Justice and Objectivity for Pragmatists: Cosmopolitanism in the Work of Martha Nussbaum and Jane Addams

The goal of this paper is to argue that pragmatists interested in social justice ought to be committed to certain objective transcultural ethical ideals. In particular, I argue that we need an objective moral account of what counts as harm and flourishing for human beings. Pragmatists are usually characterized as rejecting the tenability of, or the need for, such objective standards. Instead, the question of whether a person's life is going well or badly is supposed to be answered by appealing to the standards of that person's community, appealing to ever-wider communities if necessary. The problem with this approach, I believe, is that it is far too easy to find historical and contemporary examples of communities that are committed to morally unacceptable (e.g., sexist or racist) ideals all the way up. The most deeply entrenched problems of social justice do not tend to occur because a relatively small community is committed to unacceptable moral ideals that can be checked against the better ideals of a larger social group. Rather, these problems occur because the largest social groups are themselves committed to morally unacceptable ideals. Without some kind of objective ethical standards, there can be no coherent way to criticize wide-scale, systemic, and institutional injustices.

This objective account of human harm and flourishing need not be problematic to pragmatists, I will argue, because it can and should be rooted in certain very basic or fundamental commonalities of human experience. Furthermore, I will argue that proponents of this objective account can and should retain pragmatists' commitment to epistemic fallibilism, which calls for an attitude of humility with respect to the possibility of our actually knowing what these ethical standards are with any certainty. In what follows, I will draw from the cosmopolitan writings of two very different thinkers—Jane Addams and Martha Nussbaum—to demonstrate that these sentiments can be found in both the history of American philosophy and in contemporary liberal moral and political theory.

Cosmopolitanism and Transcultural Ideals

We sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that the need for cosmopolitanism is a relatively new phenomenon, that the conflicts and tensions that arise when we are forced to negotiate between the ideals and ways of life of differing cultures are distinctively contemporary problems we face in our transnational, borderless global twenty-first century. Martha Nussbaum reminds us that these problems are old—very old. In her Cultivating Humanity, she argues that it was actually Socrates, the Cynics, and the Stoics who were among the first to grapple with multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, and she encourages us to reconsider their ancient responses in our attempts to navigate our contemporary problems. These ancient Greek philosophers appealed to reasoned discourse as a response to their experiences with cultural difference. Their appeal to reason was not meant to level or erase cultural differences, but to appeal to a common language capable of transcending provincial particularities.

Nussbaum's contemporary cosmopolitanism is rooted in what she identifies as an ancient desire to "cultivate humanity," a desire first described by the Stoics and Cynics. She, like Diogenes the Cynic, maintains that we should think of ourselves as "citizens of the world," individuals who refuse to define ourselves in terms of local origins and particular group memberships, but rather define ourselves in terms of aspirations and concerns that are universal. She explains that the Stoics picked up and expanded upon this ideal, emphasizing, as Seneca would later put the point, that each of us dwells simultaneously in "two communities: one that is truly great and truly common . . . in which we look neither to this corner nor to that, but measure the boundaries of our nation by the sun; the other, the one to which we have been assigned by birth" (cited in Cultivating Humanity 58). It is our membership in the former, larger community that she and the Stoics believe should be the basis of our political life. This is because they believe that political injustice is likely to be committed when one blindly follows the dictates of any community that is too narrow...