All human beings are connected to one another within the community of humanity. This is the foundational thesis of the long-standing cosmopolitan debate. Ethical cosmopolitanism constitutes a specific perspective within this extensive debate, one that examines the conditions for an ethically good life in the cosmopolitan community and, amid globalized crises, is increasingly discussed as a promising approach to humanity as a whole. Yet its metaethical foundation remains contested: does ethical cosmopolitanism require ethical universalism? An early linkage of universal ethical duties with the community of humanity can be reconstructed from Cicero’s De Officiis, whose natural-law justification combines transcendental grounding with appeals to specifically human capacities. Such strategies appear problematic in light of decolonial theories, which reject universal validity claims for ethical norms and dismiss universal ethics as Eurocentric and embedded in ongoing coloniality. Cicero is paradigmatic here, because his natural-law justification decisively shaped later cosmopolitan theories and thus stands for an entire tradition of universalist ethics. Decolonial theories, as articulated by Walter D. Mignolo in The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (2021), voice perhaps the most fundamental challenge to such grounding strategies. Starting from a condensed reconstruction of Cicero’s natural-law justification in De Officiis and applying decolonial objections to it, I examine how convincing such a grounding of an ethically universal cosmopolitanism proves to be.
Eva-Maria Frank is a visiting Ph.D. student working on ethical cosmopolitanism at the Center for Life Ethics at the University of Bonn, Germany. Her research is funded by a Ph.D. grant from the Heinrich Böll Stiftung/BMFTR.