Why cosmopolitan war is an ethics of fantasy

What is it about?

This article strives to show why the cosmopolitan view of war is implausible - an ethics of fantasy. War is a collective and collectivising activity and it requires a shared identity to be carried out. Those who argue that we should act as cosmopolitans, primarily attachment to humankind rather than any particular community, fail to take seriously the psychological mechanisms underpinning phenomena such as mobilisation or battle. To make war successfully and repeatedly, we need far more robust identities and this means that we cannot dispense with particularistic identities such as national ones.

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Photo by British Library on Unsplash

Photo by British Library on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This article is part of a special edition that seeks to bring ethical thinking about war into dialogue with findings in the social sciences. The goal is to formulate non-ideal theory that is plausible, that is to say an ethical view of what is just that is capable of guiding action and choice in the real world.