes with two important responsibilities, according to Appiah. First, it means we have moral obligations to people, even strangers and people with whom we seemingly have nothing in common. Second, it means we must take other people’s lives seriously, including their practices and beliefs, even if we do not agree with them or share in them. These responsibilities might sound difficult, but Appiah sees many people in our complex world already engaging in cosmopolitan behaviors in their everyday lives. We are often asked to interact with neighbors, friends, coworkers, and family members who are culturally different from us, and this can even be pleasant.

In the first chapter, Appiah tells the story of the historical figure Sir Richard Burton, a Victorian adventurer and traveler who, in some ways, was an excellent cosmopolitan. He learned many languages and was curious about different cultures. He translated works from other languages into English with an open mind (like, for example, The Kama Sutra). However, he could also be bigoted, racist, and indifferent to suffering. Burton successfully took an active interest in other cultures (the cosmopolitan’s second responsibility), but he failed at feeling obligated to them morally (the cosmopolitan’s first responsibility).

Appiah also depicts Burton as a relativist who, through his travels, got the impression that there was no truth any more meaningful than any other. This relativism is a problem for Appiah, who sees it not just in Burton but throughout Western intellectual thought. Borrowing an image from Burton’s written work, Appiah introduces the metaphor of the shattered mirror to demonstrate what relativism is like: There is no shared meaning. We all have one piece of the mirror, and no one’s truth is better than anyone else’s.

In Chapters 2 and 3, Appiah takes on relativism and the Enlightenment philosophical worldview that he argues lies behind it, positivism. He explains the assumptions behind positivism, which results in a sharp divide between facts (what you can prove) and values (your personal opinions). According to Appiah, this division is not as clear as we tend to think, and he introduces several ways of thinking about facts and values that muddy the waters. The problem is, Appiah argues, that for a relativist, a conversation about right and wrong just isn’t possible. The best you can do is agree to disagree because it all comes down to having two opinions—two shards of mirror—that are equally true. People must be able to converse about moral issues, Appiah says, or they are stuck in silence.

When we do have conversations, we will have disagreements, which Appiah covers in Chapter 4, where he describes several types of possible moral disagreements. Disagreement happens even within societies, so it’s to be expected that we might disagree when we have conversations with those who do not share our moral vocabulary. Even so, Appiah believes it is still possible to reach consensus. He notes that when we do agree, it is more likely to be on what we should do rather than why we should do it. He makes this argument in Chapter 5: It is far easier to agree on practice than on reasons.

For Appiah, conversation is valuable in itself. Even if it doesn’t lead to an agreement, it still encourages people to engage each other in an act of moral imagination, to view the issue from another’s perspective, which allows us to become more accustomed to one another. Some might question whether common ground—some universal value or characteristic—is necessary to have conversations across boundaries. For example, perhaps all humans have an innate tendency to want to take care of small children or to avoid unjust murder. Appiah addresses that question directly in Chapter 6. There are some universal human capacities (in the sense that they are normal everywhere, not that literally every person has them). But to have a conversation, you don’t need universal traits; you only need to have some common ground with particular people, and that is not as difficult as it seems.

In the last four chapters, Appiah’s argument becomes more practical as he turns toward real-life examples. In Chapters 7 and 8, he deploys arguments against two distinct but related concepts: cultural preservation (the idea that some cultures need to be preserved from cultural imperialism) and cultural patrimony (the idea that historical artifacts and works of art uniquely belong to a particular cultural group). Appiah acknowledges the good intentions behind wanting to protect local cultures from being replaced by Western culture, and behind wanting to keep looters from stealing artifacts from archeological sites. However, he dislikes the idea of attempting to preserve cultural purity; the idea of one cultural group “owning” an image also troubles him. Appiah likes the metaphor of cultural contamination, which he describes as a mixing and blending of distinct cultures.

After examining what counter-cosmopolitanism looks like in Chapter 9, noting its similarities and differences with cosmopolitanism itself, Appiah concludes his argument by devoting Chapter 10 to the question of what exactly we owe strangers. He considers other philosophers’ responses to problems like global poverty and concludes that we are not morally obligated to give away most of our material possessions to nonprofit organizations, both because we are not required to respond entirely on our own and because that response is not embedded enough in the complexity of the problem to truly address it. Our obligation as cosmopolitans is more nuanced, but it will involve informing ourselves fully about a situation, engaging in conversation about the problem, and encouraging political leaders and nation-states to seek solutions.