Review of International Studies (2002), 28, 457–478 Copyright © British International Studies Association ‘Citizen of nowhere’ or ‘the point where circles intersect’? Impartialist and embedded cosmopolitanisms

TONI ERSKINE*

Abstract. Ethical cosmopolitanism is conventionally taken to be a stance that requires an ‘impartialist’ point of view—a perspective above and beyond all particular ties and loyalties. Taking seriously the claims of those critics who counter that morality must have a ‘particularist’ starting-point, this article examines the viability of an alternative understanding of cosmopolitanism: ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’. Using moral justifications for patriotism as points of contrast, it presents embedded cosmopolitanism as a position that recognises community membership as being morally constitutive, but challenges the common assumption that communities are necessarily bounded and territorially determinate.

Introduction

Cosmopolitanism can be understood to mean (at least) two different things. It might be equated with the potential achievement of world government and the global political institutions that would presumably accompany it.1 Alternatively, cosmo- politanism might be thought to entail a universal scope of ethical concern. In other words, it is possible to speak of political or ethical cosmopolitanism, neither of which necessarily entails the other.2 We can assume that when Diogenes the Cynic uttered the frequently cited phrase, ‘I am a citizen of the world’, in the fourth century BC, he had

* This essay was presented at the International Studies Association (ISA) 39th Annual Convention, 18–21 March 1998, Minneapolis, USA. I am grateful to Professor Ian Clark and this journal’s anonymous referees for many constructive comments on the argument contained here. This research would not have been possible without the generous support of Trinity College, Cambridge, the Overseas Research Students (ORS) Awards Scheme and the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust. The opportunity to prepare this paper for publication has been afforded by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. 1 Positions that fall within this understanding of cosmopolitanism often champion the creation of a world state. Such a stance, chronicled by Derek Heater in World Citizenship and Government: Cosmopolitan Ideas in the History of Western Political Thought (London: Macmillan, 1996), advocates the elimination of political borders. For a variation on this theme that also treats the notion of world citizenship quite literally, but involves the transformation rather than the elimination of political borders, see Daniele Archibugi, David Held and Martin Köhler (eds.), Re-imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998) and Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). 2 Regarding this statement of their potential mutual exclusivity, I mean two things. First, a system of states need not preclude (and arguably might be conducive to) a transnational scope of ethical concern. Second, a world government would no more ensure global justice or a global scope of ethical concern than does the state entail universal justice within its own borders. 457 458 Toni Erskine the latter meaning in mind.3 Questioning the exclusive moral claims of local affili- ations (along with a good number of social conventions), he pronounced himself a member of the ethical cosmopolis.4 According to an ethical cosmopolitan perspective, moral commitments extend beyond political borders as well as ethnic, ideological, socioeconomic and religious divides. Put in another way, one’s scope of moral concern is coterminous with no particular community or group of communities (other than the community of human individuals worldwide).5 It is on this understanding of cosmo- politanism and its compatibility (or, indeed, incompatibility) with different sources of value that the subsequent discussion will be focused. The idea of ethical cosmopolitanism is both the subject of intense debate and the object of deep mistrust. This is colourfully illustrated in the passionate response to an essay by Martha Nussbaum published in a special issue of the Boston Review in the autumn of 1994. In this essay, a direct rejoinder to a defence of patriotism, Nussbaum enthusiastically champions ‘the very old ideal of the cosmopolitan, the person whose primary allegiance is to the community of human beings in the entire world’.6 Many of her respondents remain unconvinced. As one sceptic counters, ‘cosmopolitanism has a nice, high-minded ring to it, but it is an illusion, and, like all illusions, perilous’. The root of this charge lies in what this critic sees cosmo- politanism as entailing (or, more accurately, neglecting): Above all, what cosmopolitanism obscures, even denies, are the givens of life: parents, ancestors, family, race, religion, heritage, history, culture, tradition, community—and nationality. These are not ‘accidental’ attributes of the individual. They are essential attributes. We do not come into the world as free-floating, autonomous individuals. We come into it complete with all the particular, defining characteristics that go into a fully formed human being . . .7

3 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. II, trans. R. D. Hicks (London: Heinemann, 1958), Bk.VI, 63, p. 65. This proclamation has also been attributed to other figures. In World Citizenship and Government, p.6, Heater takes the following passage from Montaigne’s Essays: ‘When someone asked of Socrates of what country he was, he did not reply, “Of Athens”, but “of the world”. His was a fuller and wider imagination; he embraced the whole world as his city, and extended his acquaintance, his society, and his affections to all mankind.’ In ‘Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism’, The Journal of , 5 (1997) pp. 1–25 at 5, Martha Nussbaum quotes Marcus Aurelius’s assertion that ‘it makes no difference whether a person lives here or there, provided that wherever he lives, he lives as a citizen of the world’, and attributes Kant’s penchant for this phrase to Aurelius’s influence. 4 As far as flouting social conventions, Diogenes was, among other things, known to reside in a tub. 5 That ethical cosmopolitanism generally is seen to be coterminous (and not merely coextensive) with the community of human individuals is a significant, and often overlooked, qualification. For positions that would characterise this understanding of ethical cosmopolitanism as exclusive, see arguments that one’s scope of ethical concern should extend to non-human animals in, inter alia, Steve F. Sapontzis, ‘Moral Community and Animal Rights’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 22 (1985), pp. 251–7; to all living things in James K. Mishi, ‘The Limits of Moral Community and the Limits of Moral Thought’, Journal of Value Inquiry, 16 (1982), pp. 131–42; and (taking this argument to somewhat bizarre and currently irrelevant lengths), to extra-terrestrials in Donald Scherer, ‘A Disentropic ’, Monist, 71 (1988), pp. 3–32. Moreover, I am referring here to contemporary conceptions of ethical cosmopolitanism. The Stoics would have thought a community of human individuals exclusive for another reason: ethical cosmopolitanism was understood to entail the community of all rational beings, including both humans and gods. (I am grateful to Nicholas Denyer for emphasising this final point.) 6 Nussbaum, ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, Boston Review, XIX (October/November 1994), pp. 3–6, at 3. Nussbaum’s essay responds to Richard Rorty’s article, ‘The Unpatriotic Academy’, New York Times, 13 February 1994, p. E15. 7 Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘The Illusions of Cosmopolitanism’, in Joshua Cohen (ed.), For Love of Country (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996), pp. 72–7, at 77. Impartialist and embedded cosmopolitanisms 459

This challenge to cosmopolitanism is motivated by what is perceived to be a flawed, and potentially dangerous, understanding of individual moral agency. According to this criticism, the moral agent of a cosmopolitan ethic is stripped of layer after layer of presumed contingency until there is no ‘self’ left. The rejection of Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan ideal stems from the eschewal of abstraction and impartiality in moral theory. What is under attack, therefore, might be referred to as impartialist cosmopolitanism. Not only does this reaction reflect current movements in contemporary ethical thought, but it should be viewed as having great significance for anyone concerned with exploring ethics, and, specifically, sources of value, within the discipline of International Relations (IR). An important question for both moral philosophers and normative theorists of international relations is how we get from where we are currently standing, steeped in our own immediate circumstances, with our own particular ties and commitments, to concern for those with whom we share neither kinship nor country, neighbour- hood nor nation. One answer to this question is that we must remove ourselves from such particular (and potentially prejudicing) loyalties in order to achieve an inclusive scope of moral consideration. It is this answer that has incited heated disagreement about the very nature of moral agency, judgement and value. Some positions—inter alia ‘communitarian’ political thought and certain streams of feminist theory—reject the notion that morality must aspire to an impartialist world-view and argue instead that morality is ‘embedded’ in particular social, historical and affective commit- ments.8 As the of context and particularity has been seen as the means of arriving at transnational normative discourse, the possible implications of these firmly anti-impartialist positions cannot be ignored. If we deny an Archimedean point for moral deliberation, what does this mean for ethics at a global level? I will suggest an alternative way of conceiving of ethical cosmopolitanism—a way that might satisfy the critics of an impartialist conception of morality without denying the potential for morally relevant allegiances that are undeterred by borders. I will call this hypothetical position ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’. This discussion will be divided into three parts. In the first section I will explore ‘impartialist cosmopolitanism’ as a focus of criticism for those who assert that morality is impossible in the absence of context and particularity. I will then put forth a position that is meant to provide a stark contrast to impartialist cosmo- politanism. This position, which I will arrive at through a discussion of patriotism, will be called ‘communitarian realism’. After briefly addressing the notion that state

8 Those considered communitarians—predominantly an ascribed classification and not a term of self- description—include the following: Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory [1981], 2nd edn. (London: Duckworth, 1985); Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), Interpretation and Social Criticism: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 1985 (London: Harvard University Press, 1987). Feminist theorists who put forth similar critiques of impartialist morality include Virginia Held, Feminist Morality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), and Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (London: Routledge, 1993), all of whom are influenced by Carol Gilligan’s work in moral developmental psychology. See Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development [1982], 2nd edn. (Harvard University Press, 1993). 460 Toni Erskine borders have value in a strictly instrumental sense (a sense compatible with an impartialist view of morality), I will look at what the idea of the morally constitutive state might mean for defining one’s scope of ethical concern. The final section of this article will suggest the relative merits (and demerits) of an alternative to both impartialist cosmopolitanism and communitarian realism. This alternative will be evaluated for its potential to sustain an account of moral agency as ‘embedded’, to address the deeply problematic issue of the moral relevance of state borders, and to accommodate an inclusive scope of ethical concern.9

‘Citizens of nowhere’: the limits of impartialist cosmopolitanism

By ‘impartialist cosmopolitanism’, I mean an understanding of morality that binds a universal scope of inclusion inextricably to an account of moral agency according to which deliberation requires one to abstract from the perceived prejudices of particular ties and loyalties. It is important to establish from the outset that the label ‘impartialist cosmopolitanism’ does not, for the purposes of this discussion, represent a single philosophical perspective. Rather, I will construct this position in order to illustrate the site of opposition for those (equally diverse) theorists who maintain that morality must have a particularist starting-point. This discussion will proceed from two related assumptions: that impartialist cosmopolitanism is better understood as a perceived theoretical point of departure than as a single, monolithic position (that all too easily might be propped up and knocked down); and, that proponents and critics of impartiality in moral theory are often engaged in somewhat asymmetrical arguments. What the supporters of impartiality are defending is, simply, the view that morality depends on an impersonal standpoint from which equal consideration is given to all persons. According to this position, abstraction, or limiting knowledge of subjective particulars, is a feature of moral deliberation that is necessary to ensure that a privileged position is granted to no one person or group of people.10 It is important to note that strong arguments support the assertion that impartiality in moral deliberation need not be accompanied by a lack of attention to particularity.11 Indeed, any division between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ ethics requires myriad qualifications. Those who claim to reject abstraction for context in moral reasoning

9 This article will thereby be primarily concerned with establishing embedded cosmopolitanism as a distinct normative approach to the study of international relations. Of course, how this position frames specific practical problems in international relations, and whether it does so in a way that is more compelling than those normative perspectives generally employed, are extremely important questions. I confront them in ‘Embedded Cosmopolitanism and the Case of War: Restraint, Discrimination and Overlapping Loyalties’, Global Society, 14 (2000), pp. 569–90, by analysing how the ‘enemy’ non-combatant is perceived from this proposed position in the context of organised violence. 10 One example of this perspective can be found in approaches to international ethics influenced by ’s A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). See Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979) and Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1989). 11 See, for example, Onora O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 39–44. O’Neill maintains that abstract (as opposed to ‘idealised’) reasoning does not preclude sensitivity to context. Impartialist and embedded cosmopolitanisms 461 often seem to illustrate an account of impartialist morality that is more caricature than accurate portraiture. Yet, despite the frequent over-simplification of their theo- retical foil, the advocates of a particularist moral starting-point articulate positions that are in many respects compelling and worthy of careful examination. It is the implications of these positions for normative theorising in IR with which I will be concerned. Critics of an impartialist cosmopolitan position lament its failure to acknowledge the role of community and social relationships in constituting both selfhood and agency. They reject the perceived underlying assumption of impartialist cosmo- politanism: that we can be removed from our social contexts and still possess a rich enough embodiment of who we are in order to arrive at moral decisions. The vision of the moral agent as independent of particular attachments is disparaged as lacking substance: Iris Murdoch calls it ‘thin as a needle’,12 and Alasdair MacIntyre describes its ‘attenuated, ghostly quality’.13 Carol Gilligan, in her influential chal- lenge to conventional developmental psychology, criticises the ‘skeletal lives’ of make-believe people invoked in abstract moral dilemmas.14 Responding to Nussbaum’s essay, Benjamin Barber charges that Nussbaum ‘understates the thinness of cosmopolitanism,’ claiming that ‘the idea of cosmopolitanism offers little or nothing for the human psyche to fasten on’.15 An image of cosmopolitanism as an anaemic ethic thereby emerges—one requiring metaphysical leaps that are impossible for real flesh-and-blood moral agents. To extend the metaphor common to MacIntyre, Murdoch, Gilligan and Barber, the self is ethically emaciated.16 This analysis has serious implications for ethics at a global level if an inclusive scope of concern is seen to rely on an impartialist understanding of morality. If one adheres to this view, a moral perspective that claims to be constituted by particular relationships can only promise exclusive moral enclaves and not moral commitments that travel. A particularist moral starting-point would thereby undermine the potential for ethical cosmopolitanism. MacIntyre, for one, seems willing to accept this repercussion. He insists that the roles he inhabits and the social and historical communities to which he belongs constitute his ‘moral starting point’ and give his life ‘its own moral particularity’: [W]e all approach our own circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity. I am someone’s son or daughter, someone else’s cousin or uncle; I am a citizen of this or that city, a member of this or that guild or profession, I belong to this clan, that tribe, this nation.17 MacIntyre is critical of attempts to posit an ethical perspective that would transcend these particular loyalties. He provides an uncompromising rejection of both an impartialist world-view and ethical cosmopolitanism. By ‘aspiring to be at home anywhere’, MacIntyre chastises, we have become ‘citizens of nowhere’. He describes

12 Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 53. 13 MacIntyre, ‘How Moral Agents Become Ghosts or Why the History of Ethics Diverged From That of the ’, Synthese, 53 (1982), pp. 292–312, at 309. 14 Gilligan, Different Voice, p.100. 15 Benjamin R. Barber, ‘Constitutional Faith’, Boston Review, XIX (October/November 1994), pp. 14–15, at 14. Emphasis not in the original. 16 In Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), Michael Walzer uses the same image of a ‘thin’ universalism but claims to do so without the pejorative connotations. 17 MacIntyre, After Virtue, p.220. 462 Toni Erskine this modern malady as ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’.18 His cure is to accept a delimited scope of ethical concern, a concession that he acknowledges entails some degree of .19 The question that must be addressed by the normative theorist of international relations in light of the anti-impartialist movements within moral philosophy, political theory, and, most recently, within IR itself, can then be worded as follows: If one challenges the alleged ‘rootlessness’ of an impartialist position, is one doomed to conceding MacIntyre’s moral parochialism? This is a complex question. Demand for ethical discourse that would recognise the ‘embeddedness’ of our moral experience is vulnerable to the charge that it would also require us to prefer those with whom we share this experience. Such a preference could be argued to exclude broader moral obligations. Moreover, an embedded ethical perspective can be accused of precluding a critical measure by which accepted values might be questioned. One might argue that challenges to the perceived moral boundaries of ‘primary’ loyalties and conventional relationships are thereby resisted. The objection that an embedded morality is both partial and conservative is raised in the liberal indictment that the communitarian politics of the ‘common good’ fosters prejudice and intolerance.20 Similarly, Seyla Benhabib cautions with respect to Gilligan’s ‘ethic of care’ that ‘group solidarity may often be achieved at the expense of moral disregard and contempt for individuals who are not group members’.21 When one makes the jump from the local to the global, from interpersonal relations to international relations, it is necessary to examine this risk of exclusion as arising not only from a sense of primary loyalty and affection in the forms of familial relations and communal ties, but also between the (often analogously portrayed) bonds of fellow citizens. This possibility of exclusion can be illustrated by momentarily turning from cosmopolitanism to a discussion of patriotism.

State borders and the situated self: the ethic of patriotism

The purpose of this section is to explore the nature of an understanding of individual moral agency that is dependent on notions of citizenship and statehood. I will begin by examining the behaviour of one such conception of moral agency in the context of an ethic of patriotism. Patriotic sentiment is often condemned as immoral. Leo Tolstoy, for example, defining patriotism as ‘the exclusive desire for the well-being of one’s own people’, sees it as an unquestionable evil and describes it as ‘the root of war’.22 Nevertheless, I am concerned with the attempt to justify patriotism as a moral position through the appeal to constitutive attachments. According to this line of reasoning, it is because moral value is located within a

18 MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth, 1988), p. 388. 19 Ibid., pp. 352–67. 20 Michael Sandel, Liberalism and Its Critics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 7. 21 Seyla Benhabib, ‘The Debate over Women and Moral Theory Revisited’, in Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 178–202, at 188. 22 Leo Tolstoy, ‘Patriotism, or Peace?’, in Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence (Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1987), p.140. Impartialist and embedded cosmopolitanisms 463 particular relationship, namely citizenship, that the individual is justified in her over- riding commitment to the well-being of the state and to the preferential care of her compatriots. However, before exploring this account of patriotism—one that is forcefully articulated by MacIntyre—it is necessary to say something further about the nature of patriotism and, more specifically, the disparate accounts of moral agency with which it might be associated.

Patriotism for impartialists

I will take patriotism to involve the granting of primary loyalty to one’s own state and one’s fellow citizens.23 It is important to recognise that it is possible (although, perhaps, counter-intuitive) to conceive of an impartialist justification of patriotism. Two quite different examples of such a justification can be found in both consequen- tialist and rights-based arguments. In order briefly to show how it might be possible to construct an argument for the preferential treatment of compatriots that does not rely on a particularist moral starting-point, I will outline the consequentialist and rights- based positions put forth by Robert Goodin and Alan Gewirth, respectively.24 These defences of state-centric spheres of concern will provide important points of contrast for the understanding of patriotism as arising from morally constitutive bonds of citizenship—the account upon which I will subsequently focus. There are two significant aspects of the positions of Goodin and Gewirth with respect to the current discussion. First, they do not present the preference for compatriots and the accompanying delimited sphere of moral concern that define patriotic sentiment as ethical positions by virtue of the constitutive value of the particular relationships themselves. Instead, the moral licence to give priority to compatriots is argued to arise from universal duties or principles. Second, this circumscription of the scope of moral concern is necessarily qualified. Loyalty to particular others (compatriots) and the concomitant recognition of duties that are unique to these others can never completely eclipse the duties that one has to everyone qua human being. Charles Beitz refers to a similarly qualified understand- ing of patriotism as ‘patriotism for cosmopolitans’—his own variation on which he describes as ‘a patriotism based on loyalty to a just constitution, and which acknow- ledges obligations to outsiders that could override obligations to compatriots’.25

23 This definition can become problematic if one considers that both statehood and citizenship (and their respective relationships with the concepts of nation and nationality) involve theoretical as well as, in practice, hotly contested claims. In ‘Cosmopolitanism and Boredom’, Radical Philosophy, 85 (1997), pp. 28–32, at 28, Bruce Robbins makes the astute point that particular political allegiances cannot a priori be accepted as directed towards concrete and easily categorised entities. The complexity of both moral identity and the idea of morally constitutive borders will be considered in the final section of this article. 24 Robert E. Goodin, ‘What Is So Special about Our Fellow Countrymen?’ Ethics, 98 (1988), pp. 663–86; Alan Gewirth, ‘Ethical Universalism and Particularism’, Journal of Philosophy, 85 (1988), pp. 283–302. 25 Charles Beitz, ‘Patriotism for Cosmopolitans’, Boston Review, XIX (October/November 1994), pp. 23–24, at 23. Similarly, Stephen Nathanson offers what he argues to be a morally acceptable ‘moderate patriotism’ in his ‘In Defense of “Moderate Patriotism”’, Ethics, 99 (1989), pp. 535–52, at 538: ‘We can hold that patriotism is a virtue so long as the actions it encourages are not themselves immoral. So long as devotion and loyalty to one’s country do not lead to immoral actions, then patriotism can be quite laudable. When concern for their own country blinds people to the legitimate needs and interests of other nations, then patriotism becomes a vice.’ 464 Toni Erskine

Goodin’s position fits easily into Beitz’s classification while also giving meaning to Tennyson’s prima facie contradictory verse that ‘[t]hat man’s the best cosmopolite/ that loves his native country best’.26 Goodin argues that general duties are most effectively fulfilled if they are ‘subdivided’.27 He thereby champions a moral paro- chialism that is both artificial and functional. His delimitation of the scope of moral concern presupposes a universal moral horizon: the very partitioning of ethical consideration is justified because it benefits everyone. Goodin portrays a ‘rule of universal partiality’ as the most efficient means of allocating responsibility for moral actions.28 He explains special duties as follows: My preferred approach to special duties is to regard them as being merely ‘distributed general duties’. This is to say, special duties are in my view merely devices whereby the moral community’s general duties are assigned to particular agents.29 Suggesting that national boundaries provide subdividing functions, Goodin reveals what might be called a consequentialist approach to patriotism. According to this approach, to which Goodin refers as the ‘assigned responsibility model’, citizenship is merely ‘a device for fixing special responsibility in some agent for discharging our general duties vis-à-vis each particular person’.30 All that distinguishes Goodin’s view from the impartialist cosmopolitanism position discussed above is that a global scope is deliberately reduced in favour of what is argued to be a universally beneficial moral parochialism. The account of moral agency embraced by the two positions is identical. In fact, Nussbaum, criticising pro-patriotic arguments in favour of an impartialist cosmopolitan stance, articulates a position that is remarkably similar to Goodin’s notion of distributed general duties: If we really do believe that all human beings are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights, we are morally required to think about what that conception requires us to do with and for the rest of the world. Once again, that does not mean that one may not permissibly give one’s own sphere a special degree of concern. Politics, like child care, will be poorly done if each thinks herself equally responsible for all, rather than giving the immediate surroundings special care.31 If we consider those in our ‘immediate surroundings’ to include our fellow citizens, then the positions of Goodin and Nussbaum are compatible.32 For Goodin, special duties—such as those recognised between compatriots—are not actually ‘special’ at

26 Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘Hands All Round’ [1885], The Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), pp. 371–2, at 371. 27 Goodin, ‘Fellow Countrymen’, p. 681. 28 Ibid., p. 664, fn. 2. 29 Ibid., p. 678. 30 Ibid., p. 686. 31 Nussbaum, ‘Patriotism’, p.6. 32 That Nussbaum would take this step is apparent in another version of the same argument. In ‘Reply’, in Cohen (ed.), Love of Country, pp. 131–44 (at 135–6), Nussbaum acknowledges that ‘[n]one of the major thinkers in the cosmopolitan tradition denied that we can and should give special attention to our own families and to our own ties of religious and national belonging. In obvious ways, we must do so, since the nation-state sets up the basic terms for most of our daily conduct, and since we are all born into a family of some sort. Cosmopolitans hold, moreover, that it is right to give the local an additional measure of concern. But the primary reason a cosmopolitan should have for this is not that the local person is better per se, but rather that this is the only sensible way to do good.’ Emphasis not in the original. Impartialist and embedded cosmopolitanisms 465 all: ‘[a]t root, they are merely the general duties that everyone has toward everyone else worldwide’.33 Goodin’s subsuming of ‘special’ duties under ‘general’ duties in the previous statement—to the extent that he feels able to deny the existence of special duties altogether—might seem a particularly unhelpful way of providing a moral justific- ation for patriotic loyalties. In fact, it might appear that he is rejecting the idea that duties to those with whom one stands in a particular relationship have any moral backing at all. Yet, Goodin’s argument is more sophisticated than a prolonged focus on his professed annulment of special duties might lead one to believe. He maintains that there are special duties in the sense that one might have obligations to fellow citizens that one does not have to the rest of the world. It is necessary to go back to the terminology of H. L. A. Hart upon which Goodin draws in order to get beyond the apparent doublespeak of this position. Goodin denies that there are any ‘special’ duties only in the sense that such duties arise out of some particular relationship in which individuals stand to each other. (This is the way in which Hart employs the label.)34 In other words, he denies that such duties have independent moral force. Goodin’s consequentialist angle allows him to remain faithful to this denial while still advocating the partial treatment of compatriots: duties to particular others are, indeed, morally justified, but only because they are a means of realising universal, impartially derived, obligations. Like Goodin, Gewirth aims to provide a universalist justification for giving preferential consideration to people with whom one has a special relationship. Yet, Gewirth is deeply critical of such arguments if they justify particular loyalties by presenting them ‘as means to the universalist end of advancing some kind of overall equality taken as a fundamental value’. In other words, he would reject the conse- quentialist position put forth by Goodin. Gewirth argues instead that he is able to establish ‘intrinsic justifications of certain kinds of ethical particularism’.35 Gewirth describes his position as falling under the ‘“Kantian” principle of human rights’36 and focuses on accounting for the ‘particularist priorities of one’s country’.37 He acknowledges that the term ‘patriotism’ can be used to describe such a focus of concern, but cautions that the particularist priorities for which he is attempting to provide justification would exclude forms of patriotism that involve violations of human rights.38 ‘Within the limits set by such violations’, Gewirth continues,

33 Goodin, ‘Fellow Countrymen’, p. 681. 34 Hart, in fact, uses the label ‘special’ to qualify rights. Nevertheless, as Goodin explicitly takes the labels ‘general’ and ‘special’ from Hart (see Goodin, ‘Fellow Countrymen’ p.665, fn.3), we might assume that, for him, they serve the same function in qualifying duties. In ‘Are There Any Natural Rights?’, Philosophical Review, 64 (1955), pp. 175–91, at 183, Hart defines special rights as follows: ‘When rights arise out of special transactions between individuals or out of some special relationship in which they stand to each other, both the persons who have the right and those who have the corresponding obligation are limited to the parties to the special transaction or relationship. I call such rights special rights to distinguish them from those moral rights which are thought of as rights against (i.e., as imposing obligations upon) everyone’. Emphasis not in the original. 35 Gewirth, ‘Ethical Universalism’, p. 289. 36 Ibid., p. 288. Compare this position to that of Richard Dagger in ‘Rights, Boundaries, and the Bond of Community: A Qualified Defense of Moral Parochialism’, American Political Science Review, 79 (1985), pp. 436–47. Dagger argues that the principle of fair play can ground a special obligation to give priority to the needs of compatriots. 37 Gewirth, ‘Ethical Universalism’, p. 298. 38 Ibid., p. 298. 466 Toni Erskine there are justified kinds of loyalty to one’s country...whereby one has special concern for its flourishing both collectively and distributively. The objects of concern may range from its national security and welfare policies to its political institutions and economic workings, social and cultural arrangements and traditions, and even aesthetic considerations, as well as the communal relationships fostered by living together in a political society.39 His defence of these ‘justified loyalties’ rests on the belief that human rights are necessary for the protection of individual agency and that the state—specifically the democratic state—is the protector of human rights. ‘Given these universalist justifications of the minimal and democratic state,’ he reasons, ‘the state’s protection of basic and other rights serves, in turn, to justify the particularist allegiance of its members to its own flourishing’.40 I will now turn to a justification of the morality of patriotism that appeals directly to a particularist moral starting-point and thereby treats this justification as neither derivative of, nor subservient to, universal principles. This account of patriotism relies on the idea of morally constitutive attachments; namely, those that exist within the state. The fundamental difference between the accounts of patriotism addressed above and the idea of patriotism as a manifestation of morally constitutive attach- ments is simply that only the former can claim an impartialist account of morality. Whereas consequentialist and rights-based variations on patriotism rely on a conception of the moral agent as existing independently of the state (even if the state is seen to be necessary in order to protect the individual’s capacity for agency, as Gewirth argues), the very idea that state membership is constitutive of morality means that it is impossible for the moral agent to be removed from the context of her role as citizen of the state.

Communitarian realism

A useful illustration of the idea of the morally constitutive state is drawn by MacIntyre in a lecture on the ‘virtue’ of loyalty to one’s own particular country.41 While MacIntyre does not present this position as his own, but rather as a characterisation of one pole on a spectrum of conceptions of patriotism (at the other end of which such loyalty is disclaimed as a vice), his argument follows his own philosophical commitments. For MacIntyre, moral agency is acquired through membership in a particular community. ‘Deprived of the life of that community’, he maintains, ‘I would have no reason to be moral.’42 This communitarian approach to patriotism rejects any attempt at impartialist justification. MacIntyre adamantly dismisses moves to qualify patriotism, such as those advanced above. The approach that I have referred to as ‘patriotism for impartialists’, disapprovingly alluded to by MacIntyre as ‘a perfectly proper devotion to one’s own nation which must never be

39 Ibid., p. 299. 40 Ibid., p. 301. 41 MacIntyre, ‘Is Patriotism a Virtue?’, in Ronald Beiner (ed.), Theorising Citizenship (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 209–28. 42 Ibid., p. 217. Impartialist and embedded cosmopolitanisms 467 allowed to violate constraints set by the impersonal moral standpoint’, is presented as decidedly unpatriotic.43 In the course of this essay, MacIntyre ties his communitarian view of moral agency to the state. For MacIntyre, the conviction that we are defined by the associations to which we belong, and the practices within which we participate, provides a strong foundation for the position that patriotism, or loyalty to one’s political community, is indeed a virtue. ‘A central contention of the morality of patriotism,’ he argues, ‘is that I will obliterate and lose a central dimension of the moral life if I do not understand the enacted narrative of my own individual life as embedded in the history of my country.’44 This blending of a communitarian account of moral agency with the conviction that it is the state that is morally constitutive produces a distinctly moral realist position, according to which ethical consideration is curtailed by political borders. MacIntyre’s depiction of the moral basis of patriotism might, therefore, be described as exhibiting a ‘communitarian realism’.45 In order to fully justify this ascription, it is necessary to turn to MacIntyre’s account of the scope of ethical concern that accompanies his illustration of the morally constitutive state. Invoking MacIntyre is helpful as he is never one to evade the less palatable aspects of his avowed particular ‘moral starting point’. MacIntyre’s virtuous patriotism has serious implications in terms of one’s moral bearing to those outside one’s country. True to form, MacIntyre readily acknowledges these implications. In a language that seems to vindicate Tolstoy’s fears, while remaining impervious to his condemnations, MacIntyre concedes the lack of moral standing that ‘communitar- ian realism’ would allow individuals qua human beings: [E]verything that I have said on behalf of the morality of patriotism is compatible with it being the case that on occasion patriotism might require me to support and work for the success of some enterprise of my nation as crucial to its overall project, crucial perhaps to its survival, when the success of that enterprise would not be in the best interests of humankind . . . 46 A much earlier appeal by Tolstoy could have been a reaction to MacIntyre’s boldness. ‘How can this patriotism’, Tolstoy demands, ‘whence come human sufferings incalculable, sufferings both physical and moral, be necessary, and be a virtue?’47 MacIntyre would certainly respond, from the position that he has adopted in this specific article, that giving predominance to the state, even when this means

43 Ibid., p. 112. 44 Ibid., p. 224. 45 It is important to make two clarifications here. First, although this position that I label ‘communitarian realism’ reflects the problematic move within normative IR theory of equating the idea of the morally constitutive community with the state, it is not intended to be representative of a single ‘communitarian’ position in IR theory. Rather, it is meant to provide a useful foil for both impartialist and ‘embedded’ ethical cosmopolitan positions. Second, while ‘communitarian’ is a fitting description of much of MacIntyre’s work, his assumption in the essay invoked here that ‘community’ is synonymous with ‘state’ is neither a feature of his other writings, nor a characteristic of the so- called ‘communitarian’ writings in . (IR theory thereby makes a significant departure from political philosophy by accepting this association.) 46 MacIntyre, ‘Is Patriotism a Virtue?’, p. 222. 47 Tolstoy, ‘Patriotism, or Peace?’, p. 144. Emphasis in the original. 468 Toni Erskine abandoning the possibility of ethical appeals that might be argued to extend beyond it, is a moral position because the survival of the state is a moral necessity.48 This argument for granting a special degree of moral concern to compatriots thereby has potentially harsher implications for those beyond the borders of the state than would be allowed under the impartialist positions looked at above. The delimited sphere of moral concern advocated by Goodin, conceded by Nussbaum, and defended by Gewirth allows treating the needs of fellow citizens first, but not (if the positions are to remain internally consistent) to the detriment of ‘outsiders’. As Goodin acknowledges, [i]f special duties can be shown to derive the whole of their moral force from their connections to general duties then they are susceptible to being overridden (at least at the margins, or in exceptional circumstances) by those more general considerations. In this way, it turns out that ‘our fellow countrymen’ are not so very special after all. The same thing that makes us worry mainly about them should also make us worry, at least a little, about the rest of the world, too.49 Conversely, in keeping with the ethic of patriotism illustrated by MacIntyre, moral concern may stop at the borders of the state without qualification. Communitarian realism and impartialist cosmopolitanism—at least in their idealised forms—are two normative approaches to the study of international relations that are diametrically opposed. While communitarian realism relies on an account of moral agency as embedded, the moral agent of an impartialist cosmopolitan perspective is necessarily removed from all particularity during moral deliberation. Communitarian realism concedes that moral concern is coterminous with the borders of the state; impartialist cosmopolitanism claims a global moral purview. Finally, the state is the locus of value according to communitarian realism, whereas this same political association is a mere contingency from the perspective of impartialist cosmopolitanism. These two positions provide the points of theoretical opposition for the discussion that follows. The position tentatively labelled ‘em- bedded cosmopolitanism’ would combine a commitment to the idea of the moral agent as radically situated with an inclusive scope of ethical concern—an alternative ruled out by both communitarian realism and impartialist cosmopolitanism.

‘The point where circles intersect’: towards a theory of embedded cosmopolitanism

The ethic of patriotism extracted from MacIntyre’s work might be seen as an extreme example of how an embedded moral perspective would deal with questions of transnational concern. (Perhaps due to his avowed, and long-held, anti-liberalism,

48 One might reasonably question the implications for this position when what MacIntyre calls the ‘enacted narrative’ of one’s life is embedded in the history of a country committed to a tradition—of human rights, for example—that demands that the survival of the state and claims of necessity defer to the well-being of ‘outsiders’. Can communitarian realism simultaneously condone the complete disregard of the non-citizen’s moral standing and support a principle that demands that her well- being take precedence over the well-being of the state? In ‘Embedded Cosmopolitanism and the Case of War’, p.580, I demonstrate why this must be answered in the affirmative. 49 Goodin, ‘Fellow Countrymen’, p. 679. Impartialist and embedded cosmopolitanisms 469

MacIntyre is not as moved by aspirations of inclusion as some of his more liberal ‘communitarian’ contemporaries, including Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer.)50 Indeed, there are theorists who, unlike MacIntyre, propose a situated moral agent without conceding a scope of ethical concern that ends abruptly at state borders. Significant examples are the following: Mervyn Frost’s neo-Hegelian project of reconciling state sovereignty with human rights through a ‘constitutive theory of individuality’;51 John Rawls’s relatively recent attempt to arrive at global principles of justice while maintaining his ‘political’ interpretation of liberalism;52 and, Walzer’s suggestion that we might achieve an inclusive ethic from within our own morally defining community (his metaphorical cave) by ‘vicariously endorsing’ the positions of those beyond its boundaries.53 These theories differ radically from each other, yet each claims an account of the moral self that is constituted (to various degrees) by the community. Moreover, all three positions provide an important challenge to the conviction that an account of moral agency as embedded neces- sarily entails a delimited scope of ethical consideration.54 My concern with them is that they assume the morally constitutive community to be spatially bounded, if not explicitly state-centric. The result is a moral perspective that is defined in terms of a determinate group of outsiders. While these positions provide alternatives to communitarian realism, they necessarily fall short of achieving an inclusive ethic.55

50 MacIntyre, ‘An Interview with Thomas D. Pearson’, Kinesis, 23 (1996), pp. 40–50, at 47: ‘My critique of liberalism is one of the few things that has gone unchanged in my overall view throughout my life. Ever since I understood liberalism, I have wanted nothing to do with it—and that was when I was 17 years old.’ One completely anomalous and somewhat puzzling essay by MacIntyre implies that he might be becoming concerned about inclusion. In ‘How Can We Learn From What Veritatis Splendor Has to Teach?’, The Thomist, 58 (1994), pp. 171–195, at 187, MacIntyre responds to some of his critics by adopting a definition of the person as a ‘culture transcending animal’. Yet, he does not seem able to reconcile this Thomist position with his avowed commitment to a particularist moral starting-point. 51 Mervyn Frost, Ethics in International Relations: A Constitutive Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 52 While I think that one misrepresents Rawls to call him a ‘communitarian’ (a view not shared by, among others, Sybil Schwarzenbach in ‘Rawls, Hegel, and ’, Political Theory, 19 (1991), pp. 539–71), his post- A Theory of Justice writings move towards a more situated understanding of the moral agent. In ‘Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14 (1985), pp. 223–51, Rawls claims that the conception of the self as abstracted from social and historical context upon which he relies in A Theory of Justice is not a metaphysical presupposition but a means of agreeing upon the good. Moreover, he locates this conception of the self within a particular political tradition. In ‘The Law of Peoples’, in Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (eds.), On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993 (New York: Basic Books, 1993) and ‘50 Years After Hiroshima’, Dissent (Summer 1995), pp. 323–7, he argues that this ‘political’ understanding of liberalism might yield inter- national principles of justice that would extend beyond the context of liberal democratic society. He has elaborated upon this position in The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 53 Walzer, Thick and Thin, p.7. I take this position to be fundamentally different from the ‘reiterative universalist’ stance that he describes in ‘Nation and Universe’, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values XI (Salt Lake City: Utah University Press, 1990), pp. 507–56. 54 Nevertheless, it is important to note a fundamental way in which Rawls’s approach diverges from the other two—and from embedded cosmopolitanism. Instead of beginning with an account of moral agency as ‘embedded’ and endeavouring to grant this starting-point the capacity for inclusion and critical distance, Rawls assumes an impartialist position (his continued employment of the ‘veil of ignorance’ represents an enduring reliance upon impartiality in moral deliberation) to which he strives to lend context. I explore this point of contrast in ‘Embedded Cosmopolitanism: The Morally Constitutive Community, Normative IR Theory and the Case of Non-Combatant Immunity’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1999. 55 I come to these conclusions regarding the work of Walzer and Frost in ‘The Morally Constitutive Community, Normative IR Theory and the Case of Non-Combatant Immunity’. O’Neill unveils the necessarily exclusive nature of Rawls’s political liberalism in ‘Political Liberalism and Public Reason’, Philosophical Review, 106 (1997), pp. 411–28. 470 Toni Erskine

It would, however, be premature to reject embedded cosmopolitanism as a viable ethical perspective. The insights of two (very different) philosophers provide some indication of how one might begin to construct an inclusive ethic and still claim a particularist source of value. Both philosophers question the same boundaries that define MacIntyre’s virtuous patriotism and impede the aspirations to global inclusion that characterise the positions of Frost, (the most recent ‘later’) Rawls, and Walzer. Onora O’Neill has woven into her commitment to transnational justice a challenge to the assumption that identities exhibit either the singularity or the permanence that could justify bounded states.56 Marilyn Friedman’s sympathy with the idea that communities are morally constitutive is tempered with a denial that they need to be either inherited or territorially defined.57 Neither O’Neill nor Friedman are obvious allies to whom one would make appeals in support of embedded cosmopolitanism. O’Neill is deeply suspicious of positions that lay claim to a particularist or embedded moral starting-point.58 Friedman embraces the notion of the socially constituted self but balks at the possibility of then achieving a cosmopolitan scope of concern.59 Nevertheless, by very briefly turning to both O’Neill’s inquiry into the ‘legitimacy of the institution of boundaries’,60 and Friedman’s project to ‘transform the communitarian vision of self and community into a more congenial ally for feminist theory’,61 it might be possible to sketch a more sophisticated conception of the ‘embedded’ moral agent and an understanding of community that neither takes for granted nor ignores the moral significance of borders. Both moves are vital to establishing a viable theory of embedded cosmopolitanism.

Multiple identities, ‘dislocated’ communities and overlapping memberships

O’Neill challenges the notion that appeals to identity, whether cultural, historical or national, can be used to lend legitimacy to state borders. The understanding of identity that she puts forth in order to make this argument provides a lens through which it might be possible to bring into clearer view the route to exclusion taken by some who define morality through particular attachments, while also refocusing the idea of the ‘embedded’ moral agent. Underlying O’Neill’s illustration of identity is an unwavering concern for inclusion. ‘To have a sense of identity is to have a certain constellation of views of oneself’, O’Neill explains, ‘of whom one recognises as other, of who will recognise one as fellow countryman or woman or as foreign, as of

56 O’Neill, ‘Transnational Justice: Permeable Boundaries and Multiple Identities’, in Preston King (ed.), and the Common Good: New Fabian Essays (London: Frank Cass, 1996), pp. 291–302. O’Neill articulates a less developed argument along the same lines in her earlier essay, ‘Justice and Boundaries’, in Chris Brown (ed.), Political Restructuring in Europe: Ethical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 69–88. 57 Friedman, ‘Modern Friendship: Dislocating the Community’, Ethics, 99 (1989), pp. 275–90. 58 The neo-Kantian philosophy of O’Neill provides a nuanced and compelling articulation of what I have labelled ‘impartialist cosmopolitanism’. 59 Friedman, ‘The Social Self and the Partiality Debates’, in Claudia Card (ed.), Feminist Ethics (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1991), pp. 161–79, at 176. 60 O’Neill, ‘Permeable Boundaries’, p. 291. 61 Friedman, ‘Modern Friendship’, p. 277. Impartialist and embedded cosmopolitanisms 471 the faith or as infidel, and to feel appropriate sentiments of affiliation and its lack’.62 It is perhaps due to this acute awareness that identity creates outsiders (when it is based on anything more local than our common humanity) that she refuses to grant any single ‘identity’ the capacity to be exclusively determinate. Instead, O’Neill asserts that one’s sense of self ‘is not an unquestionable, singular and non-negotiable given’.63 From this important qualification she arrives at the complexity of identity: ‘It is this indeterminacy of (senses of) identity that makes multiple identities possible’.64 Yet, this is only half of O’Neill’s position on identity. After all, the idea that identities are multiple corresponds effortlessly with the image of concentric circles of morally defining associations, a position that is itself compatible with the conviction against which O’Neill is arguing: that identities justify bounded states. The second half of O’Neill’s depiction of identity is both critical to her own argument and extremely valuable to mine. O’Neill maintains that while some identities might correspond with territories, other identities are irreducible to location. Not only does O’Neill provide us with the helpful reminder that while states are territorial, membership within them need not be,65 but she frequently returns to a theme of ‘the non-coincidence of national and other identities with territory’.66 The significance of this position for an embedded cosmopolitan perspective can be elucidated by turning to Friedman’s discussion of community. Feminist critics of communitarian political thought make the point that the morally constitutive community is often a realm of oppression and exclusion.67 It is within this context that Friedman discusses the possibility of dislocating the com- munity. Friedman counters the merely instrumental conception of social relation- ships found in the impartialist cosmopolitan position addressed above.68 Neverthe- less, she is critical of the sources of value invoked by many of those theorists who would assert a particularist moral starting-point. ‘Communitarians,’ Friedman charges, ‘invoke a model of community which is focused particularly on families, neighbourhoods, and nations.’ Borrowing from sociology, Friedman refers to such bounded communities as ‘communities of place’. These are the types of com- munities that Friedman claims ‘have harboured social roles and structures which have been highly oppressive to women’.69 Friedman, like O’Neill, is sensitive to the possibility of exclusion and denies that it is inevitable by emphasising that no single association, attachment or commitment

62 O’Neill, ‘Permeable Boundaries’, p. 299. 63 Ibid., p. 297. 64 Ibid., p. 299. Emphasis in the original. 65 Ibid., p. 292. 66 O’Neill, ‘Justice and Boundaries’, p. 85. 67 Elizabeth Frazer and Nicola Lacey, The Politics of Community: A Feminist Critique of the Liberal- Communitarian Debate (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 130–62; Friedman, ‘Modern Friendship’, ‘The Social Self’; Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family (Basic Books, 1989), pp. 41–73; Joan Tronto, ‘Beyond Gender Difference to a Theory of Care’, Signs, 12 (1987), pp. 644–63, at 662; Donna Greschner, ‘Feminist Concerns with the New Communitarians: We Don’t Need Another Hero’, in Allan C. Hutchinson and Leslie J. M. Green (eds.), Law and the Community: The End of ? (Toronto: Carswell, 1989), pp. 119–50; and Iris Marion Young, ‘The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference’, Social Theory and Practice, 12 (1986), pp. 12–13. 68 Friedman, ‘The Impracticality of Impartiality’, The Journal of Philosophy, 86 (1989), pp. 645–56; ‘The Social Self’; ‘Modern Friendship’. 69 Friedman, ‘Modern Friendship’, p. 277. 472 Toni Erskine defines the self so as to preclude the influence of other affiliations: ‘Human beings participate in a variety of communities and social relationships, not only across time but at any one time’.70 Instead of accepting that the communities constitutive of moral identity are determinate, exclusive, and unalterable, Friedman suggests the moral relevance of what she refers to as ‘communities of choice’.71 ‘The problem,’ she observes, ‘is not simply to appreciate community per se but, rather, to reconcile the conflicting claims, demands, and identity-defining influences of the variety of communities of which one is a part’.72 By combining an account of the embedded moral agent with a powerful critique of the communitarian penchant for invoking associations with borders, set territories and given memberships, Friedman offers an alternative to a strictly state-centric or spatially bounded interpretation of the morally constitutive community. In an argument that corresponds at many points with O’Neill’s depiction of identity, Friedman evokes the image of communities that can have geographically dispersed memberships as well as communities that are integrated with, or projected upon, other communities. This reconstitution of the morally relevant community provides the basis for an account of moral agency as embedded that might be compatible with an inclusive scope of ethical concern. Before giving some substance to what is now little more than critique and conjecture, it is necessary to address a likely criticism of Friedman’s understanding of community. Friedman’s proposed conception of the self, as constituted by social relationships and yet somehow ‘free’ to chose between them, is one that might be argued to be burdened with an inherent . Is she not herself adopting the ‘pre-social’ self of the impartialist position that she claims to reject? Although the semantics of Friedman’s distinction between ‘found’ and ‘chosen’ communities is misleading (the phrase ‘dislocated’ community, which she uses interchangeably with ‘chosen’ community, is perhaps more appropriate), Friedman’s position need not be undermined by this charge. Her theory of an alternative and complementary understanding of community—the dislocated community—does not entail denying the constitutive force of communities that are found. For Friedman, the self does not shed all morally defining associations in order to experiment with new ones. Rather, Friedman simply acknowledges that after being born into a set of circumstances, one can establish new relationships and participate in different communities—communities that might be every bit as significant in defining the self as the bounded communities into which one is born. This is what O’Neill calls the ‘malleability of (senses of) identity’;73 this is Friedman’s idea of the complex social self who is defined by ‘her various and variant identity constituents’.74 What does this all mean for an analysis of embedded cosmopolitanism? Friedman suggests that inclusion may be compatible with an account of the moral agent as socially constituted if we radically rethink the nature of the communities that are taken to be defining. Three possible manifestations of her challenge to ‘communities of place’ provide exciting possibilities for understanding ethics in international relations: the idea of morally constitutive transnational communities, the notion of

70 Ibid., p. 282. 71 Ibid., p. 284. 72 Ibid., p. 282. 73 O’Neill, ‘Permeable Boundaries’, p. 300. Emphasis in the original. 74 Friedman, ‘The Social Self’, p. 171. Emphasis in the original. Impartialist and embedded cosmopolitanisms 473 communities that are both morally defining and overlapping, and the recognition of morally relevant communities that are non-territorial (in other words, communities that have geographically dispersed memberships). I will address the capacity of each variation on the idea of community to bring us closer to accounting for the moral standing of those beyond hearth and home, outside circles of families and friends, and on the other side of political borders, from an ethically particularist starting- point. One variation on the idea of the morally constitutive community that arises if the community is to be defined neither by state nor national borders is that of the morally constitutive transnational community. Yet, while the notion of a morally constitutive transnational community might support a position that is more inclusive than the communitarian realism extracted from MacIntyre’s work, it would be naive to assume that it gets us beyond the problem of a moral starting-point that relies on a determinate group of outsiders. A potential example of a morally constitutive transnational community (that is also extremely interesting in light of current political changes) is Europe. Just as being European could be coextensive with one aspect of one’s identity, the recognition of others who warrant ethical concern could be coterminous with this association.75 This introduces a grave shortcoming to the possibility of the morally constitutive transnational community allowing an inclusive moral purview. At this point, it is necessary to take seriously Friedman’s critique. Friedman’s idea of community, if we recall her argument, is meant to challenge the exclusive appeal to ‘communities of place’. The intended result is not merely that we acknowledge morally relevant associations that extend beyond the nation, neighbourhood or state, but that we recognise our memberships within these communities as cutting across (and not merely encircling) more local affiliations. The second important variation on the morally constitutive community that follows from this qualification is the idea of overlapping memberships in morally relevant associations. While this conception owes much to the view that individuals have multiple and multifarious identities, the potential for a truly cosmopolitan scope of ethical concern is enhanced by the further suggestion distilled from the arguments of Friedman and O’Neill: that these overlapping memberships are also constituted by non-territorial affiliations.76 As O’Neill states, ‘membership of communities is usually neither inclusive nor exclusive within any given territory’.77 Morally relevant communities include those that are free of borders that can be mapped. The of multiple identities allows the argument that one is constituted by more than one community. These might be ‘communities of place’: Scotland, Britain

75 I illustrate this point in ‘Embedded Cosmopolitanism and the Case of War’, pp. 588–9, with reference to Western European responses to the respective massacres of ‘fellow Europeans’ in the former Yugoslavia and non-Europeans in Rwanda. 76 Membership within the human rights organisation Amnesty International is one example of a non- territorial and potentially morally defining affiliation. One might also be a member of an academic community that both cuts across borders and contributes to one’s identity. With regard to this example, if one turns to the news section of the journal Nature, one becomes aware of the implicit assumption that all scientists are members of a particular community regardless of their respective geographical locations and political loyalties. This assumption is reinforced by articles on Indo- Pakistani and Arab-Israeli scientific co-operation. (I owe this observation to David Chart.) 77 O’Neill, ‘Justice and Boundaries’, p. 73. 474 Toni Erskine and Europe, for example. Yet, the combination of this idea of multiple identities (membership in multiple morally constitutive communities) with overlapping and non-territorial affiliations creates a radically different picture. Instead of evoking an image of concentric circles of morally constitutive communities (nation, state, regional union of states) this idea of community summons the figure of a web of intersecting and overlapping morally relevant ties. A particularist account of moral agency thereby does not entail that being a member of any one community requires seeing a non-member of that particular community as being outside the scope of moral concern. Here, O’Neill’s position on multiple identities has particular resonance: ‘Only if a sense of identity were fully determinate, if it could saturate our lives, would it be incompatible with all other senses of identity’.78 Instead, the scope of ethical concern, understood in terms of multifarious and overlapping morally constitutive communities, has the potential to be inclusive in scope.

A distinct theoretical perspective?

In the place of the impartialist cosmopolitan position with which this discussion began, I have suggested a more mundane view of cosmopolitanism—one that recognises (and relies upon) the moral force of particular associations. By reconcept- ualising the types of community that can provide one with a particularist moral starting-point for addressing international normative questions, I have started to piece together a case for a cosmopolitan scope of ethical concern that would neither require nor allow abstract appeals to our common humanity. Instead, I have proposed that the realm within which claims of moral duty, solidarity and loyalty to ‘fellow moral agents’ provide intelligible appeals is determined by membership within an intricate web of variously coinciding, morally defining memberships. I will briefly recount how embedded cosmopolitanism differs from both its impartialist counterpart and communitarian realism by distinguishing the account of individual moral agency upon which it relies, the moral relevance that it attributes to the state, and the scope of ethical concern that it allows. Embedded cosmopolitanism rejects the notion of a pre-social self that is seen as requisite to impartialist cosmopolitan positions. Whereas, according to impartialist cosmopolitanism, the standpoint of the moral agent is independent of all social particularity, embedded cosmopolitanism locates the standpoint of the moral agent in the multifarious communities to which she belongs. The moral agent is thereby not abstracted from all particularity but remains embedded in any number of different morally constitutive associations. Although the moral agent is never removed from the subjective particulars of her life, membership in various different communities might be seen to allow her a critical edge that begins to answer the charge of levied against proponents of embedded moral perspectives. As Friedman observes, such complex selves ‘do not simply replicate a small cohesive set of norms’.79 Furthermore, this account of moral agency neither blindly accepts, nor carefully avoids, the difficult issue of the moral relevance of borders.

78 O’Neill, ‘Permeable Boundaries’, p. 299. 79 Friedman, ‘The Social Self’, p. 171. Impartialist and embedded cosmopolitanisms 475

Allying herself with Goodin and Gewirth, Nussbaum assumes a strictly instru- mental conception of social relationships, including citizenship, in her impartialist cosmopolitan stance.80 She would denounce situating value in the state as ‘that morally questionable move of self-definition by a morally irrelevant characteristic’.81 Conversely, an embedded cosmopolitan perspective would not (indeed, could not if it is to remain internally consistent) deny the potential moral relevance of state borders. Nevertheless, here it differs markedly not only from impartialist cosmo- politanism but also from communitarian realism. Embedded cosmopolitanism does not take the ethical significance of borders for granted. To the contrary, embedded cosmopolitanism challenges the assumption that bounded communities, including states, have an exclusive capacity to define the moral agent. This, as I have intimated, is profoundly important for the scope of ethical concern that this perspective might allow. Embedded cosmopolitanism is not bound to the moral parochialism of com- munitarian realism. While moral commitments cannot be derived from our ‘common humanity’, inclusion arises from respect for the ethical standing of a fellow moral agent with whom one shares membership in any one of a multitude of particular, often transnational, overlapping, territorial and non-territorial morally constitutive communities. Nevertheless, it would be misleading to assert that embedded cosmopolitanism is problem-free. Unlike its impartialist counterpart, it cannot claim a necessarily inclusive moral purview. This point becomes especially salient when one realises that the two conceptions of cosmopolitanism must be defined with different points of emphasis. If we return to Nussbaum’s (impartialist) definition, cosmopolitanism involves ‘primary allegiance’ to ‘the human beings of the entire world’. Embedded cosmopolitanism must be defined negatively as pre- venting the scope of moral concern from being coterminous with any particular community or group of communities (a definition that I employed in the opening paragraph). This is more than a mere fancy piece of rhetoric—it points to the limits of an attempt to accommodate the ‘situated self’ and an inclusive scope of ethical concern within a single normative approach. In the absence of overlapping associations that would foster acknowledgement of the moral standing of the other, the scope of ethical concern is truncated. An inclusive moral purview is possible when the moral agent assumes a particularist starting-point (a concession denied by both communitarian realist and impartialist cosmopolitan positions); however, it can not be guaranteed.

Conclusion

Both the promise and the potential weaknesses of an embedded ethical cosmo- politanism find resonance in ‘The Recruit’, a poem written by a soldier during the Second World War:

80 Gewirth would likely object to the term ‘instrumental’ being used with reference to his work, but I cannot see that this is an unfair description. 81 Nussbaum, ‘Patriotism’, p. 3. 476 Toni Erskine

Pried from the circle where his family ends, Man on his own, no hero of old tales, Discovers when the pose of lone wolf fails Loneliness and, miraculously, friends.

Finds how his comradeship with one depends On being both from London, say, or Wales, How with the next a common job prevails, Sport with a third, and so the list extends.

Nation and region, class and craft and syndicate Are only some: all attributes connect Their own with his kind, call him to vindicate

A common honour; and his self-respect Starts from the moment when his senses indicate ‘I’ as the point where circles intersect.82

This poem begins with the speaker being dislodged from one set of identity-defining relationships and finding a community of friends. (This provides an interesting parallel with Friedman’s notion of replacing found communities, such as the family, with dislocated communities. She uses friendships as her primary example of the latter.)83 The soldier’s ‘constellation of views of himself’ (to use O’Neill’s termin- ology) is shown to be defined by a multiplicity of affiliations—including territorially defined communities such as city and nation and non-territorial affiliations such as ‘sport’, ‘class’, ‘craft’ and ‘syndicate’. We are given the sense that these various ties provide the young recruit with an extended scope of moral concern. And yet, with all the apparent potential for using this poem as an epigraph for embedded cosmopolitanism, one cannot escape the fact that ‘The Recruit’ is, in the end, an ode to patriotic loyalty and honour. According to a theory of embedded cosmopolitanism, in a world in which there were a multitude of diverse, territorial and non-territorial, overlapping morally constitutive communities, we could claim a particularist moral starting-point and still confidently assert the potential for moral commitments that extend beyond borders. However, in a world in which multiple identities (and overlapping, morally constitutive communities) were somehow reduced or made incompatible, we would be left with the risk that values would not be able to travel beyond a plethora of divisions. As O’Neill considers, ‘[t]here are imaginable future worlds in which one can no longer be Scots and British, or Catalan and Spanish, or in which one can no longer be Christian and capitalist, or Muslim and socialist’.84 How can embedded cosmopolitanism respond to such imaginable future worlds (not to mention the incompatibilities within our present one)?

82 John Manifold, ‘The Recruit’, in Brian Gardner (ed.), The Terrible Rain: The War Poets 1939–45 (London: Magnum Books, 1966), p. 31. (I am indebted to Nicholas Denyer for introducing me to this poem.) 83 Friedman, ‘Modern Friendship’. 84 O’Neill, ‘Permeable Boundaries’, p. 300. Impartialist and embedded cosmopolitanisms 477

There are two strong responses to this possibility that I can imagine by those who would, nevertheless, argue that an embedded cosmopolitan position that recognises the self as existing ‘at the point where circles intersect’ is preferable to an impartialist cosmopolitanism that reduces the self to a ‘citizen of nowhere’. The first response might be defensive in character. There is solace, one could reply, in the suggestion that embedded cosmopolitanism as outlined above allows that exclusion be countered by acknowledging potentially morally relevant communities that are currently neglected (actively denied or simply unnoticed) or by establishing ties that are, at present, non-existent. A second response might be the more offensive counter-attack of simply asserting that impartialist cosmopolitan positions are, in fact, no more inclusive than an embedded perspective whose ‘overlapping com- munities’ have been reduced. As Immanuel Wallerstein suggests to Nussbaum, ‘[t]he stance of the “citizen of the world” is deeply ambiguous. It can be used just as easily to sustain privilege as to undermine it.’85 Implicit in this criticism is a suspicion that claims of impartiality in moral reasoning behave as no more than a façade for the cultural and political imperialism of those with power. This response, of course, must be uttered with due humility: while impartialist cosmopolitanism can be accused of covertly embodying the interests of a particular group, those who would reject an impartialist position must face the same charge head-on. Nevertheless, by questioning the nature of the particularist sources of value invoked by many anti- impartialist positions, embedded cosmopolitanism provides a normative framework within which this charge can begin to be refuted and an inclusive scope of ethical concern is conceivable.

85 Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Neither Patriotism, Nor Cosmopolitanism’, Boston Review, XIX (October/November 1994), pp. 15–16 , at 16.