Cosmopolitanism : Ethics As A World Of Strangers

Culture is the Backbone of a society, when something/someone tries to alter it or go against it everyone will notice. In this issue pointed out by Ruth Macklin, we look at the problems that can arise when an individual’s culture and autonomy clash. Every year there at least 30 million immigrants from all over the world that move to the United states of America, making America one of the most culturally diverse country in the world. Keeping this in mind, we will focus on Ruth Macklin’s issue of Multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is the co-existence of diverse cultures, where culture includes racial, religious, or cultural groups and is manifested in customary behaviors, cultural assumptions and values, patterns of thinking, and communicative styles. Critics argue that we associate culture with a society, community and or family, but rarely with a single individual, thus placing it above the individual person. In this paper we are going to look at four different scenarios on from Ruth Macklin’s article.

The Internet is playing a very important role in the evolution of digital technology, but although it has seen remarkable growth over the last few years, its dispersion remains highly asymmetric. It is widely believed that the so called information age will bring radical change and improvement, and countries all over the world are busy with constructing the necessary infrastructure, the "information superhighways," in order to meet the challenges of the information society of the twenty-first century. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s essay “Making Conversation” tell us about human’s conversation

Humankind would be a better place if we were all just citizens of the world. In Martha Nussbaum’s “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” she argues whether children should be taught in education to be patriotic or cosmopolitan. Nussbaum’s definition of cosmopolitanism is a person whose primary allegiance is to the community of human beings in the entire world. Nussbaum begins her argument by raising questions about education and how students ought to be taught that hunger in third world countries are problems of global problems and not the countries problem. She says “We should regard out deliberations as, first and foremost, deliberations about human problems of people in particular concrete situations, not problems growing out of a national

Appiah spends more than half of his introduction describing how complicated the word cosmopolitanism truly is. He keeps revolving around the overlapping idea that we as a people, are not confined to the limits of what our eyes can see. Our strengths, our experiences and our knowledge comes from more than where we were born or how we were raised. We cannot and should not be limited to those

Through the lenses of preservationists, culture is authentic, carries traditions that keep historical ancestry alive, and is threatened by “cultural imperialism”. From a cosmopolitan perspective, culture is the freedom of choice, made up of multiple values and ideas that allow individuals to reinvigorate its uniqueness in an ever changing society. In “The Case for Contamination”, published by the New York Times Magazine, Kwame Anthony Appiah addresses the concern regarding the diminishment of cultural identity in poor countries by introducing the idea of cosmopolitanism: being free from cultural preordains and engaging in a pluralist society. Appiah endorses globalization and explains that resisting cultural interconnection will perhaps trap people in a stagnating society and avert it from achieving a pluralistic environment. He claims that cosmopolitanism enables individuals to adopt foreign culture based on how they see fit within their cultural context, and without “structuring the consciousness” and detaching people from traditional beliefs.

Appiah defines Cosmopolitanism as being conscious that every citizen that belongs to a community among other communities. The writer wanted to remind the reader the value being of conscious that we are part of a bigger community. Appiah main idea in his work was to start having conversations that discuss cultures, beliefs and values to expand our knowledge about other cultures and not having the excuse of marking another culture’s belief right or wrong. He argues that by using Cosmopolitanism we can create a more united community.

A worldview is the set of beliefs that is fundamentally grounded in each person’s heart whether they realize it or not, whether they hold true to it or not. Put simply, it is the basis on which a person lives his/her life. Therefore, ethics, the defining of right and wrong in life, is a crucial aspect of each worldview. Some would say ethics is based on feeling, others would say religious beliefs, while still others would say ethics is based on the law or the standards of behavior accepted by society. The absence of ethics is also a theme in some worldviews. While James W. Sire discusses several different worldviews in The Universe Next Door, the ethical beliefs held by each worldview

A large subsection of cosmopolitanism is the power of external public shaming, and the power of shame to shape the behaviors of cultures. This is also the part of cosmopolitanism which can be applied more broadly to societies than to individuals. In his book, The Honor Code, Appiah offers various examples about the connected roles which shame and honor have respectively in guiding the morality of different cultures, and how these influences change over time through external forces which evaluate and judge the practices of that particular society. The reason he gives for honor having enough weight to influence behavior to such an extent is “our deep and persistent concern with status and respect, our human need for what Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called Anerkennung¬—¬recognition” (Honor xiii). This theory about honor connects to a psychological notion that human beings are social creatures and depend on social connections and interactions for a large part of our own self worth. Appiah goes on to say that “we human beings need others to respond appropriately to who we are and to what we do. We need others to recognize us as conscious and to acknowledge that we recognize them” (Honor xiii). Not only do humans need to be recognized, but we must also have our actions affirmed, a theory which Appiah applies not only to individuals, but to collective honor as well.

While cosmopolitanism can be viewed as a concise concept, it can also be viewed to have two different strands. The first strand, as Appiah explains, focuses on the obligations we have to one another as universal citizens of the cosmos; obligations that stretch beyond family or local community. The second strand is more intensive stating that not only are we obligated to those whom we share nothing in common with but also find ourselves accountable for knowing other individuals on a more profound level of their practices and belief systems. Yet, while there do exist these two varying strands Appiah also acknowledges that it is not desirable nor probable that as a collective population we want to live under a single model of living. All the while, he briefly states that these two varying strands of the same descending concept may conflict in certain instances. Those who advocate fiercely for the cause of unification and understanding were often mocked for their own hypocritical actions.

Case in point, Appiah demonstrates how his experience with a Ghanaian pageant resonates with the attributes of a celebratory atmosphere and feeling over the sector in exclusive festivals. Appiah explains that every culture has its own competition and one other worldwide event that appears to make a change in non-existent culture is globalization. On this regard, Appiah identifies globalization’s essential function as advertising of commonness whilst eliminating divisions amongst the sector’s citizens. Appiah’s evaluation has a religious point of view too. In one instance, Appiah identifies the function of Cosmopolitanism in an elimination of what's morally incorrect. In this regard, Cosmopolitanism plays the identical function as religion would on the planet. This expose elucidates the function of religion in Appiah’s analysis while comparing his method to my

Moralization in our society can lead to conflict as to right and wrong. While moralization is generally thought of as a positive force, The Moral Instinct by Steven Pinker shows how moralization can lead two groups to identify against each other. While smaller communities may be stronger systems of support and justice, their genesis can create isolation from other communities, leading to misunderstanding, and eventually, conflict or violence. As one reads The Moral Instinct, the more striking ideas that alter our understanding of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me and Nayomi Manaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors, are those which show us how the lack of completely universal morality leads to smaller identities within our world, and

In the pursuit to gain the greatest understanding and respect of human rights projects and global social justice cosmopolitanism is necessary. Looking at cosmopolitism’s roots, features and limits through the lenses of authors Fine, Held and Calhoun to further address the importance of this ideal regardless of its weaknesses. Following the debate of whether critics are right about cosmopolitanisms liberal biases undermining its critical potential will be discussed, to suggest where cosmopolitanism needs adjustments in order to progress. Lastly, this paper will consider the idea that cosmopolitan ideals are more necessary then ever given the resurgence of nationalist and isolationist politics worldwide. Through an overall analysis of

Cosmopolitanism teaches us the value of valuing through engaging in multiple learning dialogue and reflection. Cosmopolitanism is the idealogy that all human beings belong to a single community, based on a shared morality. According to cosmopolitanism, every person has global strature as the ultimate unit of moral concern and is therefore entitled to equal respect and consideration no matter what her citizenship status or other affiliations

Cosmopolitanism, by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, follows the events of a missionary taking control of an African tribe, but mainly focuses on one character. Cosmopolitanism can be defined by the following quote, “Cosmopolitans...regard all the peoples of Earth as so many branches of a single family, and the universe as a state, of which they, with innumerable other rational beings, are citizens, promoting together under the general laws of nature as a whole, while each in his own fashion is busy about his own wellbeing (Voltaire),” (Appiah xv). If everyone acted like Mr. Brown, a kind and peaceful man, then a lot of unnecessary events would have been avoided, like Okonkwo’s strong disgust of the change in

Cosmopolitanism does have its limits in achieving its aims. It is necessary that one tracks the historical roots of cosmopolitanism to understand what visions it sets out to propose for IR. In Hellenic era, cosmopolitanism finds its meaning when Alexandrian intermarriage took place (Russel, 1945: 220), introducing the concept of ‘mankind as a whole’. Similar notion came into being in Stoicism in which people, apart from their own local identity, are united under a world citizenship (Nussbaum, 2010: 156). Kant, in the eighteenth century, furthered expounded on cosmopolitanism by suggesting a rule of cosmopolitan law and universal liberties (Held, 2010: 3).