“Only in the past couple of centuries, as every community has gradually been drawn into a single web of trade and a global network of information, have we come to a point where each of us can realistically imagine contacting any one of our six billion conspecifics and sending that person something worth having: a radio, an antibiotic, a good idea. Unfortunately, we could also send, through negligence as easily as malice, things that will cause harm: a virus, an airborne pollutant, a bad idea. And the possibilities of good and ill are multiplied beyond all measure when it comes to policies carried out by governments in our name. Together, we can ruin poor farmers by dumping our subsidized grain into their markets, cripple industries by punitive tariffs, deliver weapons that will kill thousands upon thousands. Together, we can raise standards of living by adopting new policies on trade and aid, prevent or treat diseases with vaccines and pharmaceuticals, take measures against global climate change, encourage resistance to tyranny and a concern for the worth of each human life.
And, of course, the worldwide web of information—radio, television, the Internet—means not only that we can affect lives everywhere but that we can learn about life anywhere, too. Each person you know about and can affect is someone to whom you have responsibilities:* to say this is just to affirm the very idea of morality.” — Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (W.W. Norton & Co., 2006)
* A vigorous and nuanced appreciations of our cosmopolitan social and environmental interdependency which draws upon the concept of vulnerability for an argument extending the reach of our moral obligations and claims beyond the contractual, the provincial, and the constricted space of familiar, intimate or special interpersonal relations, is found in Robert E. Goodin’s Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities (University of Chicago Press, 1985).
I have a number of bibliographies relevant to our topic, but I’ll mention just two: the compilations for “individual and shared responsibility” and “global distributive justice.”
See too:
- Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity (Liveright Publishing, 2018).
- Archibugi, Daniele, ed. Debating Cosmopolitics (Verso, 2003).
- Goodin, Robert E. Reflective Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2003).
- Goodin, Robert E. Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice After the Deliberative Turn (Oxford University Press, 2008).
- Nussbaum, Martha C. Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011).
- Sen, Amartya. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (W.W. Norton & Co., 2006).
- Wright, Eric Olin. Envisioning Real Utopias (Verso, 2010).
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