Abstract
An important issue within the field of global ethics is the extent or scope of moral
obligation or duties. Cosmopolitanism argues that we have duties to all human beings by
virtue of some common property. Communitarian ethics argue that one’s scope of
obligation is circumscribed by one’s community or some other defining property. Public
virtues, understood to be either a property that communities possess to function well or a
moral excellence constitutive of that community, offer an interesting challenge to this
binary by positing moral goods or excellences that are constitutive of a community yet
global in application. Virtues such as tolerance, charity, moderation, or benevolence might
be examples of such goods or excellences endorsed by a community but applied to
individuals who are not members of the community, or, as in the case of environmental
ethics, even to entities that are not moral agents. Unlike cosmopolitan ethics, the scope of
the obligation does not depend on identifying universal properties, such as rationality,
human dignity, or utility, but could be defined entirely by and within a community.