The Different Tasks of Cosmopolitan Ethics

A COSMOPOLITAN MORALITY hardly depends on cosmopolitan ethics by being implied in its analytic view of morality. By “morality” I think of the psychological potential, in use or not, to behave cooperatively and pro-socially under conflicts of interest. “Cosmopolitan morality” would then encompass the psychological powers in real people, worldwide, answering the conflicts arising when people from different world regions, and different historical cultures, levels of economy, and spheres of religion are engaging in increasingly close contact. To make things more complicated, conflicts of interest arise not only among those actually cooperating, but also with those intentionally or arbitrarily excluded from cooperation. Within a growing net of interconnections there is no state of isolation. If the economically least efficient states are excluded from cooperation, then they will encounter side-effects of the global process, for example, in the form of global climate change. Given the process of globalization, the possibility of a global morality of sorts is obviously of crucial interest.

Cosmopolitan ethics assumes the task of analyzing the prospects for a global morality. Being largely philosophical ethics, its manner of analysis may be one-sided—one-sided in choosing “concepts” and “argument” as the only proper content of morality. Following the Humean tradition in moral philosophy, however, cosmopolitan ethics can also undertake the job of laying bare the motivational and emotional fundament that gives rise to moral attitudes and beliefs. This can be done with varying degrees of stringency, and a huge divide in moral philosophy is particularly built around one difference. Are all moral beliefs, and thereby obligations and rights, to be dissolved into moral motivations and behavioral tendencies, or is this not possible? Do some moral beliefs stand up by themselves, so to speak, and proffer obligations and rights on their own? Is our moral thinking more flexible and far-reaching than our moral feelings by not being restricted to the latter's bodily lethargy?

These are the two philosophical traditions that demand a hearing in this moral dispute, to be dubbed the “Humean” and the “Kantian.” They are “philosophical” in that their focus is not on a specific moral decision in the first place, something we are confronted with in everyday life (buy the “fair-trade” article or not?), but on the “inner workings” of our moral capacities and their moral and social potential.