The Relation between cosmopolitan ethics and pluralism.

Cosmopolitan ethics comes from Diogenes (5th century) in Ancient Greece. When someone asked him where he came from he said: “I am a citizen of the world (cosmopolitan)". This is a broader concept than what most people held at that time.

Most Greeks, in those days, identified with their individual city-state or with being Greek as a group. Now the individual could be part of two communities, the one in which they were born and the community of mankind in general.

Pluralism recognizes and promotes diversity within a nation or state. This permits the peaceful acceptance of different lifestyles, ideas, and beliefs.

The relation between the cosmopolitan ethics and pluralism







The relation between the cosmopolitan ethics and pluralism is that that both go beyond local prejudices and cultural patterns to embrace the fact that the world is large and so many people can’t all have the same way of looking at things. Both cosmopolitan ethics and pluralism foster the idea that not only can we live in peace with one another, through acceptance and tolerance, but also benefit by contributing knowledge and understanding to each other’s lives.

One relationship is that both of these concepts are weasel-words that can mean whatever the writer happens to want them to mean. They both describe a general tendency to hold certain beliefs which, if taken to extremes, would self-refute. For example, can we tolerate the intolerant? Can we engage in pluralism with a self-isolating community like the Amish? Etc.

“Cosmopolitan ethics” and “pluralism” are just ways to signify to others that one is thinking about something along the lines of left-leaning social tolerance, within the boundaries of modern leftism. If you want to be more specific than that, you have to stop using these words and talk about something concrete.