Philosophy Bites by David Edmonds & Nigel Warburton

Author:David Edmonds & Nigel Warburton [Edmonds, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-08-11T16:00:00+00:00

NW: Let’s look at a different problem that might arise for cosmopolitans. If you believe that fundamentally you are a citizen of the world, there may not be grounds for preferring the people nearest to you to those who might need your help who are very far away. There may be no reason to favour family and compatriots over those on the other side of the world who may be dying of poverty and malnutrition. Some philosophers have argued that what a responsible citizen of the world should do is treat all human needs equally, and that would involve us in the West giving most of our money to Oxfam or to UNICEF, one of the charities that might be able to save people’s lives. Isn’t that too demanding a morality?

KAA: Part of what is important here is giving people a reasonable account of how they ought to conduct themselves. Addressing people in the richer parts of the world in the way that my friend and Princeton colleague Peter Singer does—by saying, basically, ‘you ought to be depriving yourself of many, many of the things that are good in your life, because there are people out there who are suffering’—coming at people in that way, even supposing it were right, is not going to work. People are going to turn away from someone who makes what they will regard as absurdly demanding claims on them. So the first thing we have to think about is, what can we ask people to do that they might actually do, that would help with the problems in the world?

People who are engaged with the rest of the world, who know about life in places where people are poor and suffering—that is, people who have a cosmopolitan attitude and engagement with life—are more likely to be tractable, more likely to be persuadable to do something. Remember, though, I don’t think that cosmopolitanism should come with heavy philosophical baggage, because then you are making it a condition of the conversation that people agree with you about something. The whole point about the conversation is that we will talk to whoever comes along. Still, my view is that we have the privilege of living in a world in which we have the resources to give everybody what they need in order to have the possibility of a decent human life, and the resources to do this without abandoning opera, and BBC Radio 3, and all those things that might seem optional if you were focused entirely on human suffering.

But, second, I think what we owe to others is less than many philosophical views claim. The reason is that many of these philosophical views are maximizing views: that is, they are views according to which we should make sure that everybody has the most of a possible thing. Whereas I think that what is crucial in moral life is to make sure that everybody has what they need in order to lead a decent life, which is

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