Contemporary Cosmopolitanism: Appiah and Nussbaum

Kwame Anthony Appiah, in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006), develops what he calls "rooted cosmopolitanism" or "cosmopolitan patriotism," a position explicitly designed to reject the false dichotomy between local attachment and universal moral concern that much of the nationalism-cosmopolitanism debate presupposes. Appiah, who was raised partly in Ghana (where his father, Joseph Appiah, was a prominent politician and independence-era statesman) and partly in England, draws on this personal formation to argue that genuine cosmopolitan sensibility does not require the abandonment of local, particular loyalties to family, nation, or culture, but rather combines a robust commitment to those particular attachments with two further commitments: an acknowledgment of obligations that extend beyond one's own kin and compatriots to all human beings simply as human beings, and an active, curious interest in the differing beliefs and practices of other cultures, valued not because all values are relative but because there is genuine, fallible learning to be had from engagement with different ways of living well.