Res Publica (2013) 19:81–94

DOI 10.1007/s11158-012-9208-0

Civic and Cosmopolitan Friendship

Kerri Woods

Published online: 21 December 2012

 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012

Abstract This article draws out two implications for cosmopolitan or global
friendship from an examination of a recent work on civic friendship in the domestic
sphere: (1) Insofar as it is the case that civic friendship, as defined by Schwar-
zenbach (On civic friendship: Including women in the state. Columbia University
Press, New York, 2009) is necessary for justice in the state, it is also the case that
the absence of global justice can be partially explained by the absence of what might
be called cosmopolitan friendship. (2) If we consider the practicalities of civic
friendship, we find that cosmopolitan friendship is an even more difficult and
demanding project than we might have imagined.

Keywords Civic friendship
Cosmopolitanism
Sentiment
Global justice

Introduction

In this article, I want to explore what cosmopolitan moral thought might learn from
the idea of civic friendship. I consider whether there could plausibly be said to be
such a thing as ‘cosmopolitan friendship’, and what contribution it might make to
global justice.1 Personal friendship is familiar to us all. Civic friendship, a public
1
Instead of friendship, I could use another term: ‘solidarity’ (Gould 2007; Rorty 1993; Straehle 2010),
‘compassion’ (Nussbaum 2003), ‘empathy’ (Gould 2007), ‘humanity’ (Van Hooft 2010; Freeman 1994),
and ‘fraternity’ (Rawls 1999), all appear in the literature. I do not think that I am misusing the term
friendship by offering it here to describe a disinterested concern for the well-being of others who are not
one’s personal friends. It may be that I am misusing it, but I will not offer any argument about
terminology here, save to say that insofar as we find, from Aristotle on, a respected tradition of theorising
about civic friends, there is at least a precedent for that, and arguably a basis from which to consider the
notion of cosmopolitan friendship. I will thus proceed on the understanding that we can recognise, if not

K. Woods (&)
School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK
e-mail: k.woods@leeds.ac.uk

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relation distinct from personal friendship, is a phenomenon of continuing interest in

moral and political philosophy. Cosmopolitan friendship, or global friendship, or
something analogous, is proclaimed by some civil society actors, but as a concept, it
has few, if any, defenders in the academy.2
On the other hand, we find an emerging trend in the cosmopolitan literature on
global justice giving consideration to sentiment and solidarity as morally relevant
notions on which cosmopolitans might draw in defending a cosmopolitan account of
justice (Long 2009). I do not presume that practices of (civic) friendship can be
unproblematically extended to the global realm. Nevertheless, I contend here that
evaluating the limits and possibilities of civic friendship yields relevant lessons for
those theorists engaged in the business of identifying and defending cosmopolitan
global justice; indeed, this exercise might help us to identify the limits and
possibilities of cosmopolitan friendship.
The article proceeds as follows. I begin with a brief discussion of Sibyl
Schwarzenbach’s recent account of civic friendship. I then offer two plausible
reasons in support of her claim that friendship is, as Aristotle contended, necessary
for justice. If this holds, then there is merit in considering the affinities between
civic friendship and the sentimental turn in cosmopolitan thought, and the
implications of this for global justice. The aim of the paper, then, is not to defend
a given account of civic friendship, a task that many others are (fruitfully) engaged
in, nor to propose a new account of cosmopolitan friendship, but rather, to see what
light a notion of civic friendship might shed on the limits and possibilities of
cosmopolitan friendship. I conclude that cosmopolitan friendship is both a very
difficult practice to establish, and yet a potentially valuable practice of global
justice.

Civic Friendship

In a much-quoted passage, Aristotle (1980) tells us that friendship is necessary for

justice, because:
Friendship [philia] seems to hold states together, and lawgivers care more for
it than for justice. For when men are friends they have no need of justice,
while when they are just they need friendship as well, and the truest form of
justice is thought to be a friendly quality. (NE 1155a 2224)3
Schwarzenbach (2009) aims to establish the validity of this claim for the
contemporary state,4 and argues that we find in the practice of what she calls

Footnote 1 continued
accurately or satisfactorily label, some ordinary affective concern for the well-being of fellow citizens,
and that it might at least be possible to experience a similar sentiment towards non-citizens.
2
I will use ‘cosmopolitan friendship’ interchangeably with global or international friendship.
3
I do not intend here to contribute to the scholarship on Aristotle. Colleagues in this collection have done
so ably; see Bentley’s, Hope’s and Leonstini’s contributions.
4
Schwarzenbach (2009, p. xii) claims, ‘a form of political or civic friendship between citizens emerges
as a necessary condition for justice in the polis or city–state’.

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‘ethically reproductive labour’ (ERL), which has traditionally been performed by

women, a practice of civic friendship, which is, in effect, the glue that has held
Western liberal democracies together for years.
Schwarzenbach’s thesis is of interest to the cosmopolitan theorist not only
because she concludes her defence of civic friendship with a speculative account of
the possibility of a practice of international friendship that is said to spontaneously
and inevitably emerge from the practice of civic friendship,5 but also because the
resources on which she draws to develop a contemporary account of civic friendship
are also those mined by scholars working in what Graham Long (2009) has called
‘sentimental cosmopolitanism’; as well as neo-Aristotelian work on emotions and
the relation between emotion and the virtue of justice, neo-Marxist accounts of
praxis, and feminist work on both care and justice.
Central to Schwarzenbach’s account of civic friendship is the practice of
ethically reproductive labour:
With the ethical sense of reproduction […] I intend all those rational activities
(thinking about particular others and their needs, caring for them, cooking
their meals, etc.) which go toward reproducing a particular set of relationships
between persons over time—in the best case, my thesis runs, relations of
philia. (Schwarzenbach 1996, p. 102)
ERL covers a range of practices, from obvious ones like childbearing and
rearing, to providing care for the ill and the elderly, to teaching at all levels, to
providing food and comfort to productive members of society as conventionally
understood (i.e., those who, in liberal theories of the state, are recognised as
contributing to the economy), to nurturing ‘work’ done by all sorts of people in all
sorts of situations that support and encourage friends, colleagues, strangers at bus
stops or in the pub or in the library, for example., by means of a sympathetic ear, a
helping hand, a word of advice or encouragement, or even helping a lost stranger
with directions. One might add to this the cultivation and appropriate protection of
ecological resources, which Schwarzenbach (2009) nods to in passing.
ERL goes on, and has gone on, at all levels of society, throughout history. It is
self-evidently vital to the functioning of the community, yet it is typically and
substantially under-recorded and often unrecorded in the economy and unnoticed by
conventional theories of what is minimally required for the maintenance and
functioning of the just state.6 I want to suggest a further point. Accepting ERL as
necessary for all citizens implies a shared vulnerability on the part of all citizens; to
the extent that we all need help from friends, family, and indeed fellow citizens,

5
She tells us, ‘any state that views the value and duty of civic friendship as central to its self-conception
will quite naturally build this value into its foreign relations as well, that is, if its conception of philia is a
truly civic one… In focusing on one form of friendship, we are led naturally to focus on and explore the
other’ (2009, p. 249).
6
A primary target here is John Rawls’ Theory of Justice: ‘There is genuine friendship embodied in this
principle [the Difference Principle]: it expresses the attitude that I do not want systemic advantages at the
expense of others… that I am aware of and concerned about their plight… [But] the practical activity of
caregiving itself—these stages are vaguely left to others in Rawls’ theory’ (Schwarzenbach 2009,
pp. 174-5).

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throughout our lives (not only the very young, the very old, and the chronically
disabled), we all have reason to value ERL. I will return to this thought.
This caring labour is ethical in the sense that the practices involved are informed
by choices about how we live and how citizens support one another in their chosen
way of life. It is political because it (can) aim at reproducing the ‘best’ civic or inter-
personal relations as the community conceives them. But where this labour is
devalued—as Schwarzenbach thinks it is in contemporary liberal democracies—
then community relations themselves suffer. Moreover, the devaluing of ERL
allows the burden of this necessary work to be unevenly distributed within the
community. Historically, women, and members of other disadvantaged groups, have
performed the lion’s share of this work.7 State recognition of the necessity of ERL is
needed both to democratise the practice, and to better foster a friendly commitment
to justice within the state.8
Civic friendship is a caring relationship that takes a political form; it is a practice
of good citizenship; that is, it is one of the constitutive and habitual sets of acts that
define good citizenship. Schwarzenbach explicitly adopts the Aristotelian notion of
philia in order to develop a contemporary account of civic friendship, which she
takes to be superior to simply care in that philia presupposes a relationship of moral
equality, which care does not.9 By locating her argument in the Aristotelian tradition
of theorising on friendship Schwarzenbach is also able to tie the necessity of care to
an account of human flourishing, central to which in the contemporary context will
be the protections afforded by human rights (2009, p. 67).10
Let us be clear, then, about what is meant by friendship or philia in this account
of civic friendship—it is not romantic friendship nor companion friendship nor
virtue friendship. There are three principal elements in the Aristotelian account of
personal friendship: (1)reciprocal liking and awareness of the other as a moral
equal; (2) reciprocal wishing the other well for her own sake; (3) reciprocal practical
doing things for one another. Civic friendship is characterised by Aristotle as a form
of ‘advantage friendship’, though, as John Cooper (2005, p. 75) reminds us,
advantage friendship is not merely self-interested in Aristotle’s terms, but retains all
the features of friendship to a less perfect degree than would ‘companion

7
Schwarzenbach concludes from this that women, as traditional practitioners of ERL, are better suited to
fostering civic friendship, and she therefore proposes the greater inclusion of women in the state in
various public roles as a means to generating improvement. Though I would be very glad to see more
women in public roles, I contend that Schwarzenbach’s claim that women’s traditional work gives them
special aptitudes mistakes a socialised role for a natural one.
8
Concrete proposals for such recognition include direct payment and a period of national service for
17–25 year olds performing ERL in the community (Schwarzenbach 2009, p. 152). National service
could equally be done by tenured professors, no doubt. The goal is to make explicit the contribution of
ERL, and to disrupt the paradigm of productive labour as only that which adds to GDP, a focus on which
serves as a ‘block’ to civic friendship (Schwarzenbach 2009, p. 135). Such disruption also contributes to
the project of generating respect for the disadvantaged who have historically performed most ERL.
9
For Schwarzenbach, this is a significant point of departure from proponents of the ethics of care,
wherein caring relationships can be asymmetrical.
10
This is the modern equivalent, for Schwarzenbach, of friends being attentive to one another’s
character—good character is indicated, in conditions of pluralism, by a commitment to universal human
rights.

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friendship’, the most perfect form, and also the rarest. For Schwarzenbach, in civic
friendship these traits operate via the state’s laws, institutions, and social practices:
[T]he ideal of my liking each citizen in, say, another part of the city or country
would normally entail, first, that I am informed (or try to be) about the nature
of that city’s population, its citizens’ general standard of living, their history,
and so forth. In addition, I am concerned about their welfare (I wish them well
down to the most pathetic case) insofar as I educate myself to their hardships
(natural disasters, economic woes, etc.), and I am willing to help to whatever
degree (Schwarzenbach 1996, p. 110).
We should expect a few constraints on the practicality of this as a mutual,
reciprocal practice amongst all citizens in a state on the scale of contemporary
liberal democracies. Condition (3) (reciprocally practically doing things for one
another) is obviously not something that each of us can positively do all the time for
every person we encounter who is in need of assistance. Although in the (national)
domestic context Schwarzenbach defends the view that the priority for each citizen
is those closest to them,11 it is also the case that care can take place at some distance
and that ERL can be indirectly offered via institutional means. In a minimal sense,
this is achieved through our support of institutions such as the welfare state, which
we contribute to insofar as we pay taxes (and not everyone does). Indeed, in her
discussion of international friendship Schwarzenbach suggests that for us to have
discharged our duty as civic friends it may be sufficient that we support at a distance
the provision for hands-on ERL: ‘what is sending money abroad if not a way of
getting other people to do the actual hands-on ethical reproductive labor all people
(but especially the starving) need?’ (2009, p. 269)
Another point to note that has a bearing on the practicality of civic friendship as a
practice of citizenship is that it is not necessary to personally like our civic friends.
Lawrence Blum’s defence of altruistic emotions as having a role to play in moral
theory and practice makes this clear:
Altruistic emotions are distinct from personal feelings, such as liking and
affection. The former are grounded in the weal and woe of others, whereas the
latter are grounded in personal (but not necessarily moral) characteristics and
features of the other person. Altruistic emotions can occur in the absence of
personal feelings towards him; and vice versa (Blum 1980, p. 4)
Civic friendship, then, is a practice that accepts the possibility of altruism without
making any unreasonable claims about our personal affection for those for whose
sake we support and engage in ERL. What civic friendship requires of citizens is
that they care about the ‘weal and woe’ of fellow citizens, independently of
personally liking them. Without such care, our support of institutions like the
welfare state will be grudging and unfriendly. With it, a just state is more readily
possible.

11
Importantly, though, this priority is defended on practical, not moral grounds, and so differs from the
communitarian position.

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86 K. Woods

So, to summarise the argument thus far; civic friendship is a practice of citizens
that takes up, fosters, and makes explicit, the practically necessary ERL that has
hitherto been hidden in dominant liberal and Marxist accounts of productive labour
and of the relations between the citizen and the state. Civic friendship is
characterised by traits and practices that owe much to Aristotle’s notion of philia,
chiefly in that citizens stand in reciprocal relations with one another as moral equals,
and wish one another well for their own sakes. Civic friends need not personally like
one another, but they must practically do things for one another; at a bare minimum,
this means contributing taxes to the welfare state, but in a state where civic
friendship is supported by the state and the value of ERL is recognised within this,
then it might be much more; civic service supporting ERL could have equal if not
greater value than the practices typically rewarded in our current rather skewed
economic system. Finally, the practice of civic friendship is necessary for justice
and for community flourishing.

Justice and Friendship

This last claim will be puzzling to some. Friendship, being an expression of

partiality, has often been seen as a threat to impartial justice, rather than a
prerequisite of it. For Aristotle, civic friendship is a distinct kind of friendship, to be
distinguished from the rare character friendship that is the truest form, and we can
today distinguish the practice of civic friendship as set out here from the partiality of
personal friendship.
Personal friendship looks like a threat to justice to the extent that our natural
tendency to be partial to our friends, or to those close to us, might motivate us to
favour the interests of our friends over the (impartially) just outcome. But several
theorists have found this account mistaken. Scanlon argues that recognising the
moral value of friendship ‘involves recognizing the moral value of friends qua
persons, hence the moral claims of non-friends as well’ (Scanlon 1998, p. 165).
Another approach is to recognise, as Susan Mendus (2002, pp. 7–46) does, that it is
our emotional attachments to particular others that gives meaning to our lives such
that we have reason to care about impartial justice, for their sakes and ours. These
arguments establish, at least, why friendship need not be at odds with justice. But
the claim here is that civic friendship is necessary for justice. There are two ways in
which we might make sense of this.
The first follows Michael Sandel’s (1982, p. 182) complaint that, ‘liberalism has
an inadequate sense of community’. Friendships are part of what define our sense of
self (Sandel 1982, pp. 178–84). If the self is a blank box, then there is nothing on
which (for example) the Rawlsian practice of reflective equilibrium can get
purchase. If this is so, and if some form of reflective endorsement of justice is
necessary for justice to be motivating, then some understanding of the self as
situated within a community of others is a necessary condition. The practice of civic
friendship informs, fosters, and consolidates that location of the self within a
community. This argument need not deny liberal principles of individual rights, but

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it does endorse the view that liberalism, where it understands the individual agent
atomistically, fails to provide motivating reasons to be just.
For Kant, of course, to be just is to be motivated by duty, which duty can be
identified through abstract reason. On this view of things, my account here proceeds
from a mistaken notion of justice. I accept that this criticism obtains where one
holds, with Kant, that the motivation to be just is found in duty. But it seems
plausible to resist the Kantian view both on the grounds that practical deliberation
about what to do is a problem for situated selves, not abstract ones (this is Sandel’s
point), and on the grounds that, even if it were true that we ought to be moved only
by duty, study and experience of human psychology suggests that that is not the
case.
The second way in which we can understand the claim that friendship is
necessary for justice is practical: Civic friendship, as Schwarzenbach understands it,
is necessary for justice to the extent that civic friendship is connected to practices of
ERL. ERL makes possible the maintenance and reproduction of society over time.
Where ERL is obscured, and where citizens do not view one another as civic
friends, the nature of the society that is reproduced will be distorted accordingly—
social cohesion, and commitment to the general well-being of fellow citizens, will
suffer. On the other hand, where ERL is promoted as a public good, and where civic
friendship is a valued practice, there exists the possibility of developing a more
cohesive community, and a more even distribution of well-being.
Civic friendship is a relation amongst persons who are substantively equals. The
unequal distribution of ERL in society has been attendant upon an understanding of
productive labour that undervalues and renders invisible work that is in fact
necessary for the maintenance of society. The undervaluation of the work has been
concurrent with its being unevenly distributed and the burden disproportionately
falling upon the disadvantaged in society. Public recognition of and support for this
work achieves two goals: (1) it addresses material disadvantage and the political
disadvantage that attaches to perceived status of persons engaged in ERL as work
(2) it presents opportunities to re-balance the distribution of this work through
publicly funded programmes.
So, the practice of civic friendship is crucial to justice in two senses: Firstly, it
fosters a sense of community that both makes possible a sense of justice, and gives
us reason to be commited to justice, it is therefore at a basic level motivating, and
secondly, it practically contributes to the promotion and maintenance of a just
society by underwriting equality.

Sentimental Cosmopolitanism and Global Friendship

Let us suppose that the following points of Schwarzenbach’s account of civic

friendship are reasonably valid: The practice of fellow citizens caring for one
another is indeed the glue that holds society together, lending stability to justice.
Civic friendship as a practice involves having some knowledge and understanding
of the circumstances of others in the state (as a minimal expression of ‘liking’
them), wishing them well for their own sake, and being prepared to ‘do things’

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practically for them, at the very least, being prepared to sanction the redistribution
of resources through taxation supporting the welfare state.
If all this is so, if civic friendship is in effect a necessary practice of citizenship
within the just state, what conclusions might we draw about the prospects for global
justice? Should cosmopolitan theorists encourage the practice of cosmopolitan or
global friendship, either by persons, or peoples?12
Cosmopolitans hold that all persons are morally equal, and that it follows from
this that we have minimal obligations to one another as fellow humans,
independently of our being co-nationals, co-religionists, or standing in any
particular relations to one another.13 As a model cosmopolitan we might take
Thomas Pogge (2002), whose work Schwarzenbach (2009, pp. 262–8) discusses
with some approval, and who holds that we have minimal negative duties not to
contribute to the upholding of coercively imposed international institutions that
foster the under-fulfilment of human rights (Pogge 2002). This argument is parasitic
on the thought that we have a basic moral duty not to avoidably harm others. On
Pogge’s reading, an international economic regime that greatly favours the interests
of developed nations is unjust, and any individual who benefits from it is complicit
in that injustice.14
Of course, few, if any, cosmopolitans would argue that we have equally extensive
obligations to persons in other countries as to fellow citizens. Nevertheless, if civic
friendship is necessary for justice, might some approximation of cosmopolitan
friendship be necessary for global justice? Without presupposing that domestic
justice and global justice are straightforwardly symmetrical, it is worth reflecting on
some of the criticisms that have been advanced regarding cosmopolitan accounts of
global justice in relation to the claims made for civic friendship.
Sceptics have doubted the motivating potential of cosmopolitanism. David Miller
observes, ‘it seems unlikely that rational conviction can carry the weight required of
it, except perhaps in the case of a small number of heroic individuals’ (Miller 2007,
p. 57). Patti Tamara Lenard claims, ‘cosmopolitans believe that duty to others in and
of itself should be sufficient to motivate democratic participation and loose
reciprocity’ [at the global level] (Lenard 2010, p. 351). The thrust of these and
related criticisms is that neo-Kantian claims about the moral status of distant others
and what is rationally owed to them, as revealed by our institutional relation to
them, fails to motivate real agents.15
Against this, we find an emerging trend amongst some cosmopolitans to embrace
the idea of a sentimental cosmopolitanism, which recognises the need for a

12
Catherine Lu (2010) proposes a relation of ‘political friendship’, which I take to be equivalent to civic
friendship, again drawn from Aristotle, among peoples (understood in Rawls’ terms in The Law of
Peoples). My focus here is on individuals as agents, and thus (potential) civic or cosmopolitan ‘friends’.
13
I will not offer a defence of this position here. For the purposes of this article, I take these claims to be
reasonably valid or at least defensible.
14
Without campaigning for its reform or making other compensatory gestures—see Pogge (2005).
15
A fair target here might be Pogge’s account, or Onora O’Neill’s (2000) argument that the fact that we
construct institutional frameworks that depend for their coherence on distant others being rational agents
must entail that we implicitly recognise distant others as having the same moral standing we claim for
ourselves as rational agents.

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sentimental engagement on the part of would-be cosmopolitans in order to generate

the motivation to act in support of global justice. In this scant literature we find
some salient parallels with Schwarzenbach’s notion of civic friendship. Sentimental
cosmopolitanism is an umbrella term describing a small number of cosmopolitan
theorists (Long 2009) who foreground particular sentiments, the cultivation of
which they argue is necessary to achieving the cosmopolitan goal of global justice.
Like civic friendship, sentimental cosmopolitanism finds plausible the claim that
individual agents can care about the weal and woe of others without personally
liking them, or even personally knowing them. Sceptics may doubt whether such
sentiments really exist, yet the continued ability of charitable aid organisations to
raise funds from public donations suggests that at least a degree of concern of this
sort is indeed possible, and observable. The particular sentiments described vary,
from empathy, to compassion, to solidarity (others might be found), but they all fall
within Blum’s definition of altruistic emotions (above). Two examples will be
briefly highlighted to illustrate the argument: Carol Gould’s account of ‘social
empathy’ and Martha Nussbaum’s ‘compassion’.
Carol Gould (2007) understands ‘transnational solidarity’16 as ‘a form of social
empathy’ which can generate support for human rights and global justice (Gould
2007, p. 149). On Gould’s account it may be out of respect for human rights that one
is moved to act in solidarity with others, but the sense of solidarity that emerges
from social empathy would inspire action independently of the rule-following
command to respect human rights. The motivation to act is our affective concern for
others.
Social empathy involves us affectively engaging with the circumstances of
others. Empathetic understanding both motivates action and serves as a corrective to
some of the potential problems that a more distant sympathy or a unilateral appraisal
of needs or duties might generate. Importantly, on Gould’s account, social empathy
is not ineffectual weeping; it necessarily generates action if it is to be properly so-
called. Moreover, this action is politically directed: ‘[T]he ethical requirement of
empathy is blended with a requirement for social critique in order to make action
effective’ (Gould 2007, p. 161). The cosmopolitan agent does not simply encounter
a need and then seek to alleviate it, but rather, seeks to understand the causes of
disadvantage and their relation to the agent. In Gould’s account we find blended
both the commitment to rational appraisal of institutional structures that charac-
terises Pogge’s cosmopolitanism, and the recognition of sentiment as a valuable
moral phenomenon that is partly constitutive of a commitment to a scheme of
justice.
A further point to note is the solidaristic nature of the relationship; this is a
relation of equality, it is not a uni-directional, hierarchical relation. Thus it offers, ‘a
way to avoid the imposition on the others of the customary expectations and
practices of those offering aid’ (Gould 2007, p. 157), by being, in principle at least,
a mutual relation. Mutuality, or reciprocity guided not by self-interest but by
16
Schwarzenbach (2009, p. xiii) explicitly distinguishes her notion of civic friendship from relations
properly described as relations of solidarity, which she says have traditionally been male and lack the
feminist dimension that is central to her account. I do not think this a significant objection to comparing
the two here: There are thematic affinities that justify setting aside semantic differences.

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concern for the well-being of the other, is typical of solidaristic practices (Bayertz
1999). However, in practice the expectation of mutual aid from the global poor
looks implausible, as Gould herself notes; ‘it is not yet clear that reciprocity can be
operative in most cases of solidarity with distant others, since these others may not
be aware of one’s actions in solidarity with them’ (Gould 2007, p. 154).
Schwarzenbach glosses an expression of friendship in civic terms as being
informed and educated about how citizens live in other parts of one’s country. This
finds a parallel in the requirement for an empathetic model of transnational
solidarity, where agents are enjoined to understand the circumstances of those with
whom they are in solidarity. The value of this deceptively simple expression of
‘friendship’ should not be underestimated. Ignorance of how others live is an
obstacle to being aware of their needs, as well as being aware of how those needs
can best be addressed. A related consideration is that, where beneficence is
unilaterally practiced, it is prone to having unintended and sometimes negative
consequences, as many aid workers will attest. But here the obstacles to reciprocity
are again troubling—feedback from prospective recipients of aid is vital to
understanding the success or otherwise, of aid-related interventions. Moreover, aid
initiatives that are not substantively informed by recipients’ own accounts of their
needs and wishes is open to reproducing the invidious and oppressive relations that
have often characterised relations between richer and poorer countries in the past.
As Leif Wenar (2003) points out, theorists of global justice have tended to
approach the question of what capable agents owe to distant others in terms of what
sacrifices agents ought to make. This approach is apparent in Pogge’s work, for
example, when he suggests that a sacrifice of just 1 % of GDP by the richest nations
could alleviate global poverty (2002, p. 2). Implicit in this claim is the suggestion
that a sacrifice of 1 % asks comparatively little, and that the gain to the global poor
is significant. As a practice of friendship, however, thinking exclusively or
predominantly in terms of how much money an agent could or should sacrifice does
not satisfy the need for mutuality. And Wenar’s analysis gives us reason to think
that there is a need for more than unilateral sacrifice:
Over the past 50 years the percentage of people living in dire poverty has
declined, while the absolute number has increased. Aid flows during this
period have been greater than the period before, yet in absolute terms have
been fairly small. Many aid initiatives appear to have averted crises and
reduced poverty. But the money spent on other initiatives has been worse than
wasted—it has, for example, disrupted local systems of production, intensified
corruption, or simply delayed democratic reforms. The direction of aid has
often been guided by strategic and institutional rather than by humanitarian
imperatives. Yet even the best-intentioned efforts have had unintended side-
effects that have overwhelmed their benefits, and the projects that have
seemed the most likely to have salutary effects sometimes have not (Wenar
2003, p. 292)
Sending money abroad, then, is not simply, as Schwarzenbach suggested, a way
of getting other people to do ERL. It sometimes has unintended side-effects. It
sometimes does not reach its destination at all. And it does not bridge the problem of

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ignorance concerning the lives and needs of distant others. The range of variables
influencing the impact of a particular aid project is difficult to predict. Wenar’s point
is that one cannot know the content of one’s duties to distant others without
knowing what would actually work. The expression of care in civic friendship—the
requirement to be informed about how citizens live in other parts of a city or
country, extended to the global context—is both (a) hugely significant in terms of
shaping the content of obligations to distant others, and overcoming some of the
potential for negative unintended consequences, and (b) enormously demanding.
Nevertheless, if we take seriously the thought put forward in the preceding sections,
that civic friendship is necessary for justice, then we can see that the motivational
gap in cosmopolitan thought proceeds in part from an epistemic one. Knowledge of
fellow citizens (global or civic) is necessary in order to identify needs as well as to
be able to understand oneself as belonging to a community of justice, one that is
crucially a community of moral equals.
The second cosmopolitan sentiment I want to discuss adds a further dimension to
the need for mutuality rather than unilateralism in the practice of what we might call
cosmopolitan friendship, or action taken in support of cosmopolitan aims for global
justice. Martha Nussbaum (2003; 2007) highlights compassion as a sentiment to be
cultivated as a means of fostering support for cosmopolitan ends.
According to Nussbaum, compassion is distinct from empathy insofar as one
could plausibly empathise with a suffering person but think them deserving of their
plight, and thus feel no inclination to assist them (Nussbaum 2003, pp. 300–3).
Compassion, on the other hand, proceeds from a degree of identification with the
suffering other, made possible by imagination. Central to this is recognition of
vulnerability, not to one another in the Hobbesian sense, but in the sense that the
agent believes herself to be vulnerable to the sufferings experienced by the other in
relevantly similar ways: ‘[C]ompassion requires acknowledgment that one has
possibilities and vulnerabilities similar to those of the sufferer.’ (Nussbaum 2003,
p. 316) If we can imagine what it might be like to suffer the same fate, then it is
possible for us to respond compassionately to the situation the other person finds
herself in. Without such imaginative possibilities, there is a barrier to understanding
the needs of the other. More importantly, without being able to imagine ourselves as
similarly vulnerable beings who could suffer the same fate, there will be a barrier to
our conceptualising the other as our moral equal.
I now return to the thought raised earlier in relation to vulnerability and
Schwarzenbach’s account of ERL. The relevance of the relative invisibility of ERL
should now be apparent. To the extent that the need and value of ERL is obscured in
dominant conceptions of productive labour (productive) agents’ awareness of their
own vulnerability is thereby also obscured. If this makes the task of understanding
the needs of some of our fellow citizens rather difficult, it makes the task of
understanding the lives and needs of persons living in absolute poverty quite
unimaginable for most citizens of the world’s richer countries. The overwhelming
majority of citizens in wealthy countries—those who for cosmopolitans have duties
with respect to global justice—simply are not vulnerable in relevantly similar ways
to the overwhelming majority of citizens in the poorest countries. The vulnerabil-
ities experienced by the global poor are utterly alien to the experience of the global

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affluent. Again, the absence of reciprocity, the practical obstacles to a shared

awareness of cosmopolitan friendship, reinforce this problem.
Nussbaum (1998) prescribes a literary education as a partial solution to the
problem of distance in terms of perceived vulnerability and imaginative under-
standing, and it may be plausible to fulfil, to some extent, the civic obligation to
know and understand the lives of fellow citizens, or even of the global poor, through
taking the time to read literature, watch films, and engage in other cultural practices
that help us to imaginatively understand the lives of others. For her part,
Schwarzenbach proposes a programme of international civic service as a potential
parallel to domestic civic service: This experience will enable young people from
richer countries, ‘not to exploit or control the inhabitants [of poor countries], but to
learn from them and be of service’ (Schwarzenbach 2009, p. 271, emphasis added).
Their purpose will be to, ‘build roads, to transport medicines, to help bring in the
harvest, to watch the children, to supply the most elementary food and care, and so
forth’ (Schwarzenbach 2009, p. 271).17
This practice is designed to facilitate the mutual awareness and concrete
knowledge of one another’s needs that is important for the possibility of civic
friendship. There is some merit in this, but it also looks like a somewhat naı̈ve
proposal. Whether or not being parachuted into a context of profound need,
knowing that one will be parachuted out of it again, would foster an understanding
of vulnerability, is an open question. It would arguably go some way to overcoming
Gould’s concern that the possibility of reciprocity is undermined by the
unlikelihood of the distant others’ being aware of action in solidarity with them,
but a more pressing concern is whether international civic service of this sort would
actually be in the interests of (or desired by) the host communities. As noted above,
the needs of communities in poverty can be complex, while the variables affecting
the success or otherwise of interventions aimed at alleviating poverty are uncertain.
Before we can endorse this as a practice of international civic friendship, we will
want a clear assessment of whether this practice would actually benefit those
towards whom we are assumed to be acting as cosmopolitan friends.18
Such an assessment is beyond this article, though it will be clear that I have
reservations about the proposal. The point of drawing out these concerns is not to
cast doubt on Schwarzenbach’s account of civic friendship, but rather to better
understand the problem that sentimental cosmopolitans face. On the one hand, the
practices of civic friendship as set out by Schwarzenbach share affinities with the
ideas of sentimental cosmopolitans.19 The obstacles to such practices informing
17
Schwarzenbach goes on, ‘[w]hat these young people lack in expertise and knowhow, moreover, they
will surely make up amply by their energy, curiosity, and enthusiasm—above all, by their often still intact
ethical idealism’ (2009, p. 271). I worry that this claim idealises young people, and underestimates the
negative potential impacts on fragile communities in poorer countries of playing host to would-be
international civic friends.
18
Another issue to be considered is the carbon footprint.
19
A sceptic might wonder whether the analogy I seek to draw between civic friendship and cosmopolitan
sentiment falls down. The argument might go; ‘Am I not obliged to help my friend even when I don’t feel
sympathetic or compassionate towards him? And if that is so, doesn’t the putative analogy dissolve?’ This
attack misconceives the role of friendship and global sentiment in the account of justice that I take it that
sentimental cosmopolitans defend. The claim is not that the justice-based obligations of assistance arise

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Civic and Cosmopolitan Friendship 93

justice at the global level both explain why it is appropriate for cosmopolitans to
turn to sentiment as a resource for fostering a commitment to global justice, and
reveal how burdensome and complicated the practice of cosmopolitan friendship
might be.

Conclusion

Sentimental cosmopolitans have rightly begun to look at the development of

affective ties to distant others as crucial to motivating action in support of global
justice. If Schwarzenbach’s central thesis about the relation between civic
friendship and justice holds, then we can partially explain the evident lack of
commitment to global justice in terms of an absence of something like cosmopolitan
friendship. However, the most significant outcome of considering what sentimental
cosmopolitanism might learn from civic friendship lies in the importance of ERL to
a sense of vulnerability, and in the value of friendship as a reciprocal practice.
Importantly, civic friendship is motivating because it fosters cohesion and involves
us in a relation of something approximating equality with fellow citizens. The claim
of sentimental cosmopolitans is that compassion or empathetic solidarity is similarly
motivating for would-be cosmopolitan agents to the extent that they can understand
the lives of the global poor and see their fate as potentially their own.
Cosmopolitan friendship, as a social practice embedded in everyday life like
civic friendship, could be less dramatic than undertaking ERL in another country,
but is demanding; it requires agents to express their care for would-be cosmopolitan
friends by knowing about their lives, recognising a need and understanding how best
to respond to that need. Given the history of ineffective aid policies and projects,
and the link between citizens’ motives and political will, this is potentially the most
valuable contribution that cosmopolitan friends could be asked to make to the
welfare of distant others. If filling the epistemic gap helps address the motivational
one as well as correct some of the problems of unilateralism, then cosmopolitan
friendship has the potential to be as transformative at the global level as
Schwarzenbach suggests civic friendship could be domestically. But this also
reveals the difficulties and demands of cosmopolitan friendship.

Acknowledgments An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2010 Manchester Metropolitan
University Workshops in Political Theory. I am grateful to all participants in the workshop and also to
Derek Edyvane, Cristina Johnston, and an anonymous reviewer for Res Publica for extremely helpful
comments and suggestions. I worked on this article whilst holding a postdoctoral fellowship from the
British Academy, and I am grateful for their generous support.

Footnote 19 continued
from feelings of friendship or related sentiment. Rather, the claim is that the feelings of sentiment/
friendship are constitutive of a sense of belonging to a community of justice that guides the agent’s sense
of the scope of justice, and that the practice of civic/cosmopolitan friendship serves an important function
in motivating a commitment to justice and an epistemic function in correcting biases that would pre-
dictably arise in justice practised unilaterally. I am grateful to Derek Edyvane for pressing me on this
point.

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94 K. Woods

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