Justifying Cosmopolitanism: A Methodological Critique

Abstract

This chapter considers the different methodologies grounding the justification of cosmopolitan principles and shows that they are affected by significant difficulties. It distinguishes between two forms of cosmopolitanism: relational and non-relational. Proponents of the former problematically ground their defence of global egalitarian justice on the empirically dubious claim that there exists a basic global structure much like the basic structure of domestic societies. Proponents of the latter fail to offer a convincing defence of global equality because they give excessive weight to intuitions about highly counterfactual scenarios, which should be largely discounted when designing a theory of justice for the world we live in. Because both relational and nonrelational cosmopolitans' defence of global egalitarian justice rests on shaky grounds - either dubious empirical claims or unreliable moral intuitions - the chapter concludes that neither is vindicated.