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THE GLOBAL CRISIS AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL FEASIBILITY OF INTERNATIONALISM
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 May 2024
Abstract
This essay revisits the metanormative version of the motivational critique of contemporary conceptions of cosmopolitan justice. I distinguish two ways of understanding this critique as leveling the charge of infeasibility against cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitan motivation can be understood to be infeasible because it is impossible or because it is not reasonably likely to be achieved if tried. The possibilistic understanding is not persuasive, given that examples show that cosmopolitan motivation is possible. The conditional probabilistic understanding is more compelling, by contrast, because under certain social conditions it may not be reasonably likely that cosmopolitan motivation is achieved if tried. I argue, however, that whether cosmopolitan motivation is infeasible in the conditional probabilistic sense depends on malleable social conditions, given that, according to a plastic account of the human moral mind developed by Allen Buchanan, social conditions can undermine or favor the formation of cosmopolitan motivation. I illustrate this plastic account by showing how it can explain recent anticosmopolitan orientations as “tribalistic” reflexes to global crises, like the COVID-19 pandemic, which involved competition for survival resources and (existential) threats. I conclude that cosmopolitan motivation is not infeasible under all social conditions and that cosmopolitanism therefore requires bringing about and maintaining those social conditions under which cosmopolitan motivation is feasible.
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Footnotes
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Department of History and Politics, The American University of Paris, jculp@aup.edu. Competing Interests: The author declares none. I would like to thank Ani Gonzalez Ward for superb research assistance. Earlier versions of this essay were presented at conferences in Frankfurt am Main and Washington, DC; I would like to thank those audiences for their valuable feedback. I also benefitted from the frank and fine feedback of Allen Buchanan, Dave Schmidtz, and anonymous referees.
References
1 In her recent assessment of the global justice debate, Flikschuh, Katrin, What Is Orientation in Global Thinking? (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for example, identifies Internationalism as the “now increasingly dominant view.”
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5 The basic idea of the infeasibility charge is that feasibility functions as a constraint on the validity of a normative claim. It is contested, however, which kinds of normative claims are subject to such a feasibility constraint. Some, for example, hold that it is a constraint on prescriptive but not on evaluative normative claims. For surveys of the current debate, see Southwood, Nicholas, “The Feasibility Issue,” Philosophy Compass 13, no. 8 (2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the specific claim that the psychological feasibility of a moral motivation is a condition for its validity, see Kagan, Shelly, The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 277 Google Scholar, who speaks of a “motivational condition.”
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19 Miller, David, “Reasonable Partiality Towards Compatriots,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 8, nos. 1–2 (2005): 79 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, makes a similar point: “It has yet to be demonstrated that a purely cosmopolitan ethics is viable—that people will be sufficiently motivated to act on duties that are likely to be very demanding in the absence of the ties of identity and solidarity that nationality provides.”
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25 These media include China’s CGTB and Russia’s RT television stations. The spyware that is used is Pegasus of the NSO technology group.
26 For the conditional probabilistic account, see Brennan, Geoffrey and Southwood, Nicholas, “Feasibility in Action and Attitude,” in Hommage à Wlodek: Philosophical Papers Dedicated to Wlodek Rabinowicz, ed. Rønnow‐Rasmussen, Toni et al. (Lund: Lund University Press, 2007), 1–25 Google Scholar. Subsequently, I will drop the qualifier “conditional” when referring to the conditional probabilistic account. The distinction between the possibilistic and the probabilistic understanding of feasibility is analogous to the distinctions between binary and scalar understandings of feasibility as well as between hard and soft feasibility constraints.
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33 Boehm, Moral Origins, 10.
34 Boehm, Moral Origins, 10, 180.
35 Boehm, Moral Origins, 11–12, 73–74.
36 Boehm, Moral Origins, 15, 17, 19, 31–32, 71–72, 87, 149–50.
37 Boehm, Moral Origins, 19–23, 28, 32–33, 43, 106–7, 185, 200.
38 Boehm, Moral Origins, 33–35, 73.
39 Boehm, Moral Origins, 12–13, 15, 31.
40 Boehm, Moral Origins, 23–25.
41 Another case in point is Kitcher, The Ethical Project, who, like Boehm, argues that the capacity to follow rules of social cooperation emerged within small groups that attempted solving so-called altruism failures. Altruism failures are cases in which individuals do not give sufficient weight to the interests of other individuals in their decision-making, e.g., when going on a large-scale hunt, and therefore fail to solve collective action problems.
42 See Simmons, Mobilizing; Sikkink, The Justice Cascade.
43 Cf. Buchanan, Allen and Powell, Russell, The Evolution of Moral Progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar as well as Buchanan, Allen, Our Moral Fate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
44 Buchanan, Our Moral Fate, 67–68, characterizes the environment of evolutionary adaptation as follows: “(1) There weren’t many humans, and they lived in small, widely scattered groups. (2) When they encountered individuals from other groups, they were in a desperate competition for survival resources. (3) Because these groups were widely scattered, they had different immune histories, which meant that if you encountered people from another group, you might become infected with lethal pathogens…. (4) Individuals from other groups not only presented a risk of biological parasites but also could be social parasites, free riders on your group’s cooperative practices, because they hadn’t internalized your group’s rules and weren’t bound to you by the ties of loyalty that your group’s traditions and practices fostered…. (5) There was little or nothing in the way of social practices or institutions to enable peaceful, mutually beneficial cooperation among different groups …. (6) Because human groups were widely scattered and had their own histories, they had different languages, different styles of bodily adornment, clothing, hairstyles, and so on, and different ways of doing the basic things that all human societies must do to survive.”
45 Buchanan, Our Moral Fate, 76.
46 Buchanan, Our Moral Fate, 125.
47 Greene, Moral Tribes.
48 Buchanan, Our Moral Fate, 109, 105–18.
49 Gilabert, “Justice and Feasibility,” 118–23.
50 This is a different way of saying that the Internationalist ethos may appear infeasible (in the probabilistic sense) from a static perspective (e.g., due to the preponderance of anticosmopolitan orientations), even though it is feasible (in the probabilistic sense) from a dynamic perspective. For this distinction, see Hamlin, Alan, “Feasibility Four Ways,” Social Philosophy & Policy 34, no. 1 (2017): 209–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For my defense of how to change educational practices to create a more Internationalist (and democratic) consciousness, see Culp, Julian, Democratic Education in a Globalizing World (London: Routledge, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.