Abstract

Resurgent nationalisms and disputes over educational curricula have brought to the fore an old debate between cosmopolitans and patriots. The cosmopolitans emphasize our moral obligations to all human beings, while the patriots argue that our greatest moral obligations lie closer to hand, within our political community. My dissertation concerns the roots of this debate by focusing on the first philosophers in the West to devise an ethical theory which is fully committed to the strictly cosmopolitan denial that we have any obligations to fellow citizens qua fellow citizens, the Greek Stoics of the third century scBCE. I discuss the arguments they offer for their strict cosmopolitanism, and I demonstrate how they argue in favor of the locally engaged political life in spite of their strict cosmopolitanism. For perspective, my dissertation also includes a background chapter on Plato and Aristotle and a chapter on the development of Stoic cosmopolitanism in Cicero. ;An introductory chapter clarifies the conflict between cosmopolitanism and patriotism. The first chapter concerns the Socrates of Plato's early dialogues, who seems to recognize obligations to all human beings, and the mature Plato and Aristotle, who do not develop the cosmopolitan implications of Socratic ethics. Chapter Two argues that the early Stoics ground their strict cosmopolitanism in certain assumptions about cosmic nature, and in Chapter Three, I reconstruct how Chrysippus' On Lives endorses the political life in spite of his strictly cosmopolitan commitments. The fourth chapter discusses the retreat in Cicero's De Officiis to a more limited Stoic cosmopolitanism which recognizes special obligations to fellow citizens. A brief concluding chapter relates the findings of the dissertation both to some broad historical questions about the origins and subsequent development of cosmopolitanism and to an argument for special obligations to fellow citizens which is prominent in the contemporary literature