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Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics of Mobility pp 69–90Cite as

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Critical Cosmopolitanism and the Ethics of Mobility

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Abstract

This chapter sets out criteria for a critical cosmopolitan account of the political philosophy of migration. It develops this account through an exploration of Matheiu Kassovitz’s film La Haine that follows three youth from the banlieue of Chateloup-les-Vignes in the aftermath of neighborhood clashes with the police. The multidimensional forms of exclusion that the banlieue youth experience suggest the need for a more complex ethics of borders. To guide the search for this ethics, the chapter outlines a critical cosmopolitan ethics of migration and borders that combines insights from the social sciences and philosophy and seeks to promote people’s capabilities and to contest relationships of domination and hierarchy.

Keywords

  • Critical cosmopolitanism
  • Capabilities
  • Domination
  • Hierarchy
  • La Haine
  • Political philosophy

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Approximately 15 serious clashes between youth and police occurred between the start of the 1980s and 2010 (Body-Gendrot 2010: 660).

  2. 2.

    “Banlieue” refers to a suburb of a city, but it is more akin to the US inner city.

  3. 3.

    A related debate concerns the criteria for determining the scope of the democratic community, sometimes in terms of the “boundary problem” in political philosophy that asks how we can determine the scope of the demos. For a sample of this literature, see Abizadeh (2012), Bauböck (2007), Goodin (2007), Lopez-Guerra (2005), and Sager (2014).

  4. 4.

    An exception is Michael Walzer’s suggestion that it is necessary to regulate movement across state borders in order that neighborhoods remain open. Walzer provocatively asserts that “To tear down the walls of the state is not, as Sidgwick worriedly suggested, to create a world without walls, but rather to create a thousand petty fortresses” (Walzer 1983: 39). Walzer raises an important issue about the interaction of types of borders but does not pursue it very far and offers little evidence that open borders would indeed lead to “a thousand petty fortresses.” He also neglects the extent that many petty fortresses do in fact exist and are at least partly the result of state borders (e.g., due to their role in illegalizing ethnic and racialized groups).

  5. 5.

    A notable exception that connects these two literatures is Valls (2010).

  6. 6.

    By moral individualism, I am not disputing that morality ultimately derives from the well-being of individuals. Rather, I refer to the failure to analyze people as members of groups. For example, it makes a difference if someone has fewer opportunities because of structural racism.

  7. 7.

    Sen proposed capabilities as an alternative to welfare-based and resource-based approaches to distributive justice (Sen 1980). Welfare-based approaches that focus on individuals’ subjective evaluations of their well-being are vulnerable to the charge of “adaptive preferences”—for example, some groups may be socialized to be content with a subordinate position (Nussbaum 2008). Proponents of the capabilities approach hold that the advantage of focusing on capabilities over resources is that capabilities specify the ends themselves. Resource-based approaches instead target means to unspecified ends. An advantage of capabilities approach is that it refocuses away attention from distribution—who gets what—to questions of what people can actually do and enjoy.

  8. 8.

    In the previous work I have developed the implications for neo-republican accounts of freedom as non-domination for political inclusion and for the ethics of migration policy (Sager 2014, 2017).

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  1. Philosophy, Portland State University, Portland, OR, USA

    Alex Sager

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Sager, A. (2018). Critical Cosmopolitanism and the Ethics of Mobility. In: Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics of Mobility. Mobility & Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65759-2_5

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