Cosmopolitan Responsibility

Front matter

Jan-Christoph Heilinger Cosmopolitan Responsibility

Jan-Christoph Heilinger Cosmopolitan Responsibility

Global Injustice, Relational Equality, and Individual Agency

Contents

Introduction: The challenge. Global injustice and the individual agent — 1 1 The ‘circumstances of cosmopolitanism’ — 5

2 The idea of cosmopolitanism — 8

3 Towards a global political ethics — 9 4 The pragmatic impulse — 11

Chapter 1 Cosmopolitanism. The ideal of global justice, past and present

The idea that all humans form a morally relevant global community has a long history that continues to inspire and shape debates until today. This chapter introduces and explicates the notion of cosmopolitanism and will establish it as the first core element of a cosmopolitan ethos. It does so by discussing the idea of global citizenship and its normative content; and the major phases of its historical development to the present—with a particular focus on the Cynics, Stoics and the Enlightenment philosophy of Immanuel Kant. It provides a brief overview of the contemporary debate about global justice, some basic distinctions with regard to metrics and patterns of justice, and explains the relationship between thinking about global justice and about global ethics.

With this, the idea of world citizenship is introduced as the first and foundational normative element of my theory of cosmopolitan responsibility. Agents who understand themselves and others as citizens of the world will acknowledge the numerous morally relevant connections that link people across the globe. The scope of justice and the scope of one’s moral concern will then no longer be limited by national borders; and global structural injustice—that links the advantages enjoyed by some with the disadvantages suffered by others—becomes a matter of urgent moral concern also for the privileged who, initially often unknowingly, benefit from it.

1 Global citizenship

The word “cosmopolitan” is of Greek origin and means “citizen of the world”. It is a compound noun combining the words “cosmos” (world, order) and “polites” (citizen). The tension between these two components generates something akin to an oxymoron: after all, the notion of a citizen of the world seems to contradict itself. Citizenship is generally understood to be individual legal membership with a defined national, social and political community. The term as currently and conventionally used specifies a particular subgroup of humans who form a distinct—and by definition not an all-inclusive—community. In the classical Greek context, citizenship was linked to a specific polis, a city-state like Athens or Sparta. Later on, the nation-state became the primary unit specifying citizenship. Today, supranational institutions like the European Union have emerged

8 OpenAccess. © 2020 Jan-Christoph Heilinger, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110612271-003 that provide citizens of member states with an emerging, new form of supra-citizenship, although this is still dependent upon their prior national citizenship. What such developments demonstrate is that, whatever the current organising unit, the size, constitution and complexity of citizenship-conferring communities has varied over time and space, and continues to do so.

Citizenship refers to a special status that individuals possessing it enjoy, including a specific range of expected, required and permitted actions. Citizens are normally expected to participate in their community, to express their voice through, for example, voting on issues of communal importance. Furthermore, citizens, in exchange for following the laws governing their community, are entitled to certain advantages, such as the use of common goods or the privilege of traveling with a passport of the respective community. Such special status, defined by a specific set of expectations, obligations and entitlements, can only be conferred by a community that is institutionally organised in specific ways (Carens 2000). Due to this legal (or political) understanding of citizenship, citizenship in the cosmopolitan sense of being of the world may appear nonsensical.

However, a closer analysis of the word “cosmos” reveals an innovative and provocative idea that dispels the oxymoron. Unlike our contemporary understanding of “cosmos” as outer space (all that lies beyond our planet world as such), “cosmos” in the classical Greek sense had a very different connotation: it referred to the world as an already structured and organised harmonious whole. Cosmos signified for the Greeks the universal order governed by logos, and was the opposite of “chaos,” the unstructured, formless and lawless void —in other words, the term had a meaning quite opposite to the one we currently attach to it. The assumption of such a meaningful and harmonious cosmic order, which is governed by natural (or divine) eternal laws, moderates the oxymoron in the word “cosmopolitan”. It points to the possibility of perceiving individuals as members in a structure that expands beyond the polis or nation. Here, citizenship is understood as an anthropological or a psychological’ phenomenon that is largely independent of actual political or legal arrangements. The presumed contradiction fades away under this assumption and makes room for an admittedly optimistic ideal of coherence, and for allegiance to a community that transcends local groups. In this sense, humans as humans can be understood to

11 My distinction between a legal and a psychological understanding of citizenship is based upon the distinction between different dimensions of citizenship made by Carens. He suggests that there is a legal dimension of citizenship, referring to the legal status of an individual, a political dimension, regarding the individual’s participation in collective decision making processes, but also a psychological dimension, that is constituted through psychological attachment (Carens 2000, 161-176).

form a community for which all contingent discriminatory characteristics like nationality, religion, culture, class, ethnicity, sex, gender or sexual preference, etc. are irrelevant for community membership purposes.

The cosmopolitan claim of a single, normatively relevant community of all humans endorses the normative anthropological claim that, in spite of all factual and circumstantial differences between individuals, all living human beings are equally entitled to membership in this overarching human community, which includes certain rights and entitlements, but also brings with it certain duties and obligations.

Cosmopolitanism, the idea of “world-citizenship,” is grounded in the fundamental idea that all human beings are jointly members of one global order, which is based on the widely shared normative assumption of the equal moral worth of all. Cosmopolitanism thus expresses a normative stance that gives rise to a moral project in several domains, most notably the political, cultural and moral. In its different forms, it (1) addresses a set of questions about living together, (2) shares a diagnosis, and (3) tends to agree on a set of central claims and commitments.

(1) The assumption of the existence of a single overarching human community that justifies regarding all individuals as “citizens” (at least metaphorically) suggests that there are certain expectations, requirements and entitlements connected to this status. Indeed, cosmopolitanism’s central question is how should human beings coexist? How should we live together?” More concretely, this question can be split into several sub-questions: Which normative rules should govern human action in order to coexist well on planet Earth? Which rights and entitlements do human individuals have as citizens of the world? And which obligations and duties do they have to meet, towards one another and also towards non-human animals and the environment?

(2) Asking these questions follows from the particular diagnosis of what I have called in the introduction the de facto “circumstances of cosmopolitanism”. They consist of three elements. First, all humans, whatever the differences be-

12 The adequate way of living together will also have implications for dealing with non-human animals and the environment. In any case, Nagel correctly and pointedly states that “we really do not know how to live together” (Nagel 1991, 5).

13 “The ethical life belongs to human beings, living together in ever larger groups, and working out their shared lives with one another.” (Kitcher 2012, 2) For this, see also below, chapter two.

tween individuals, are strikingly similar with regard to trans-temporally, transculturally, and inter-individually stable features. Human beings generally all have a roughly similar body, basic needs and interests, they also have standardly a capacity to have experiences, feel emotions and to reason, even if the concrete ways in which these capacities are used and experienced may differ to some degree between individuals, groups and cultures. Humans are able to interact and to communicate with one another, establishing relations that can bridge existing differences, including differences of language and culture. The obvious differences in, say, languages, fashion, parenting styles or burial rites thus must not obscure the striking similiarities between humans accross time and regions: all are needy creatures, all relate to and depend from others (at least during some periods of their lives), all can standardly govern their behaviour through employing reasoning and deliberation, and all have an interest in being well.“ These features ground the idea of a community of humans.

Second, we live in an increasingly interconnected world in which actions have both direct and indirect impact on the lives of many others. I would argue that this was already true at the very beginning of human history: rare in the historical record are individuals or communities that were permanently self-sufficient. New human groupings and settlements originated from the interactions and movements of older ones, and even when groups seek to define themselves as self-sufficient (or even hostile to other groups), those others are by definition the counterpart of such self-understandings. Once population levels increase in any area, meeting and interacting between groups becomes inevitable: it is and remains nearly impossible to abstain permanently from interaction with others. Nor is it possible not to have an impact on the lives of others, or not to be influenced by their actions (Appiah 2007). Such interaction and mutual impact is not impeded by the demarcation of groups, nor, in more recent times, by national boundaries. Today, global trade and climate change are but two particularly striking examples of the far-reaching entanglement of all human lives. The products we buy have often been produced in far away places, and so a long causal chain of interactions connects individual consumer decisions with the working conditions of manufacturers, sometimes very far away. Individual actions that generate CO,-emissions directly contribute to processes like global warming: flying anywhere in the world, from Albania to Zambia, materially adds to the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that influence weather phenomena elsewhere. And even those living in remote areas of the planet, e.g. the Maldives, are not merely heavily affected by the activities of others in

14 Cf. Appiah (2007), Ganten et al. (2008), Heilinger (2010, part IV), Nussbaum (2011a).

far away places that contribute to changing weather patterns and rising sea levels; entire islands are at risk of disappearing completely and forever as a result.

The significance of these two elements of the diagnosis of the de facto circumstances of cosmopolitanism—the possibility and inevitable reality of human interconnectedness—is heightened by a third observation: the striking contrast between the living conditions of humans in different places on the planet, which are defined by an almost unimaginable scale of inequality with many people not even having sufficient means to live a minimally decent life, due to poverty, exploitation, environmental degradation, etc.” The existing inequalities indicate a problem that can appear in an absolute and a relative form: Absolute deprivation is always morally problematic, because the basic needs of people are not met. Relative inequality might turn out to be less worrisome from a moral perspective, if those worse off are still reasonably well off and are able to live a decent life. Relative inequality, however, becomes particularly problematic, if the worse off are denied the opportunity to live a decent life all the while the relatively better off not only have access to the conditions of a decent life, but enjoy massive amounts of privileges and advantages, that are generated and upheld, at least partly, even at the expense of the worse off. This is the morally outrageous situation of our current world, constituting the third element of the descriptive diagnosis of the circumstances of cosmopolitanism.

(3) On these grounds a distinctively cosmopolitan position will take a normative stance. The particular normative commitment of cosmopolitans is that of egalitarian universalism taken seriously, with real world outcomes as the yardstick. The cosmopolitan perspective can be used in two senses: it can normatively evaluate and assess a given state of affairs, and it can be guide and demand particular forms of action and reform*°—always based on the grounds of the equal moral standing of all.

The fundamental claim about equal moral status of each individual does not —in my view—stand in need for a specific justification beyond the widely shared description of circumstances of cosmopolitanism.” The onus of proof lies, rath-

15 Extreme inequalities also occur within nations, raising problems similar to the ones discussed here. Cf. Milanovic (2011).

16 Beitz has distinguished cosmopolitanism as a “perspective” or “point of view” seeking to “encompass the whole world” on the one hand, and cosmopolitanism as a “substantive moral and political doctrine” on the other (Beitz 2005, 15).

17 However, such justifications of equal moral standing of humans are possible and standardly opt for one of three possibilities: shared needs, interests, or capacities, like reason, are seen as constitutive of equal value, external fixation of equal value by a divine entity or a natural law, or collective self-attribution of equal value through the community of communicating agents. Gener, on the side of those denying the fundamentally equal moral standing of all humans: those who might claim that some persons (women, people of colour, children, homosexuals or atheists, for example) do not have the same basic moral weight as others do, must provide arguments to defend the moral relevance of distinctions made on the grounds of gender, sexual preference, skin colour, age or religion. In the last few generations, many such distinctions have come rightfully under attack, some have already fallen. While the political realities in many parts of the world currently indicate challenges to such progress, even attack past achievements and institute regressive change, I assume that, based on the fundamentally self-evident insight into the moral equality of all, genuine progress will remain possible."

Cosmopolitanism in any case argues that the fundamental claim about the moral equality of all has to be taken seriously. And because cosmopolitanism stresses this prima facie uncontroversial assumption, it becomes controversial, thus calling for further reflection. Three central normative elements can be identified within the cosmopolitan commitment to the equal moral standing of all: normative individualism, egalitarianism/impartiality, and universal scope.’

First, each and every human individual, as such, is a basic unit of moral concern (Pogge 1992, 48). No additional conditions beyond humanness are necessary to qualify a human individual as fully morally relevant.” Notably, it is impermissible to make any exceptions and to exclude some from the moral concern because of their ethnicity, religion, nationality, family membership, sex, gender, erally, the equal moral worth of all has become a foundational conviction in contemporary moral philosophy, cf. e.g. Dworkin (1977, 180-183) or Nagel (1991, 14). Note, however, that equal moral standing and the demand to treat all as moral equals does not imply that everyone has to be treated equally. Treating different people differently—e.g., by locking up the bank robber, while being friendly to one’s cousin—may even be morally required in order to fully respect the fundamentally equal moral standing of everyone.

18 For a critical discussion of the claim that all persons have equal moral worth, cf. the papers collected in Steinhoff (2015) and Steinhoff (2013).

19 Cf. Pogge (2007, 316), Brown and Held (2010, 1-2), Pogge (1992, 48-49). The principles of normative individualism and egalitarian universalism can be found in many modern moral theories. Implicitly or explicitly, they are fundamental for Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and for utilitarian and contractarian theories.

20 The question whether the exclusive focus on human beings—and the corresponding neglect of animals and other rational or sentient beings—is problematic because in itself arbitrary (the objection of “speciesism”) will not be discussed here. Equally, I will not address the challenge that some human beings like newborn children or severely mentally impaired people are not in a full sense persons, if personhood is based on the condition of rationality. I will simply talk about human beings and interactions between human beings, while being aware of some unanswered questions in the background.

sexual preference, culture, etc. Furthermore, only human individuals are such units of concern. ‘Races,’ religious groups, nations, families, etc., have no independent moral standing, as normative collectivists might argue. For normative individualists, collectives matter morally only insofar as the individuals that are constitutive of the group matter.

Second, each of the individuals is to be seen as an equally important basic unit of moral concern. Not only are all human beings relevant, but they are equally relevant. Kings and beggars, criminals and saints, friends and strangers are indistinguishable in their fundamental moral relevance. They all have equal moral weight. Correspondingly, everyone’s interests, needs, claims, well-being etc., are fundamentally of equal moral importance. The default weighing of the interests, etc., of different people is hence one that can be characterised as impartial. All deviations from such impartial consideration stand in need of particular justification.”

Third, the scope of cosmopolitanism is unrestricted and maximally inclusive. It is universal in two senses: no matter when and where an individual lives or who she or he is, she or he matters equally; and he or she also matters equally for everyone. The first sense stresses what Pogge has called the “all-inclusiveness” of moral cosmopolitanism, the second its “generality” (Pogge 2007): cosmopolitanism fundamentally asks every individual to expand his or her concern to every other individual.

It is clear that a cosmopolitan theory and practice will face many challenges, both theoretical and practical. If it is to become a defensible, widely accepted and policy-relevant view, one will have to spell out how exactly the cosmopolitan community distributes entitlements, permissions and obligations, and what would be the appropriate institutional arrangements to secure the core demands of cosmopolitanism. With the intention of making progress in this regard, the chapters in this book will take up important challenges and seek to advance the understanding of the complex notions of equality, responsibility, impartiality, rights and their practical implications. But first I want to focus further on the development of the cosmopolitan ideal in the history of ideas, since knowing the history of a concept may also help to understand its current use more accurately.

21 Unlike Pogge (1992), Pogge (2007) avoids the notion of “equality” when determining the central normative commitments of cosmopolitanism. To prevent the impression that cosmopolitanism endorses an egalitarian view about distributive justice, he talks of “impartiality” which better captures the idea that all individuals matter equally. I discuss both notions separately in chapters two and five below.

The following section presents some important phases in the evolution of the idea that humans as citizens of the world form a morally relevant community.” I will look at the origins and at the cosmopolitan “agenda setting” in ancient Greece and will present the unfolding of this ideal during the Enlightenment period, notably in Kant’s seminal writings, before concluding with some brief thoughts about cosmopolitanism in the 19th and 20th century. It should become clear that the contemporary discussion of the content and form of cosmopolitan thinking owes much to its historical predecessors. What has mostly changed over time is that cosmopolitan ideals have become more and more applicable to an increasingly globalised—and thus factually cosmopolitan—reality.

3.1 Cosmopolitanism in ancient Greek philosophy

The explicit discussion of the notion of cosmopolitanism starts in the Greek Cynic and Stoic tradition at around 350 BCE. Yet, the idea that all human beings constitute a joint community is most probably even older and not restricted to the Western tradition of thought. The Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten (around 1300 BCE) may already be seen as an early proponent of universalistic monotheism. He accepted that he had the same duties towards all human beings, regardless of their ‘race’ or nationality (Harris 1927). The Chinese philosopher Mozi (around 400 BCE) also endorsed an idea of impartiality on the basis of a principle of “universal love” (cf. Caney 2005b, 4). A similar idea of universal obligation towards all appears in the Hebrew bible, and both Homer and Herodotus endorsed claims that call for an overcoming of narrow conceptions of (polis-) patriotism (Harris 1927). However, the origin of an elaborated idea of world-citizenship can be found “in the earlier classical period of Greek thought” (Harris 1927, 2; Nussbaum 1997b).

Explicit discussion of cosmopolitanism appears to have begun with the controversial Diogenes of Sinope (400/390 — 328/323), one of the prominent figures of Cynicism. A skeptic of the culture of the Greek polis, he has been pointedly described as “a cross between a satirical comedian and a homeless performance artist” (Warburton 2013). He rejected all possessions and lived as a pauper in order to express his disdain for material wealth. Seneca and others report that

22 This section is particularly indebted to work by Nussbaum (1997b). It also contains revised material published earlier (Heilinger 2015).

Diogenes had lived in a tub (Seneca, Ep., 90.14). Because of his “dog-like” lifestyle as a beggar without possessions, expressing without shame the different needs and impulses of his body in public, following like a dog the steps of Antisthenes whom he deeply admired (Diogenes Laërtius, VI.6, 18, 21), and because of his praise for the virtues of dogs, people called Diogenes himself a dog (Greek: kyon). Diogenes accepted this label as a title of honour and his teachings became known as Cynicism (Müller 1976, Ottmann 2001, 260, 276 -288).” It is reported that Diogenes disagreed with Plato about the adequate interpretation of Socrates’ teachings: Plato was in Diogenes’ eye too theoretical a philosopher, in contrast to Socrates, who had the right attitude towards the priority of practice. However, Diogenes agreed with both Socrates and Plato in certain respects: like both of them, he questioned the widely accepted ethical exclusivism which privileged the in-group of one’s polis over all other humans.

The core elements of the emerging cynical philosophical school were the self-sufficiency of the wantless individual (autarchy), the need for open expression of thoughts (parrhesia or shameless speech) and—here one finds the first reported actual use of the word “cosmopolitan’—a universal conception of human community transcending city or state boundaries. Once, when asked where he came from, Diogenes is said to have answered: “I am a citizen of the world.”** This claim to be a member of a universal community was perceived as a serious provocation of the established views because Diogenes implicitly rejected with this statement a definition of his own status and ancestry within the narrower terms of state or city affiliation that mattered so much to his fellow citizens. His self-description as cosmo-polites situates him in a larger community of all human beings—and in doing so places him outside of the narrowly confined borders of the Greek polis. Contradicting the standard self-perception of a citizen in a Greek polis in a way that must have appeared insulting to many, Diogenes drew a parallel between shared citizenship in a polis in the conventional understanding of his contemporaries on the one hand, and the mutual relationship of all human beings as cosmopolitans on the other. Such an expanded idea of shared citizenship implied that hospitality and fraternal affection were owed to all human beings, and not only to one’s fellow citizens in a particular polis.

23 Diogenes Laértius and Plutarch report further anecdotes about Diogenes, among them Diogenes going at plain daylight with a lamp to the Athenian marketplace and searching for an (honest) human being (an image later taken up by Nietzsche when presenting his Zarathustra). Diogenes is further said to have mocked Alexander the Great when the king promised to grant him a favour, whatever it may be: “Stand out of my sunlight!”

24 Cf. Diogenes Laértius (VI.63); a saying, however, that Cicero also attributed to Socrates in Tusculanae Disputationes (Cicero, Tusc. Disp., V.37, 108).

This early understanding of cosmopolitanism has two features that greatly influenced later uses of the concept. First, it seeks to empower the individual, insofar as one is freed from parochial allegiances to any narrower community such as the Greek polis-state. This was of particular importance to Diogenes since, in his time, the social structures of the polis had begun to decay and become increasingly fragile. Such individual self-assurance, expressed as independence from narrow-mindedness and crumbling communities, highlights the autarchy of each individual in a meaningful universal order. Second, this self-understanding of an empowered individual is embedded in the specific social concept of a universal community that is constituted by the relations between all individuals. It is this larger community within which humans stand in a relation of equality to one another, and in which mutual allegiances are owed.

The story continues with Diogenes teaching his Cynic thoughts to Crates of Thebes who influenced, together with Diogenes, Zeno of Citium, the founder of the school of Stoicism, which prevailed into Roman times. Zeno argued prominently for a universal “city under one law”” which specifies the claim of Diogenes to be a citizen of the world: the single law that all have to follow is conceived of as a natural law, existing independently of all agreements in particular cities or states. Here is how Plutarch presents Zeno’s view:

The much admired Republic of Zeno is aimed at this one main point, that our household arrangements should not be based on cities or parishes, each one marked out by its own legal system, but we should regard all men as our fellow-citizens and local residents, and there should be one way of life and order, like that of a herd grazing together and nurtured by a common law. Zeno wrote this, picturing as it were a dream or image of a philosophet’s well-regulated society. (Long and Sedley 1987, 429)*°

Zeno’s utopia hence went beyond the fraternal relations” argued for by Diogenes. The universal natural law ultimately demands a universal political order to which all human beings submit.

Another Stoic, Hierocles, addressed a challenge implicit in any demand for a universal law and universal allegiances among all human beings as human be-

25 Even if the word “city” designates obviously not the entire world, the direction of Zeno’s argument is clear. The notion of “law” is not to be understood in a modern sense. What Zeno refers to is again a meaningful structure governed by the “logos”.

26 More philosophical sources about Stoic political philosophy can be found in Long and Sedley (1987, 429 - 437).

27 And, of course, one must not oversee that several groups of people—among them women and slaves—were not always fully acknowledged as equals even in accounts defending a universal and egalitarian expansion of concern.

ings, which will also be discussed later in this book: How to deal with the particular and special relationships towards those nearer and dearer to us? If all human beings are equally important morally, then special treatment of my fellow citizens in local communities becomes problematic: Do we truly have to treat all human beings alike? How about the special concern I may foster for my parents and children, my friends, etc., as opposed to a general benevolence towards all human beings? Hierocles, living in the first and second century BCE, employed a metaphor—also later used by Cicero in his De Officiis (1.50 sqq.)—to make his point: we should understand our allegiances to other human beings as a series of “concentric circles,” with ourselves being at the centre and the other human beings grouped around us in ever larger circles. The first circle around oneself would be the immediate family, then the extended family, next friends, neighbours, fellow polis-inhabitants until ultimately the largest circle would comprise all human beings. The challenge and the task of human beings as moral agents would then be to “draw the circles somehow toward the centre,” so that the larger circle collapses with the next smaller circle.

Here is a long quote from Stobaeus, the compiler of extracts from Greek authors who worked in the early 5th century, illustrating in detail how Hierocles understood these concentric circles:

Each one of us is as it were entirely encompassed by many circles, some smaller, others larger, the latter enclosing the former on the basis of their different and unequal dispositions relative to each other. The first and closest circle is the one which a person has drawn as though around a centre, his own mind. [...] Next, the second one further removed from the centre but enclosing the first circle [...]. The third one has in it uncles and aunts, grandparents, nephews, nieces, and cousins. The next circle includes the other relatives, and this is followed by the circle of local residents, then the circle of fellow-tribesmen, next that of fellow-citizens, and then in the same way the circle of people from neighbouring towns, and the circle of fellow-countrymen. The outermost and largest circle, which encompasses all the rest, is that of the whole human race. Once these have all been surveyed, it is the task of a well-tempered man, in his proper treatment of each group, to draw the circles together somehow towards the centre, and to keep zealously transferring those from the enclosing circles into the enclosed ones [...]. The right point will be reached if, through our own initiative, we reduce the distance of the relationship with each person [...]. But we should do more, in the terms of address we use, calling cousins brothers, and uncles and aunts, fathers and mothers [...]. For this mode of address would be no slight mark of our affection for them all, and it would also stimulate and intensify the indicated contraction of the circles. (Long 1987, 349-350)

These cosmopolitan ideas about expanding the circles of concern and contracting the circles of proximity were taken up and refined more and more by the rich and diverse Roman Stoic tradition with proponents like Cicero, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius (Nussbaum 1994, ch. 9-12). In general, three main elements of Stoic cosmopolitan thinking appear to have evolved out of Diogenes’ original claim.” First, the foundational starting point is the assumed similar human capacity for reason that is constitutive for the assumed universal community of all human beings. Reason is conceived of as the divine faculty that allows us to make moral choices, and this faculty is shared by all human beings as human beings. Nussbaum explains: “Male or female, slave or free, king or peasant, all are alike of boundless moral value, and the dignity of reason is worthy of respect wherever it is found. This reason, the Stoics held, makes us fellow citizens” (Nussbaum 1997b, 7).