‘Citizen of nowhere’ or ‘the point where circles intersect’? Impartialist and embedded cosmopolitanisms

Abstract

Ethical cosmopolitanism is conventionally taken to be a stance that requires an ‘impartialist’ point of view—a perspective above and beyond all particular ties and loyalties. Taking seriously the claims of those critics who counter that morality must have a ‘particularist’ starting-point, this article examines the viability of an alternative understanding of cosmopolitanism: ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’. Using moral justifications for patriotism as points of contrast, it presents embedded cosmopolitanism as a position that recognises community membership as being morally constitutive, but challenges the common assumption that communities are necessarily bounded and territorially determinate.