I mean by “cosmopolitanism” a moral and political stance that gives the interests of people of other nationalities a weight equal (or at least nearly equal) to those of one’s compatriots.
An argument for cosmopolitanism as you define i that might be acceptable to many people would be the argument from historical arbitrariness. Someone born in Louisiana is an US citizen only because the soldiers from the north proved sufficiently good at murdering people during the civil war. Why should that fact determine the moral weights she assigns people?
This argument doesn’t work against more sophisticated forms of anti-cosmopolitanism, however.
I guess one argument for localism that EAs might be sympathetic to would be as a solution to infinitarian paralysis. If we live in big universe (Tegmark Level 1 or above) there are likely to be infinitely many agents. As such, the total amount of welfare in the universe is also infinite, so no finite action we take can increase it or decrease it. However, if we discounted welfare exponentially by distance, our sums will converge and we can do ethics as we intuitively want to, assuming individual welfare is bounded above (though weaker assumptions will also yield the result).
“This argument doesn’t work against more sophisticated forms of anti-cosmopolitanism, however.”
I’m sorry but luck egalitarianism, the conception of moral responsibility implicit in your first paragraph, cannot be refuted; it’s partly an uncontroversial empirical claim on the causal determinants of social agents, but largely a claim on intuition. Unless I’m missing something, I don’t see how it could ‘fail to work’ in itself, absent you simply disagreeing with it at first principle (which is fine, obviously).
An argument for cosmopolitanism as you define i that might be acceptable to many people would be the argument from historical arbitrariness. Someone born in Louisiana is an US citizen only because the soldiers from the north proved sufficiently good at murdering people during the civil war. Why should that fact determine the moral weights she assigns people?
This argument doesn’t work against more sophisticated forms of anti-cosmopolitanism, however.
I guess one argument for localism that EAs might be sympathetic to would be as a solution to infinitarian paralysis. If we live in big universe (Tegmark Level 1 or above) there are likely to be infinitely many agents. As such, the total amount of welfare in the universe is also infinite, so no finite action we take can increase it or decrease it. However, if we discounted welfare exponentially by distance, our sums will converge and we can do ethics as we intuitively want to, assuming individual welfare is bounded above (though weaker assumptions will also yield the result).
“This argument doesn’t work against more sophisticated forms of anti-cosmopolitanism, however.”
I’m sorry but luck egalitarianism, the conception of moral responsibility implicit in your first paragraph, cannot be refuted; it’s partly an uncontroversial empirical claim on the causal determinants of social agents, but largely a claim on intuition. Unless I’m missing something, I don’t see how it could ‘fail to work’ in itself, absent you simply disagreeing with it at first principle (which is fine, obviously).