Why Did Nussbaum Build The Defence Of Cosmopolitanism

The tradition of cosmopolitanism takes its roots from two ancient philosophical schools — Cynics and Stoics. Cynic philosopher Diogenes, when asked where he comes from, famously replied that he is “a citizen of the world”. By doing so he refused a definition by the locals around him, but looked for a more universal one. Later, the Stoics argued that people exist in two communities— “the local community of our birth, and the community of human argument and aspiration” (Nussbaum 113), which should be the real source of our obligations. A community, which, back in ancient times, was a very much imagined one. Kant believed that humans, rational creatures are members of a unified moral community, and proposed a ‘league of nations’, in which the states would organise in a republican manner and limit some of their powers for the sake of the union, as a political realisation of cosmopolitan principles. Being the direct heir of ancient and Kantian cosmopolitanism as essential ‘moral’ responsibility of helping other people as such, contemporary moral cosmopolitanism can be summarised as an understanding of “duty to aid foreigners who are starving or
According to Nussbaum, patriotic pride is dangerous, because it can lead to the impossibility of reaching some noble aims, which, she acknowledges, patriotism strives for: of national unity and moral justice and equality. Building her arguments mainly from the stances of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy (first and foremost, Stoics), and drawing examples from the deeds of Indian philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, Nussbaum speaks of the “old ideal of the cosmopolitan, the person whose primary allegiance is to the community of human beings in the entire world” (110). On the opposite, she thinks that “we undercut the very case for multicultural respect within a nation by failing to make a broader world respect central” (117) to our