Cosmopolitanism and the Evils of the World

© The Author(s) 2020

M. H. DeArmeyCosmopolitanism and the Evils of the Worldhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42978-2_1

1. Introduction

Michael H. DeArmey¹  

(1)

School of Humanities, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS, USA

Michael H. DeArmey

There are issues in the conduct of human affairs in their production of good and evil which … are so central, so strategic in … that their urgency deserves with respect to practice, the names ultimate and comprehensive. These issues demand the most systematic reflective attention that can be given. —John Dewey

This book has been written in the attempt to mitigate the world catastrophe that lies waiting in the decades to come. While the usual transnational evils continue to plague us—genocide, torture, terrorism, slavery, and wars of aggression, the most frightening, the most unsettling transnational evil is the worldwide destruction of the earth’s biosphere.

Over two centuries ago Immanuel Kant attempted to mitigate one evil—war—by arguing for a cosmopolitan world order. Kant proposed a peace federation which, since 1945, has taken the form of the United Nations. In Kant’s cosmopolitan world order individuals have rights as citizens of the world, above and beyond national rights. Kant forecast a world community which is the correlate to a cosmopolitan world organization. This book follows in the footsteps of Kant but examines additional transnational evils. Transnational evils are wrongdoings which by design severely harm people and other life forms, and occur in multiple places.¹ Their agents are scattered about. Transnational evils involve agents who plan, create a budget, utilize a communications network—in short, create a culture of wrongdoing and evildoing. Cosmopolitanism is essentially two things. It is the attempt to reduce transnational evils by precisely thinking about them, followed by recommendations that protect the dignity and world citizenship of people and their multifarious ways of living.² Cosmopolitanism is also a theory of a new world order, together with recommendations for closer ties between people and cultures—an improved world community. In this work the new world order will be a greatly strengthened United Nations, with new structural components and increased legal power. The improved world community will be more appreciative of differences within the family of mankind. Proposals will be set out that are designed to bring human beings closer together, and these run the gamut across human values and institutions: education, art, hospitality, understanding strangers, citizenship, the ethics of care and respect, and cooperation.

Cosmopolitanism has its enemies. These are isolationism, extreme nationalism and populism, totalitarianism of every variety, political conservativism, racism, relativism, and subjectivism. The people who hold these beliefs are not necessarily bad people, though some are. Many are probably your neighbors. At this point in world history, what is imperative is cooperation among nations and world citizens, not the various political realities just cited.

Synchronous Catastrophic Causation: The World in Crisis

We are at this moment in time on the brink of disaster so disruptive it could bring down civilization itself. Our dear planet is now significantly overpopulated, and there is an unbreachable time lag that will occur even if steps are taken to decrease birth rates. Ten to fourteen million people will be alive, ceteris paribus, by 2050. On top of this, so to speak, there are disastrous permutations in the atmosphere adversely affecting human health, the health of ecosystems, marine life, and crop production. Lack of food due to crop failures, water shortages, and overpopulation will produce riots. Moreover, there is a looming energy crisis, such that it is increasingly more costly to extract traditional oil and gas as these resources dwindle. Forests too continue to dwindle. The stability of nation states is disrupted in multiple ways. Borders are more permeable, millions of people are on the move attempting to relocate for a better, safer life. There is now a sharp increase in gangs, hate groups, and terrorists.³ Political groups/parties are increasingly polarized, employ insults and harsh language. We are in the midst of what Gilbert Murray once called a failure of nerve, the abandonment of confidence in reason.⁴

The homogenization of technologies, cultures, and practices worldwide which has been taking place for decades means that if a crisis occurs, it will have a cascading effect throughout the system. Thomas Homer-Dixon’s analysis of this is instructive. He states that

…a socio-ecological crisis … will have an intricate causal, spatial, and temporal structure. For example, rather than a single critical transition at the planetary scale, smaller crises originating within particular systems or geographical regions might propagate across system boundaries, connect together, and then expand into a global crisis.⁵

His prognosis is gloomy indeed:

Humankind, I argue, is on the cusp of a planetary emergency. We face an ever-greater risk of a synchronous failure of our social, economic and biophysical systems, arising from simultaneous, interacting stresses acting powerfully at multiple levels of these global Systems … I believe that the next one hundred years will be a time of great instability and quite likely of extraordinary violence and human hardship .⁶

If the catastrophic events described above are underway, think about what will happen if concurrently tremendous amounts of ice melt in Greenland and western Antarctica. If this occurs, and it is likely underway now, estimates put ocean rise at nine meters or about 28 feet. Large cities will be flooded. Barricades and walls of concrete and steel will be completely inadequate. As a consequence millions of people will move inland, not all at once but in an ever-increasing stream. Social services such as clinics and hospitals will be overwhelmed. Police forces will be overwhelmed, even the military will be unable to stop angry looters and gangs of marauding killers. Bands of people will go after farms where they can overtake owners and steal crops, chickens, and livestock. Economies will collapse. Given these upheavals, leaders of countries least affected by rising oceans will be tempted to attack and take over the territory of weakened countries. Under these conditions an array of local evils, such as robberies and murders, will sharply increase. Slavery, genocide, even the use of weapons of mass destruction are real possibilities. Unless we become cosmopolitans and work together as a family of peoples, the certain forecast is the Fall of Mankind and global biotic destruction. What we are doing to the earth’s biosphere is so destructive that it raises the question posed by the Fermi paradox: Given the likelihood of huge numbers of planets in the Milky Way and other galaxies, why have we not detected intelligent life? It may be that alien civilizations do not survive into the period in which they attempt contact with other planetary civilizations. They do not reach the point at which they could create von Neumann machines. Machine assemblers or von Neumann machines self-replicate by extracting minerals from asteroids or planets they find in the course of their various journeys through space. They would be accompanied by cargo vessels containing capsules of plutonium for the propulsion system of the replicated probes. The alien civilizations which created the mother or original machines would design them such that they constantly send out signals announcing their presence and requesting a reply. In the event they receive a reply they would be automatically rerouted to the planet originating the response. They would contain transmittable information as to where the home planet is that manufactured the probes, and what that civilization is like. Space should contain significant numbers of signaling machines. But SETI has detected no such signals despite years of scanning the heavens.

An original paper by Frank Tipler argued that since there are no von Neumann machines, no civilization survives its own collective behavior.⁷ This paper generated a wide-ranging discussion by mathematical physicists, astronomers, and philosophers. Reviewing the literature, it seems that probability would have it that if human beings self-destruct, it will be either by making the biosphere uninhabitable through pollution and changes in the earth’s chemistry, or through detonation of nuclear weapons in a third world war, or both concurrently.

Our only hope of saving ourselves and the entire biotic community and avoiding Tipler’s cosmic fate is cosmopolitanism—a greatly strengthened world organization and world community. The suggestions offered in this work, or something like them, are a matter of urgency, not only to stop the destruction of the environment but also to reduce concurrent and long-standing transnational evils as well (such as slavery and genocide).

This work is divided into two parts of uneven length. Part I: Cosmopolitan World Organization and World Community begins with Chapter 2, a brief history of cosmopolitanism from Diogenes to Kant, with the main focus on Kantian cosmopolitanism. Chapter 3 sets out a cosmopolitan theory of dignity, not only for persons but for most of the entire biotic community. This is referred to as a biotic and enhancement theory of dignity. The argument will be that when value comes on the scene, dignity appears. Chapter 4 examines Kant’s theories of cosmopolitan hospitality, care, and respect. This is part of Kant’s efforts to develop a world organization and its correlate, a world community. The ethical treatment of immigrants and their paths to citizenship are clarified, and contemporary thinking on hospitality and the ethical treatment of immigrants is discussed, with insights from Derrida, Seyla Benhabib, Ben Jolloun, and K. Anthony Appiah. Chapter 5 proposes a revision of the world order, beginning with structural changes to the United Nations. These changes involve strengthening and expanding the legal powers of the United Nations, while leaving the sovereignty of nation states intact, but with one exception, the threat to global stability by transnational evildoing.

Part II: Cosmopolitanism and Evil begins with Chapter 6, a taxonomy of bad, wrongdoing, and evildoing. What forms of badness, wrongdoing, and evildoing are there? This chapter puts some order and precision in thinking about these concepts and their referents. A new definition of evil is offered. At the most general level transnational evils are inversions of civilization and deformations of life. Chapter 7 is an extended discussion of the destruction of the earth’s biosphere, gleaned from technical research and reports from the scientific community. Active and passive wrongdoing are discussed in this context. Chapter 8, GENOCIDE, begins with Raphael Lemkin’s pioneering work on genocide, leading to the ratification of the UN Convention on Genocide. The chapter advances an analysis of the concept and referents of this transnational evil, including critical appraisals of contemporary writers such as Claudia Card. Chapter 9 is a discussion of slavery, with critical assessments of the work of three main writers on this subject, Orlando Patterson, Kevin Bales, and Siddharth Kara. Chapter 10 continues the discussion of slavery, but focuses on child soldiers, a topic neglected by writers on slavery. Chapter 11 is an analysis of the concept of torture and an examination of the ethics of torture as well as its effectiveness. Experiences of both victims and perpetrators are described. An analysis of the ticking bomb scenario is part of this chapter. Chapter 12 is a thorough analysis of terrorism. For a host of reasons it is shown that terrorist acts are always wrong. Terrorism is distinct from the more general category of acts that produce terror, and is a subset of that general category.

Throughout this book, in each chapter, cosmopolitan recommendations are made that will reduce the occurrence of transnational evils. These recommendations are non-draconian, reasonable, and necessary. I have also provided a list of these recommendations at the end of this work. In regard to the destruction of the earth, there is still time to save ourselves and the biosphere, but time is running out. So the task of putting human behavior on a sane, rational, and ethical path is urgent. The reader should be prepared for a lengthy journey through the dark side of human behavior. You must beware of the dangers of misanthropy, otherwise you may lose your moral bearings and no longer care about how others are treated. As I say to my students in my course on evil, remind yourself again and again of humanity’s best behaviors and outlooks.

Footnotes

1

This book is concerned with local wrongdoing and evildoing only insofar as these are internal to transnational evils. The array of characteristics of evildoing that distinguish it from lesser wrongdoings are described in Chapter 6.

2

Precision thinking to the extent possible, always remembering Aristotle’s remark that one must be content with what the subject matter allows. Cosmopolitan recommendations are not aimed at individual nation states but are universal proposals necessary for a better world, resulting in fewer and fewer occurrences of transnational evils.

3

This splintering into gangs and hate groups has been discussed by Magnes Enzensberger, Civil Wars from L. A. to Bosnia (New York: The New Press, 1990); Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993).

4

Gilbert Murray, Five Stages of Greek Religion (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishers, 2010).

5

Thomas Homer-Dixon et al., Synchronous Failure: The Emerging Causal Architecture of Global Crisis, Ecology and Society, 20 (2015). Access online at: https://​homerdixon.​com/​wp-content/​uploads/​2016/​10/​Homer-Dixon-etal.​-Synchronous-Failure-the-architecture-of-global-crisis-ES-2015-76811.​pdf.

6

Thomas Homer-Dixon, Synchronous Failure: The Real Danger of the 21st Century. Speech given at George Washington University, December 4, 2002. Access at: https://​homerdixon.​com/​synchronous-failure-the-real-danger-of-the-21st-century/​.

7

Frank Tipler, Extraterrestrial Beings Do Not Exist, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, 21 (267) (1981). Also see Stuart Armstrong and Anders Sandberg, Eternity in Six Hours: Intergalactic Spreading of Intelligent Life and Sharpening the Fermi Paradox. The Future of Humanity Institute, Philosophy Department, Oxford University. Access online at: http://​www.​fhi.​ox.​ac.​uk/​wp-content/​uploads/​intergalactic-spreading.​pdf.

Part ICosmopolitanism, World Organization and World Community

© The Author(s) 2020

M. H. DeArmeyCosmopolitanism and the Evils of the Worldhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42978-2_2

2. On Cosmopolitanism

Michael H. DeArmey¹  

(1)

School of Humanities, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS, USA

Michael H. DeArmey

Roosevelt…contemplates a future when any two persons on earth will be able to be completely present to one another in less than a second….All the trends are toward the greater unification of mankind. …we become interdependent. Communities merge into states, states into nations, nations into families of peoples…" —Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1926 Whither Mankind?

Cosmopolitanism began in ancient Greece as a moral outlook on the world. We are one human family. A virtuous character and good moral relations to others are central. Some writers, ancient and modern, attribute the origin of cosmopolitanism to Socrates. Cicero (Tusculus Disputiones),¹ Epictetus (Discourses), and Plutarch (De Exilio), say that Socrates was the first to view himself as a citizen of the world. Epictetus says

what other course remains for men but that which Socrates took when asked If what is said by the philosophers regarding the kinship of God and men be true, to what country he belonged, never to say I am an Athenian, or I am a Corinthian, but I am a citizen of the universe? For why do you say that you are an Athenian, instead of mentioning merely that corner into which your paltry body was cast at birth?²

And Plutarch says

…the saying of Socrates is still better, that he was no Athenian or Greek, but a Cosmian because he did not shut himself up within Sunium and Taenarus and Curaunian mountains. ‘Seest thou yon boundless aether overhead That holds the earth beneath its soft embrace?’ This is the boundary of our native land.³

In the early modern period Montaigne kept this attribution alive.⁴ Recently Rob Riemen claimed that Socrates was the founder of cosmopolitanism. Riemen cites this passage from the Gorgias, in which Socrates connects the human family with the world order:

The wise claim, Callicles, that heaven and earth, gods and humans, are connected by public spirit, friendship, a sense of order, self-control and justice. That also, my friend, is why we call this universe the cosmos, world order, and not chaos….⁵

These intriguing claims about the Socratic origins of cosmopolitanism cannot be confirmed with confidence. Rather, classicists regard Diogenes the Cynic as the founder of cosmopolitanism. When asked where he was from he replied I am a citizen of the world.⁶ This apparently meant that he was at home anywhere among the human tribes; that although he was indeed from Sinope, his most basic identity was with the human family. The Cynic orientation toward a common humanity was assimilated by Stoic philosophers. Plutarch says

…we should not organize our daily lives around the city or the deme, divided by local schemes of justice, but we should regard all human beings as our fellow demesmen and fellow citizens….⁷

Marcus Aurelius is perhaps the most interesting of the Stoic cosmopolitans. Caesar of the Roman Empire, he profited most from the teachings of a slave (Epictetus). Marcus Aurelius argues from the commonality of reason to the world …as…a city state.⁸ Reason enables us to live a life of virtue. Foreigners and other strangers should be treated as friends, and we should, first of all, when meeting them, expend the effort to ascertain their values and beliefs. This is important in judging how we may extend hospitality to the stranger. Reminiscent of Benjamin Franklin’s practice of the virtues, Marcus made cosmopolitanism a part of his daily routine:

Say to yourself in the morning: I shall meet people who are interfering, ungracious, insolent, full of guile, deceit….But I…who know that the nature of the wrongdoer is of one kin with mine…the same portion of the divine.—I cannot be harmed by any one of them, and no one can involve me in shame. I cannot feel anger against him who is of my kin….We were born to labor together, like the feet, the hands, the eyes….⁹

Humans are humans no matter what their origins. It makes no difference, he says, whether a person lives here or there, provided that, wherever he lives, he lives as a citizen of the world.¹⁰

Modern Cosmopolitanism: The Kantian Project

The central figure in modern cosmopolitanism is Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant retains the ethical dimensions of ancient cosmopolitanism but expands the cosmopolitan outlook in the direction of political and legal theory. For a long time scholars regarded Kant’s political/legal writings as minor compared to the critiques, but now these cosmopolitan writings are regarded as complex, profound, and central to his thought.¹¹ They appeared in the years 1784–1797, and one can determine by comparing these writings over the years that Kant’s thought was not static, but developing, indeed improving.¹²

For Kant the driving motivation to this more complex and more technically reasoned cosmopolitanism was the evil of war.¹³ War is a lawless state between nations in which men are used as mere tools, thereby violating their dignity. War creates misery (unhappiness): it costs lives and depletes the national treasury for years and years to come. When the national treasury is diminished, cultural improvement suffers, especially education. What can be done to bring about ongoing, perpetual peace? How can this scourge of humanity be overcome? The answer lies in the formation of a cosmopolitan peace or world federation, whose voluntary members agree to basic ethical and political principles.

Kant’s attempt to bring war to a permanent end through cosmopolitan theory and practice is divisible into the main strand and a secondary, accommodating strand. The centerpiece of the main strand is the essay, Perpetual Peace, the accommodating strand consists of his claim that we can see through the study of human history that Nature seems to be designed to eventually bring humans to cosmopolitanism.¹⁴ Kant intended Perpetual Peace to be an outline, A Philosophical Sketch as the subtitle indicates. As the term sketch implies, cosmopolitanism is something to be filled out, completed by others (he was seventy-one when he published the essay). The cosmopolitan world federation, along with the theory and practices it involves, will admit of gradual reform according to fixed principles.¹⁵ This may be aptly called pragmatic gradualism, and this book attempts to take additional steps in developing cosmopolitanism.

The Original Contract and the Ideal Nation-State. Kant’s cosmopolitanism is based on the social contract. Hypothetically, people in a state of nature, without law or government, would want to escape this condition of conflict and fear. They would form a government with a constitution and would agree to laws utilizing coercion if necessary. Thus they would escape the lawless condition. The constitution would represent the original contract, and the will of the people would be represented by a sovereign, which (for Kant) must be the legislative body. Kant says that the original contract is not a historical event but "…merely an idea of reason."¹⁶

A constitution is the framework within which the legislative body passes laws and creates state projects of various kinds. The test of whether or not laws are just is the question of whether or not the law(s) could be agreed upon by the whole people. If so, the law(s) is just, if not, the law(s) is unjust.¹⁷ The whole population functions in the same way as universalization in the first version of the Categorical Imperative.

The best form of government is republican, with a constitution and separation of powers, and with the same legislative body for all the state’s operations and for all citizens. If legislative and executive powers reside in one person or body, then the head of state can go to war as a kind of amusement, and while his people suffer in wartime, the despot will continue his banquets and other royal pleasures without interruption.

The republic is democratic in regard to sovereignty. People are represented by a legislative body which is the sovereign. Without representation the government is despotic and the people will engage in violence against this. The republic’s laws and projects are implemented by the head of state or executor. The head of state can be deposed by the legislature, but not punished. Since the legislative body has this power to depose, rebellion by the people is unwarranted. Rebellion would undermine the republican constitution. As long as it is possible to make out a case that the head of state (and perhaps the legislature too) is acting in goodwill, the people must endure crises and hardship from time to time.

In a republican nation state every citizen will have as much freedom as possible, consistent with the freedom of others. Since all citizens are free in the same way it follows that all citizens are morally and legally equal. External relations between people are governed by rights. Kant says that right is the restriction on each individual’s freedom so that it harmonizes with the freedom of everyone else.¹⁸ Any hindrance to universal and equal freedom will be met by state coercion:

…if a certain use to which freedom is put is itself a hindrance to freedom in accordance with universal laws (i.e., contrary to right), any coercion which is used against it will be a hindrance to a hindrance of freedom, and will thus…be right. It thus follows by the law of contradiction that right entails the authority to apply coercion to anyone who infringes it.¹⁹

Kant’s Federation of Peaceful Nation-States. There is an analogy between the lawless state of nature from which people escape, and the lawless relation between nation states in their external relation to one another. The absence of cosmopolitan law means that every nation state is a potential threat to any other nation state, and therefore every nation state must be prepared for war. And war, Kant says over and over again, is an evil thing. Perpetual Peace contains six preliminary articles aimed at finally eradicating the conditions which start wars. Kant says these articles are prohibitive. They describe the negative duties of nation states—what nation states must not do if human beings are to escape the horrors of war. Article 1 concerns the completeness of peace treaties. If there are hiatuses, reservations, unresolved issues, and predictable future difficulties remaining in the peace treaty, then this would be a mere treaty, a suspension of hostilities, not a peace….peace nullifies all existing reasons for a future war.²⁰ Nation states have a strict duty to work through and finalize a complete cessation of present and future hostilities. The second article outlaws one state acquiring another. Kant’s pragmatic gradualism allows some latitude to this, apparently since state boundaries were not set in 1795 (e.g., Prussia, Poland, Russia, and Austria). Once boundaries are set, a state is not a thing which can be bought, sold, given, merged, traded, etc. Rather, a state is made up of people and is a moral entity (an object of moral consideration). To treat it as something that can be possessed is to violate that people’s social contract, violate their autonomy. Article three gradually abolishes standing armies over time. Only an all-volunteer, reserve army is morally permissible, otherwise soldiers would be mere machines, expressions of force. This reserve force would receive training from time to time. The fourth article outlaws incurring debts to a foreign power(s) to conduct war. Article five is a strict duty which bans interference in the constitution and government of another nation state. It is up to the people of a state to conduct their own affairs. To interfere is to violate the autonomy of its citizens. Kant qualifies this, however. If there is civil war, a foreign power can support one side against the other. Presumably this is because that nation state has returned to a state of nature, and this cannot be tolerated by its neighbors. No doubt the support would be given to the side most favorable to a republican government. Unfortunately, Kant does not say what constitutes support. Generally, Kant thinks the outcome of internal conflict (probably short of war) within a nation state should be left to its people. The sixth article can be read as a qualification of article five. It states that nation states have a strict duty not to interfere with another nation state by sending in assassins, poisoners (venefici), by instigating treason, or by using spies. It also outlaws punishing a defeated nation, for there can be no third-party judge and no relation of superior to inferior. Nation states are equal, even if defeated in war. Punishment could lead to extermination, the withering away or self-destruction of both parties and right itself. This despicable action would not for long be confined to war.²¹ Presumably Kant has in mind killing and pillaging the defeated population.

The preliminary articles are followed by three Definitive Articles. These articles concern the formal creation of genuine and lasting peace. The first definitive article sets out an ideal that all nation states have a republican form of government in which the will of the people is represented by the sovereign or legislative body. In particular, it is essential that the will of the people—their consent—be the determining factor in whether a nation state is to go to war or not. If this were operative, then nation states …will have great hesitation in embarking on so dangerous an enterprise.²² The people know the misery and horror they would reign down upon themselves.

The second definitive article states that nation states must enter into a federation of peoples.²³ Kant rejects Cloots’s idea of one international or world state. This is because a legislative body represents a specific and distinct group of people, but a world state would have to represent peoples all around the globe, and this is unworkable. Kant thinks an international, single world state is contradictory.²⁴ Why it is contradictory is unclear. Pauline Kleingeld thinks that a world state would contradict the original contracts made by people in forming their states. In other words, a world state would violate distinct peoples’ autonomy.²⁵ Kant does say rather cryptically that …states…. already have an internal constitution and have thus outgrown the coercive right of others to subject them to a wider legal constitution in accordance with their conception of right.²⁶ The independent nation state is still to be preferred to a conglomeration of the separate nations [i.e., peoples] under a single power….²⁷ A world state would lead to a soulless despotism. Setting aside the idea of one world state, Kant says a federation of peoples will have a constitution, similar to the civil one, within which the rights of each [state] could be secured.²⁸ The ideal would be a world republic of independent states governed by public coercive laws….²⁹ But each nation conceives of its own majesty to consist precisely in not having to submit to any external legal constraint.³⁰ Therefore since nations do not want these laws, one must settle for a negative substitute.³¹ This would be a gradually expanding membership of nation states into a world federation. This federation would protect the security and independence of each member nation state. Thus Kant is a staunch defender of cultural pluralism. Member states to the federation lead their own lives, ideally according to the will of their own people.

The third definitive article attempts to create a universal human community as the complement to the world federation. Kant states that individuals are world citizens, and must be treated with hospitality when approaching another people’s country (or society). Kant says this is the only cosmopolitan right, but it is inclusive of the right to freely pursue commercial transactions, the right to engage in critical dialogue, and the right to know precisely and in detail what the laws and policies of the visited society are (the same right that should be possessed by the residents of that foreign land).

Kant means by the right to hospitality the right to be treated with goodwill so long as he behaves in a peaceable manner.³² Kant thought that already during his lifetime a universal community was in the making, and had sufficiently developed such that a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere.³³ The original impetus toward a universal community with peaceful relations and goodwill was trade and commerce.

The right of hospitality is the right of entry, not the right to be treated as a guest. It is a right of visitation (Besuchsrecht), not a right of residence (Gastrecht), someone to be taken care of as you would do for someone whom you invited to your home. For that privilege, special, non-cosmopolitan arrangements would have to be made. Kant has in mind the right of hospitality as the right to enter a foreign land as long as one intends no harm to the country, its citizens, or its material culture. Also, and presumably, that society must have reasons for denying entry, such that any society would find these reasons compelling. So Kant is in favor of opening borders to well-intentioned strangers.

For Kant hospitality is double-edged. He is at least equally, if not more so, concerned that the strangers respect the host peoples and their land. No stronger words of condemnation can be found in Kant’s writings than his condemnation of civilized states of our continent

…the injustice which they display in visiting foreign countries and peoples (which in their case is the same as conquering them) seems appallingly great. America, the negro countries, the Spice Islands, the Cape, etc. were looked upon at the time of their discovery as ownerless territories; for the native inhabitants were counted as nothing….This led to oppression of the natives, incitement of the various Indian states to widespread wars, famine, insurrection, treachery, and the whole litany of evils which can afflict the human race.³⁴

Does