Introduction
Summary
The basic fact that human experiential space is being subtly changed through an opening to cosmopolitanization should not lead us to assume that we are all becoming cosmopolitans. Even the most positive conceivable development – an erosion of frontiers between cultural horizons and a growing sensitivity towards unfamiliar geographies of life and coexistence – does not necessarily demand a sense of cosmopolitan responsibility. The question of how such a sense might become even a possibility has up to now scarcely been posed, let alone investigated.
(Beck 2004: 154)The world is facing crises in global politics and international relations that have only recently begun to be discussed in the philosophical literature. There is a crisis in peace highlighted by the so-called war on terror (Sterba 2003b). There is a refugee crisis with people moving around the globe in unprecedented numbers driven by war, persecution, famine and economic hardship (Carens 1987; Goodin 1992; Boswell 2005). There is a crisis of global justice with entire populations in underdeveloped parts of the world facing the threat of starvation owing to avoidable poverty. There is a global environmental crisis, of which climate change is only the most widely debated consequence (Jonas 1984; Crocker & Linden 1998; Newton 2003). There is a crisis in the global economy with the high social costs of globalization and trade as well as threats to supplies of energy resources (Sen 1999).
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- CosmopolitanismA Philosophy for Global Ethics, pp. 1 - 20Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2009