தமிழ் வலைப்பதிவு

குவாம் ஆந்தனி அப்பையா எழுதிய ‘Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers’ புத்தகத்தைப் போன வருடம் படித்தேன். அப்போது பிடித்த சில பகுதிகளைத் தட்டச்சி வைத்திருந்தேன். தனியாக இடுகை எழுதுதற்கு இப்போதைக்கு உந்துதல் இல்லாதபடியால் தட்டச்சிய பகுதிகளை மட்டும் இங்கே பகிர்ந்துகொள்கிறேன்.

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers

Kwame Anthony Appiah

page: XI - XIII

For most of human history, we were born into small societies of a few score people, bands of hunters and gatherers, and would see, on a typical day, only people we had know most of our lives. Everything our long-ago ancestors ate or worse, every tool they used, every shrine at which they worshipped, was made within that group. Their knowledge came from their ancestors or from their own experiences. That is the world that shaped us, the world in which our nature was formed.

Between then and now some of our forebears settled down and learned agriculture; created villages, towns, and, in the end, cities: discovered the power of writing. But it was a slow process. The population of classical Athens when Socrates died, at the end of the fifth century BC, could have lived in a few large skyscrapers. Alexander set off from Macedon to conquer the world three-quarters of a century later with an army of between thirty and forty thousand, which is far fewer people than commute into Des Moines every Monday morning. When, in the first century, the population of Rome reached a million, it was the first city of its size. To keep it fed, the Romans had had to build an empire that brought home to live cheek by jowl in societies where most of those who spoke your language and shared your laws and grew he food on your table were people you would never now. It is, I think, little short of miraculous that brain shaped by our long history could have been turned to this new way of life.

Even once we started to build these larger societies, most people knew little about the ways of other tribes, and could affect just a few local lives. Only in the past couple of centuries, as every human community has gradually been drawn into a single web of trade and a global network of information, have we come to a point where each of us can realistically imagine contacting any other of our six billion conspefics and sending that person something worth having: a radio, an antibiotic, a good idea. Unfortunately, we could also send, through negligence as easily as malice, things that will cause harm: a virus, an airborne pollutant, a bad idea. And the possibilities of good and of ill are multiplied beyond all measure when it comes to policies carried out by governments in our name. Together, we can ruin poor farmers by dumping our subsidized grain into their markets, cripple industries by punitive tariffs, deliver weapons that will kill thousands upon thousands. Together, we can raise standards of living by adopting new policies on trade and aid, prevent or treat diseases with vaccines and pharmaceuticals, take measures against global climate change, encourage resistance to tyranny and a concern for the worth of each human life.

And, of course, the worldwide web of information- radio, television, telephone, the Internet-means not only what we can affect lives everywhere but what we can learn about life anywhere, too. Each person you know about and can affect is someone to whom you have responsibilities: to say this is just to affirm the very idea of morality. The challenge, then, is to take mind and hearts formed over the long millennia of living in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become.

§

Cosmopolitanism dates at least to the Cynics of the fourth century BC who first coined the expression cosmopolitan, “citizen of the cosmos.” The formulation was meant to be paradoxical, and reflected the general Cynic skepticism toward custom and tradition. A citizen - a polites - belonged to a particular polis, a city to which he or she owed loyalty. The cosmos referred to the world, not in the sense of the earth, but in the sense of the universe. Talk of cosmopolitanism originally signaled, then, a rejection of the conventional view that every civilized person belonged to a community among communities.

page: 18-19
What people do, Positivism holds, is driven by two fundamentally different kinds of psychological states. Beliefs - the first kind are supposed to reflect how the world is. Desires, by contrast reflect how we’d like it to be. As the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe once put it, beliefs and desires have different “directions of fit”: beliefs are meant to fit the world; the world is meant to fit desires. So beliefs can be true or false, reasonable or unreasonable. Desires, on the other hand, are satisfied or unsatisfied.

Beliefs are supposed to be formed on the basis of evidence, and there are principles of reasoning that determine what it is rational to believe on the basis of what evidence. Desires are just facts about us. In an earlier philosophical language, indeed, these desires would have been called “passions,” from a Latin root meaning something you suffer, , or undergo ( a meaning still left to us in talk of Passion of Christ). Because passions are just things that happen to us, no evidence determines which ones are right. All desires, in fact, are just like matters of taste; and as the saying goes, there’s no accounting for those. When we act, we used our beliefs about the world to figure out how to get what we desire. Reason, as Hume famously said, is “the slave of passions.” If our passion is for apples, we go to where our beliefs suggest the apples are. And, once we go looking for the apples we’re after, we’ll find out whether our beliefs were right.

page: 25
Some relativists confuse two different senses in which judgments can be subjective. The view that moral judgments express desires means that they are, in one sense, subjective. Which judgments you will agree to depends on what desires you have, which is a feature of you. But, in this sense, factual judgments are subjective also. Which once you will accept depends on what beliefs you have, which is similarly a feature of you. From the fact that beliefs are subjective in this way, therefore, it does not follow that they are subjective in the sense that you are entitled to make any judgments you like. Indeed, to go from the first claim to the second is to make one of those moves from “is” to “ought” that furrowed Hume’s brow. It’s to commit the
naturalistic fallacy. So even on the Positivist view there is no route from the subjectivity of value judgments to a defense of toleration. Toleration is just another value.

§

Values guide our acts, our thoughts, and our feelings. These are our responses to values. Because you recognize the value of great art, you go to museums and to concert halls and read books. Because you see the value of courtesy, you try to understand the conventions of each society that you live in so that you can avoid giving offense. You act as you do because you respond to the values that guide you. And values shape thought and feeling as well. Truth and reason, values you recognize, shape (but, alas, do not determine) your beliefs. Because you respond, with the instinct of a cosmopolitan, to the values of elegance of verbal expression, you take pleasure in Akan proverbs, Oscar Wilde’s plays, Basho’s haiku verses, Nietzsche’s philosophy. Your respect for wit doesn’t just lead you to these works; it shapes how you respond to them. Just so, valuing kindness leads you to admire some gentle souls, and leaves you irritated by other thoughtless ones. It’s true that when you think of, say, kindness, as a universal value, you want everybody to want to be kind. And, since you want them to agree with you, you also want them to want everybody to want everybody to be kind. But perhaps the Positivist has the story exactly the wrong way round. Perhaps you want people to want each other to be kind because you recognize the value of kinds. You want people to agree with you because people agrees with you will be kind and encourage kindness in others. The same thing is true about everything you old
to be a universal value, a basic human good: your valuing it is a judgment that we all have a good reason to do or to think or to feel certain things in certain contexts, and so, also, have reason to encourage these acts and thoughts and feelings in others.

How, in fact, do people learn that it is good to be kind? Is it by being treated kindly and noticing that they like it? Or by being cruelly treated and disliking it? That doesn’t seem quite right: kindness isn’t like chocolate, where you find whether you have a taste for it by giving it a try. Rather, the idea that it’s a good seems to be part of the very concept. Learning what kindness is means learning, among other things, that it’s good. We’d suspect that someone who denied that kindness was good-or that cruelty was bad – didn’t really understand what it was. The concept itself is a value-laden, and therefore action guiding.

Page 28:

We go astray, similarly, when we think of a moral vocabulary as the possession of a solitary individual. If meanings ain’t in the head neither are morals. The concept of kindness, or cruelty, enshrines a kind of social consensus. An individual who decides that kindness is band and cruelty is good is acting like Lewis Carroll’s Humpty-Dumpty, for whom a word “means just what I choose it to mean-neither more, nor less.” The language of values is, after all, language. And the key insight of modern philosophical reflection on language is that language is, first and foremost, a public thing, something we share. Like all vocabulary, evaluative language is primarily a tool we share. Like all vocabulary, evaluative language is primarily a tool we use to talk to one another, not an instrument for talking to ourselves. You know what you call someone who uses language mostly to talk to himself? Crazy.

Our language of values is one of the central ways we coordinate our lives with one another. We appeal to values when we are trying to get things done together. Suppose we are discussing a movie. You say that it expresses a cynical view of human nature. This is not just an invitation to me to accept a fact about the film’s picture of the characters and their motivations; it is also an attempt to shape how I feel. Seeing it that way, I am more likely, for example, to resist my first emotional responses, my sympathy, say, with certain characters. If I hold on to those feelings, I might want to resist your characterization. Not cynical, I might say; pessimistic, for sure, but also deeply humane. Cynical, humane, pessimistic: these are part of the vocabulary of value. And, as I say, they are meant to shape our responses.

Page 30-31
For if relativism about ethics and morality were true, then, at the end of many discussions, we would each have to end up saying, “From where I stand, I am right. From where you stand, you are right.” And there would be nothing further to say. From our different perspectives, we would be living, effectively in different worlds. And without a shared world, what is there to discuss? People often recommend relativism because they think it will lead to tolerance. But if we cannot learn from one another what it is right to think and feel and do, then conversation between su will be pointless. Relativism of that sort isn’t a way to encourage conversation; it’s just a reason to fall silent.

Chap 3: page 39

What it’s reasonable for yu to think, faced with a particular experience, depends on what ideas you already have.

That’s as true Western science as of traditional religion. In the early twentieth century, the French physicist Pierre Duhem noticed an interesting fact about the way scientists behave. When they do experiments or collect data to support their theories, other
scientists, often those attached to different theories, deny that the evidence shows any such thing. The objections can be of many different kinds. They might say, for example, that the experiment really hasn’t been done properly. They might say that the so-called data are simply incorrect. Or they could point out that their own theory explained that data just as well.

Chap 3: page 40-44

For Positivism, the underdetermination of theory by evidence is a problem. If science is rational, then we want the process of
scientific theorizing to give us reasons to believe the theories. And presumably we want to get the best theory we can, given the evidence. But if two people can always reasonable respond with different theories to the same evidence, then something other than reason or evidence must account for their choices. Furthermore, if this is true however much evidence we have, there will always be more than one possible reasonable account of the facts. And that will mean that no amount of scientific exploration will allow us to settle on a single picture of the way things are. If Positivism understates the place of reason in the justification of desires, and thus of values, it overstates the power of reason in the justification of belief, and thus of facts.

If what it’s reasonable to believe depends on what you believe already, however, then you can’t check the reasonableness of all your beliefs. You respond to new evidence in the light of what you already believe, and that gives you new beliefs. Were the original beliefs reasonable? Well, you can test them, but only by taking yet other beliefs for granted. You can’t get into the game of belief by starting from nothing. And, of course, we al grow up in a family and society that start us out with a great raft of beliefs that we could not have developed on our own. Concepts and ideas develop in our upbringing. Some concepts and ideas are based in our biological natures – like color concepts, or the idea that there are physical objects in the world. But some ideas we wouldn’t be using if we hadn’t been given them – like electron, gene, democracy, contrast, superego, witchcraft.

There is nothing unreasonable, then about my kinsmen’s belief in witchcraft. They think only what most people would think, given the concepts and beliefs they inherited; if you grew up with their beliefs and had their experiences, that is what you would belief, too. (Nor is belief in the agency of supernatural beings at all alien angels; roughly 40 percent think it’s likely that Jesus will return to earth to render judgment sometime in the next half century.)

Those of us who were given scientific educations have a significant advantage. It’s not that we are individually more reasonable; it’s that we have been given better materials with which to think about the world. The institutions of science mean that the theories and ideas tat scientists have developed are far superior to the ones that we human beings had before the growth of modern science. If we borrow their concepts, we are plugging ourselves into reality in ways that will make it easier for us to understand and to master the world.

There is only one reality, and theories about witchcraft, like the germ theory of disease, are attempts to understand that one reality. Current medical theories of disease don’t get everything right. Otherwise, when you went to the doctor you could be guaranteed a diagnosis, a prognosis, perhaps even a cure. When an American gets a fever and assumes he has an infection, he’s just doing what people have always done everywhere: he’s applying the concepts that his culture has given him for thinking about disease. If, as I believe, this is a better story than a story about witchcraft, it’s not because he’s a better person. It’s because he has the good fortune to live in a society that has spent enormous amounts of human resources to get that better story.

Scientific stories are not the only words we live by. I began with the ways our language of values helps guide us to a shared approach to the decisions that face us all. And one thing that is right in the Positivist picture is this: the methods of the natural sciences have not led to the kind of progress in our grasp of the facts, So we may be able to learn about values from societies where science is less deeply implanted than in ours: if scientific method has not advanced our understanding of values, then its superiority offers no reason to suppose that our understandings of values is superior. In fact, we have every reason to think that we can learn from other peoples, in ways both positive and negative. And if the Positivist asks us what guarantee we have that there is always goings to be a way of persuading everyone of the value of everything valuable, we can ask him what guarantee he has that we can always persuade everyone of the facts. For the question presupposes that facts are in better shape
than values here. And, even within the Positivist picture, as Duhem saw there is no good reason to accept that claim.

That there are many ways of arguing for values of many kinds should be a good deal less puzzling when we recall that there are many kinds of facts for which we must offer different kinds of support, too. Mathematical beliefs can be justified by proofs. Beliefs about the colors of things get support from how they look in ordinary lighting. Psychology beliefs about other people get support from what they do and say. Beliefs about our own mental lives gain evidence, sometimes, from introspection. In the end, though, with facts as with values, nothing guarantees that we will be able to persuade everyone else, must accept. The Positivist holds that with facts, when we disagree, one of us has the truth, one of us is underwritten by the way things
are, whereas with values, there is nothing to underwrite our claims. But even if we granted this picture, what would entitle us to think that the universe’s being determinately one way or another guarantees that we can reach agreement as to which way it is? We enter every conversation – whether with neighbors or with strangers – without a promise of final agreement.

Pg: 59-60
It is cruel to kill cattle in slaughterhouses where they live cattle can smell the blood of the dead? Or to spank children in order to teach them how to behave? The point is not that we couldn’t argue our way to one position or the other on these questions: it’s only to say that when we disagree, it wont always be because one of us just doesn’t understand the value that’s at stake. It’s because one of us just doesn’t understand the value that’s at stake. It’s because one of just doesn’t understand the value that’s at stake. It’s because applying value terms to new cases requires judgment and discretion. Indeed, it’s often part of our understanding of these terms that their applications are meant to be argued about. They are, to use another piece of philosopher’s jargon, essentially contestable. For many concepts, as W.B.Gallie wrote in introducing the term, “proper use inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper use on the part of users. Evaluative language, I’ve been insisting, aims to shape not just our acts but our thoughts and our feelings, when we describe past acts with words like “courageous” and “cowardly”, “cruel” and “kind”, we are shaping what people think and feel about what was done- and shaping our understanding of our moral language as well. Because that language is open-textured and essentially contestable, even people who share a moral vocabulary have plenty to fight about.

Chap 5: The Primacy of Practice

Page 81

What makes these conflicts so intense is that they are battles over the meaning of the same values, not that they oppose one value, held exclusively by one side, with another, held exclusively by their antagonists. It is, in part, because we have shared horizons of meanings, because these are debates between people who share so many other values and so much else in the way of belief and of habit, that they are as sharp and as painful as they are.

§

Chap 7: Cosmopolitan Contamination: page 111-113

In Praise of Contamination

Behind much of the grumbling about the cultural effects of globalization is an image of how the world used to be – an image that is both unrealistic and unappealing. Our guide to what is wrong here might as well be another African. Publius Terentius Afer, whom we know as Terence, was born a slave in Carthage in North Africa, and taken to Rome in the late second century AD. Before long, his plays were widely admired among the city’s literary elite; witty, elegant works that are, with Plautus’s earlier, less cultivated works, essentially all we have of Roman comedy. Terence’s own mode of writing-his free incorporation of earlier Greek plays into a single Latin drama-was known to Roman literatures as “contamination”. It’s a suggestive term. When people speak for an ideal of cultural purity, sustaining the authentic culture of the Asante or the American family farm, I find myself drawn to contamination as the name for a counter-idea. Terence had a notably firm grasp on the range of human variety: “So many men, so many opinions” was an observation of his. And it’s in his comedy The Self Tormentor that you’ll find what has proved something like the golden rule of cosmopolitanism : Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto “I am human: nothing human is alien to me.” The context is illuminating. The play’s main character, a busybody farmer named Chremes, is told by his overworked neighbor to mind his own affairs: the homo sum credo is his breezy rejoinder. It isn’t meant to be an ordinance from on height; its just the case for gossip.

Then again, gossip-the fascination people have for the small doings of other people-shares a taproot with literature. Certainly the ideal of contamination has no more eloquent exponent than Salman Rushdie, who has insisted that the novel that occasioned his fatwa “celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combination of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it.” But it didn’t take modern mass migration to create this great possibility. The early Cyncs and Stoics took their contamination from the places they were born to the Greek cities where they taught. Many were strangers in those places; cosmopolitanism was invented by contaminators whose migrations were solitary. And the migrations that have contaminated the larger world were not all modern. Alexander’s empire molded both the states and the sculpture of Egypt and North India; first the Mongols then the Mughals shaped great swaths of Asia; the Bantu migrations populated half the African continent. Islamic states stretch from Morocco to Indonesia; Christianity reached Africa, Europe, and Asia within a few centuries of the death of Jesus of Nazreth; Buddhism long ago migrated from India into much of East and Southeast Asia. Jews and people whose ancestors came from many parts of China have long lived in vast diasporas. The traders of the Silk Road changed the style of elite dress in Italy; someone brought Chinese pottery for burial in fifteenth century Swahili graves. I have heard it said that the bagpipes started out in Egypt and came to Scotland with the Roman infantry. None of this is modern.

No doubt, there can be an easy and spurious utopianism of “mixture”, as there is of purity.” And yet the larger human truth is on the side of Terence’s contamination. We do not need, have never needed, settled community, a homogenous system of values, in order to have a home. Cultural purity is an oxymoron. The odds are that, culturally speaking, you already live a cosmopolitan life, enriched by literature, art and film that come from many places, and that contains influences from many more. And the marks of cosmopolitanism in that Asante village – soccer, Muhammad Ali, hip-hop-entered their lives, as they entered yours, not as work but as pleasure. There are some Western products and vendors that appeal to people in the rest of the world because they’re seen as Western, as modern: Mc Donald’s, Levis. But even here, cultural significance isn’t just something that corporate headquarters gets to decree. People wear Levis on every continent. In some places they are informal wear; in others they’re dressy. You can get Coca-Cola on every continent, too. In Kumasi you will get it at funerals. Not, in my experience, in the West of England, where hot milky Indian tea is flavored. The point is that people in each place make their own uses even if the most famous global commodities.

A tenable cosmopolitanism tempers a respect for difference with a respect for a actual human beings – and with a sentiment best captured in the credo, once comic, now commonplace, penned by that former slave from North Africa. Few remember what Chremes says next, but it’s as important as the sentence everyone quotes: “Either I want to find out for myself or I want to advise you: think what you like. If you’re right, I’ll do what you do. If you’re wrong, I’ll set you straight.”

Chap 8: Whose Culture is it Anyway?

Page: 128

The Inter-Apache Summit on Repatriation, for example, claims tribal control over, “all images, text, ceremonies, music, songs, stories, symbols, beliefs, customs, ideas and other physical and spiritual objects and concepts.” A UN body circulates a Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (1994) affirming their rights “to maintain, protect and develop the past, present and future manifestations of their cultures,” including “artifacts, designs, ceremonies, technologies and visual and performing arts and literature, as well as the right to the restitution of cultural, intellectual, religious and spiritual property taken without their free and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions and customs.”

Chap 9: The Counter Cosmopolitan

Page: 144,
To say what, in principle, distinguishes the cosmopolitan from the counter-cosmopolitan, we plainly need to go beyond talk of truth and tolerance. One distinctively cosmopolitan commitment is to pluralism. Cosmopolitans think that there are many values worth living by and that you cannot live by all of them. So we hope and expect that different people and different societies will embody different values. (But they have to be values worth living by). Another aspect of cosmopolitanism is what philosophers call fallibilism- the sense that our knowledge is imperfect, provisional, subject to revision in the face of new evidence.

145-146
For the counter-cosmopolitans, then, universalism issues in uniformity. The cosmopolitan may be happy to abide by the Gold Rule about doing onto others (putting aside, for the moment, the conceptual problems of “universalizability” I discussed earlier). But cosmopolitans care of those others don’t want to be done unto as I would be done unto. Its not necessarily the end of the matter, but it’s something we think we need to take account of. Our understanding of toleration means interacting on terms of respect with those who see the world differently. We cosmopolitans think we might learn something from those we disagree with. We think people have a right to their own lives.