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Moore on Cosmopolitanism

By Lawrence Solum

Margaret Moore (Queen's University) has posted Rooted Cosmopolitanism: A Defence of Moderate Cosmopolitanism or Moderate Liberal Nationalism on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This paper argues in favour of the idea of a rooted cosmopolitanism and considers various attempts to offer a reconcilation between particularist attachments and universal duties.

And from the paper:

In this paper I have been interested in the relationship between a cosmopolitan justice and particularist relationships and attachments, in particular the attachment of people to particular political communities. I have argued that the initial cosmopolitan interpretation of nationalism as fundamentally antithetical to cosmopolitanism was fundamentally wrong, and this paper expressed sympathy for the more sophisticated attempts of cosmopolitan justice theories to incorporate people?s relationships and attachments into a fuller account of cosmopolitan theory. In terms of the various strategies for bringing the two into relation, this paper argued that both the instrumental strategy nor Tan?s constraining strategy was problematic, and that the ?room- finding? strategy expressed by Abizadeh and Gilabert, who argued, correctly, that we have both general duties to others and special duties, arising from particular relationships and attachments, which give meaning to our lives, is more promising. However, it was not clear (because not substantively developed) how exactly Abizadeh and Gilabert intend to pursue this reconciliation, and the language of ?deontic? duties constraining special duties suggests a Blanket Priority Thesis, which is very similar to Tan?s constraining strategy, and similarly problematic.

This paper also suggested, but did not argue fully for, the position that it may not be possible to develop a clear reconciliation of the two cases in a general way, rather than a case by case basis. It tried to illustrate this through examining the attachments that people may have for land, and the ways in which luck egalitarian global justice theory views land compared to the way in which indigenous or national groups view land. I argued that a general reconciliation may not be possible but it might be possible to develop some principles to think through the cases, and examine them on a case by case basis.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on August 05, 2010 (boomark / email).