Abstract
This article draws out two implications for cosmopolitan or global friendship from an examination of a recent work on civic friendship in the domestic sphere: (1) Insofar as it is the case that civic friendship, as defined by Schwarzenbach (On civic friendship: Including women in the state. Columbia University Press, New York, 2009) is necessary for justice in the state, it is also the case that the absence of global justice can be partially explained by the absence of what might be called cosmopolitan friendship. (2) If we consider the practicalities of civic friendship, we find that cosmopolitan friendship is an even more difficult and demanding project than we might have imagined.
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Notes
Instead of friendship, I could use another term: ‘solidarity’ (Gould 2007; Rorty 1993; Straehle 2010), ‘compassion’ (Nussbaum 2003), ‘empathy’ (Gould 2007), ‘humanity’ (Van Hooft 2010; Freeman 1994), and ‘fraternity’ (Rawls 1999), all appear in the literature. I do not think that I am misusing the term friendship by offering it here to describe a disinterested concern for the well-being of others who are not one’s personal friends. It may be that I am misusing it, but I will not offer any argument about terminology here, save to say that insofar as we find, from Aristotle on, a respected tradition of theorising about civic friends, there is at least a precedent for that, and arguably a basis from which to consider the notion of cosmopolitan friendship. I will thus proceed on the understanding that we can recognise, if not accurately or satisfactorily label, some ordinary affective concern for the well-being of fellow citizens, and that it might at least be possible to experience a similar sentiment towards non-citizens.
I will use ‘cosmopolitan friendship’ interchangeably with global or international friendship.
I do not intend here to contribute to the scholarship on Aristotle. Colleagues in this collection have done so ably; see Bentley’s, Hope’s and Leonstini’s contributions.
Schwarzenbach (2009, p. xii) claims, ‘a form of political or civic friendship between citizens emerges as a necessary condition for justice in the polis or city–state’.
She tells us, ‘any state that views the value and duty of civic friendship as central to its self-conception will quite naturally build this value into its foreign relations as well, that is, if its conception of philia is a truly civic one… In focusing on one form of friendship, we are led naturally to focus on and explore the other’ (2009, p. 249).
A primary target here is John Rawls’ Theory of Justice: ‘There is genuine friendship embodied in this principle [the Difference Principle]: it expresses the attitude that I do not want systemic advantages at the expense of others… that I am aware of and concerned about their plight… [But] the practical activity of caregiving itself—these stages are vaguely left to others in Rawls’ theory’ (Schwarzenbach 2009, pp. 174-5).
Schwarzenbach concludes from this that women, as traditional practitioners of ERL, are better suited to fostering civic friendship, and she therefore proposes the greater inclusion of women in the state in various public roles as a means to generating improvement. Though I would be very glad to see more women in public roles, I contend that Schwarzenbach’s claim that women’s traditional work gives them special aptitudes mistakes a socialised role for a natural one.
Concrete proposals for such recognition include direct payment and a period of national service for 17–25 year olds performing ERL in the community (Schwarzenbach 2009, p. 152). National service could equally be done by tenured professors, no doubt. The goal is to make explicit the contribution of ERL, and to disrupt the paradigm of productive labour as only that which adds to GDP, a focus on which serves as a ‘block’ to civic friendship (Schwarzenbach 2009, p. 135). Such disruption also contributes to the project of generating respect for the disadvantaged who have historically performed most ERL.
For Schwarzenbach, this is a significant point of departure from proponents of the ethics of care, wherein caring relationships can be asymmetrical.
This is the modern equivalent, for Schwarzenbach, of friends being attentive to one another’s character—good character is indicated, in conditions of pluralism, by a commitment to universal human rights.
Importantly, though, this priority is defended on practical, not moral grounds, and so differs from the communitarian position.
Catherine Lu (2010) proposes a relation of ‘political friendship’, which I take to be equivalent to civic friendship, again drawn from Aristotle, among peoples (understood in Rawls’ terms in The Law of Peoples). My focus here is on individuals as agents, and thus (potential) civic or cosmopolitan ‘friends’.
I will not offer a defence of this position here. For the purposes of this article, I take these claims to be reasonably valid or at least defensible.
Without campaigning for its reform or making other compensatory gestures—see Pogge (2005).
A fair target here might be Pogge’s account, or Onora O’Neill’s (2000) argument that the fact that we construct institutional frameworks that depend for their coherence on distant others being rational agents must entail that we implicitly recognise distant others as having the same moral standing we claim for ourselves as rational agents.
Schwarzenbach (2009, p. xiii) explicitly distinguishes her notion of civic friendship from relations properly described as relations of solidarity, which she says have traditionally been male and lack the feminist dimension that is central to her account. I do not think this a significant objection to comparing the two here: There are thematic affinities that justify setting aside semantic differences.
Schwarzenbach goes on, ‘[w]hat these young people lack in expertise and knowhow, moreover, they will surely make up amply by their energy, curiosity, and enthusiasm—above all, by their often still intact ethical idealism’ (2009, p. 271). I worry that this claim idealises young people, and underestimates the negative potential impacts on fragile communities in poorer countries of playing host to would-be international civic friends.
Another issue to be considered is the carbon footprint.
A sceptic might wonder whether the analogy I seek to draw between civic friendship and cosmopolitan sentiment falls down. The argument might go; ‘Am I not obliged to help my friend even when I don’t feel sympathetic or compassionate towards him? And if that is so, doesn’t the putative analogy dissolve?’ This attack misconceives the role of friendship and global sentiment in the account of justice that I take it that sentimental cosmopolitans defend. The claim is not that the justice-based obligations of assistance arise from feelings of friendship or related sentiment. Rather, the claim is that the feelings of sentiment/friendship are constitutive of a sense of belonging to a community of justice that guides the agent’s sense of the scope of justice, and that the practice of civic/cosmopolitan friendship serves an important function in motivating a commitment to justice and an epistemic function in correcting biases that would predictably arise in justice practised unilaterally. I am grateful to Derek Edyvane for pressing me on this point.
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Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2010 Manchester Metropolitan University Workshops in Political Theory. I am grateful to all participants in the workshop and also to Derek Edyvane, Cristina Johnston, and an anonymous reviewer for Res Publica for extremely helpful comments and suggestions. I worked on this article whilst holding a postdoctoral fellowship from the British Academy, and I am grateful for their generous support.
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Woods, K. Civic and Cosmopolitan Friendship. Res Publica 19, 81–94 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-012-9208-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-012-9208-0