4. Distinguishing State from Community: Michael Walzer’s Communitarian ‘View from the Cave’

The state is not the only or necessarily the most important arena of our moral (or even our political) life.

Michael Walzer¹

Those labelled ‘communitarians’ within political theory maintain that morality must have a particularist starting point.² They articulate anti-impartialist positions, variously arguing that membership within the community, and participation in its practices, are morally constitutive. There is little else that can define them as a group—with the exception, that is, of one aspect of their writings that separates them quite forcefully from the communitarian position characterized within normative IR theory. Many communitarian political theorists not only fall short of associating the morally constitutive community with the state, but often display an overt scepticism of the state, invoking the community as a means of highlighting its shortcomings and occasionally challenging its authority.³Given the proposal put forth in Chapter 3—that a globally inclusive sphere of equal moral standing is precluded when what it is to be a moral agent is inextricably tied to citizenship—certain movements within communitarian political thought might have the potential to bring us closer to an embedded cosmopolitan perspective. The work of the American philosopher Michael Walzer is particularly valuable in illustrating this potential. Importantly, Walzer’s communitarianism displays the loyalty to a particularist moral starting point characteristic of communitarian realism, while also sharing with impartialist cosmopolitanism the insistence that the state is not moral constitutive but instrumental.

Across a career that spans more than forty years, Walzer has written on questions of, inter alia, democracy, obligation, social criticism, distributive justice, and war. (Among scholars in the discipline of IR, he is best—and, unfortunately, often exclusively—known for his seminal work in this final category.) Despite the broad range of his academic inquiries, Walzer’s work can be read as an ongoing dialogue on the dual problem of embracing an anti-impartialist position without excluding distant strangers and striving for a critical perspective without neglecting particularity and difference. Indeed, compared to the positions of Rawls and Frost discussed in Chapter 3, Walzer seems much more self-consciously to be aspiring to a variation on what I have called embedded cosmopolitanism. In Walzer’s own words, ‘a particularism that excludes wider loyalties invites immoral conduct, but so does a cosmopolitanism that overrides narrower loyalties. Both are dangerous; the argument needs to be cast in different terms.’⁴ In this chapter, I will endeavour to identify these terms, analyse their coherence, and evaluate their aptitude for defining an alternative, embedded cosmopolitan approach to international politics.

Specifically, I will begin by providing an account of Walzer’s ‘communitarianism’—an account that I will suggest makes a clear and important (although often overlooked) distinction between the merely instrumental state and the morally constitutive community. After briefly rehearsing the obstacles that Walzer’s communitarianism nevertheless encounters when confronted with global ethical questions, I will uncover in his work three (not necessarily compatible) moves carefully choreographed to avoid these obstacles. The final of these three moves—one that I will argue relies on the possibility of transnational empathetic attachments—seems to bring Walzer nearest to what I have described as embedded cosmopolitanism. I will question the degree to which the resulting position manages both to remain faithful to an anti-impartialist philosophy and to achieve a critical, inclusive moral purview. In conclusion, I will argue that, despite Walzer’s crucial move of distinguishing between the morally constitutive community and the state, his work entails a significant impediment to achieving such a combination of characteristics. This impediment can be attributed to the understanding of the community upon which he depends in defining his moral starting point. A robust embedded cos-mopolitanism—that is internally coherent and accurately reflects our moral experience—will require that this understanding be rethought.

In short, this chapter will explore how Walzer’s attempt to navigate a route towards a self-reflective and inclusive particularism reveals the parameters within which an embedded cosmopolitan position might be most effectively articulated. An ancillary aim is to suggest the value of a comprehensive analysis of Walzer’s writings—something that has been neglected within IR.

The logical place to begin an account of the ‘different terms’ in which Walzer casts the argument between cosmopolitans and their anti-impartialist critics is with his avowed moral starting point. Although there are many significant points of contrast between the philosophies of political theorists such as Walzer, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, and Charles Taylor, each asserts that moral reasoning must be rooted in particularity. Indeed, their agreement on some core assumptions concerning where we must stand when we engage in moral deliberation has meant that they have generally been placed within the same ‘communitarian’ camp. This can be a helpful means of categorizing Walzer’s work; yet, it requires some explanation, particularly as the way the communitarian label is employed within political theory differs quite radically from its normative IR theory namesake. Rather than simply describing Walzer’s moral starting point as communitarian, it is necessary to offer some caveats regarding how this label tends to be used.

To begin, the body of thought to which I am referring here constitutes one side of a debate characterized as such within political philosophy, where its theoretical point of departure is understood to be liberalism. It is only when this label is invoked within normative IR theory that this site of opposition is relocated. (Communitarianism is then no longer presented as merely the rival of liberalism, but, rather, is placed in opposition to one possible manifestation of liberalism: cosmopolitanism.)⁵ Moreover, communitarianism, which consists of a diverse amalgamation of positions, is generally an ascribed classification and not a term of self-description. Indeed, those that share the label often radically disagree on elements of their respective philosophies—and are understandably wary of being associated with positions that would, in some respects, contradict their own.⁶ Finally, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to reduce communitarianism to one single, comprehensive thesis. Some so-called communitarian arguments invoke the concept of community as a means of description, asserting that society is premised on communal values—values that liberal theory fails to recognize (or, at least, appreciate fully). Other arguments tend more towards prescription, often with a nostalgic tone, lamenting a society in which communal values are no longer possible. In addition, communitarianism can be divided thematically between two intimately related propositions. The first theme asserts the social construction of the self and of reality; the second theme puts forth a commitment to collective values.⁷ The communitarian critique is advanced along various paths and those referred to as communitarians often part company early in their theoretical treks.

Despite their divergences, however, the theorists generally classified as communitarians share enough in common to make this a meaningful, and useful, label. Indeed, there is a common direction in which communitarian critics can generally be said to be travelling: away from the ‘rights-based’ perspective that has been dominant in contemporary liberal theory.⁸ Moreover, much of what communitarianism opposes is described in terms of a version of liberalism that is heavily reliant upon a Kantian philosophical foundation.⁹ According to this position—often referred to as ‘deontological liberalism’—the notion of right is independent of, and achieves priority over, the good. Considerations of justice and individual rights are thereby able to become paramount.¹⁰ While this view is traditionally associated with Kant, contemporary articulations can be found in the works of Bruce Ackerman, Ronald Dworkin, Robert Nozick, and, perhaps most influentially in terms of the communitarian critique, in interpretations of the early work of Rawls.¹¹ Deontological liberalism is premised on the assumption that there is a privileged vantage point removed from the particularity of one’s society and traditions, an impartialist position from which one is able to stand outside one’s own cultural experience. Communitarianism replaces this vantage point with a perspective that is rooted firmly in the community. In this way, communitarianism is resolutely anti-impartialist.

Although Walzer shares an anti-impartialist, community-based moral starting point with other so-called communitarian political theorists, this categorization of his work must pay due regard to the subtle differences between the positions of those who have been assigned this label. One must not be too quick to assume that the ‘communitarian’ description of Walzer’s work carries specific connotations beyond identifying those key characteristics that quite reasonably allow important points of comparison between the works of a diverse group of theorists. This is especially important if one considers the adamant eschewal of conservatism in Walzer’s pluralist values, his staunch democratic socialist convictions, and his espousal of a universal ‘minimal morality’ (with reference to which both cross-cultural solidarity and criticism are conceivable)—positions that might seem to run contrary to the theoretical implications of communitarianism as it is often understood. Moreover, although the communitarian position as conceived in political theory is most accurately described as a critique of liberalism, it must be noted that Walzer is strongly committed to liberal values: he is explicit in his aim to ‘correct’ rather than abandon the liberal project.¹² (On this point, Walzer’s position is miles from MacIntyre’s vehement anti-liberalism.)¹³ Nevertheless, both Walzer’s particularist perspective, first fully articulated in his 1983 work, Spheres of Justice, and the position, evident throughout his work, that communities are the bearers of values, indicate a strong and pervasive communitarian philosophy. This philosophy is most vividly introduced through Walzer’s allusion to Plato’s metaphorical cave.

In an elaborate metaphor written over two millennia ago, Plato (assuming the voice of Socrates) uses the image of a cave to describe a tortuous state of existence. He asks us to imagine an underground chamber in which men have been imprisoned since childhood, with their legs and necks bound and rendered immobile to ensure a restricted range of sight. Behind these prisoners burns a fire; between the fire and the prisoners is a road—carefully concealed by a wall—along which other men travel, talking and carrying an array of objects. As these objects protrude above the wall, the light from the fire behind them casts a procession of diverse, seemingly autonomous, shadows within the cave. The coerced audience to such a strange display has no way of determining their source or deciphering their meaning. ‘An odd picture and an odd sort of prisoner,’ Glaucon aptly replies to Socrates’ narration.¹⁵ Yet, this oddity illustrates an understanding of philosophy that is compatible with a whole tradition of Western thought. It is necessary for the prisoner to complete the painful ascent from the cave into daylight, and adjust to the brilliance of the sun as the source of truth, in order to acquire the capacity for rational deliberation. Only then can the emancipated person recognize the apparent reality of the subterranean shapes as a mere trick of vision. In firm opposition to this allegorical stance, Walzer rejects an external vantage point for his moral theorizing:

I don’t claim to have achieved any great distance from the social world in which I live. One way to begin the philosophical enterprise—perhaps the original way—is to walk out of the cave, leave the city, climb the mountain, fashion for oneself (what can never be fashioned for ordinary men and women) an objective and universal standpoint.

Instead, Walzer prefaces his work with the adamant anti-impartialist resolution that, ‘I mean to stand in the cave, in the city, on the ground.’¹⁶

Importantly, Walzer’s commitment to the cave responds to the perceived shortcomings of a range of perspectives—a detail that his frequent and often fleeting allusion to Plato’s allegory threatens to obscure.¹⁷ He is not merely offering an alternative to the Platonist notion of transcendent moral truth. His site of opposition also includes the type of perspective that does not claim access to ‘truth’, but, more modestly, understands itself as the point beyond all particularity to which one temporarily abstracts in order to deliberate without bias.¹⁸ Both require, in Walzer’s language, that one ‘leave the cave’, and Walzer’s forceful description of his preferred starting point is useful for this reason. For Walzer, requisite to moral deliberation is loyalty to the cave and to the shared beliefs of those with whom he inhabits it. His cave represents neither moral ignorance, nor intellectual illusion, nor distorting bias. On the contrary, Walzer cautions that if one aspires to a detached, impersonal standpoint—in other words, if one attempts to abandon the cave—then ‘one describes the terrain of everyday life from far away, so that it loses its particular contours’. It is in the interpretation of these particular contours that Walzer argues moral decisions can be made. According to this formulation, morality is situated, embedded, or, in Walzer’s words, ‘radically particularist’.¹⁹

Walzer’s adherence to this radically particularist, ‘view from the cave’ morality has important implications for the positions that he champions when confronted with questions of, for example, distributive justice and social criticism. In Spheres of Justice, Walzer presents a theory of social justice that relies upon the deciphering of ‘shared understandings’, or local meanings, that are given to goods to be distributed in society. In other words, he claims to forgo any appeal to universal principles of justice. Rather, Walzer maintains that ‘in matters of morality, argument simply is the appeal to common meanings’.²⁰ His account of social criticism also displays a commitment to an embedded perspective. In Interpretation and Social Criticism, delivered as the 1985 Tanner Lectures on Human Values and published in 1987, even Walzer’s description of critical distance disclaims an impartialist approach. For Walzer, a critical stance does not entail that one be removed (however temporarily) from the particular set of circumstances within which a practice is being questioned. ‘A little to the side, but not outside,’ Walzer details, ‘critical distance is measured in inches.’²¹ Once again, importance is placed on established norms: ‘What we do when we argue is to give an account of the actually existing morality.’²² According to Walzer, we derive our moral culture from within the cave, and, in order to either understand or criticize this culture, the cave is where we must remain.

Walzer’s ‘view from the cave’ morality is developed and applied across a range of his writings.²³ It does not, however, represent his only expression of a strong commitment to the significance of the community. Some of Walzer’s writing prior to Spheres of Justice, specifically aspects of his work on the ethics of war, assumes a distinct mode of ethical deliberation, one that is deeply indebted to a notion of human rights and reveals a clear, if occasionally lapsing, impartialist cosmopolitan persuasion.²⁴Nevertheless, it should be noted that a concurrent loyalty to the idea of the community as a possessor of value is discernible even in these writings. In order to appreciate this attribution of communal value, and for the sake of Walzer’s potential contribution to re-evaluating assumptions that are often made in normative IR theory, it is important to explicate his distinction between this idea of community and his reference to the merely instrumental sovereign state.

Walzer has consistently portrayed groups as bearers of values. This commitment to the moral significance of the community is evident even before Walzer articulates his ‘view from the cave’ morality. Moreover, throughout his writings, Walzer makes a pronounced distinction between the community and the state. Indeed, he has expressed doubt that the state can be considered a community in the constitutive sense at all.²⁵ In Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War, and Citizenship, published in 1970, he focuses on the greater moral significance of belonging to sub-state groups such as congregations, clubs, and trade unions.²⁶ While in such early writings Walzer is sceptical of the relationship between community and political associations, he later tends to blur any distinction between the terms ‘community’ and ‘political community’. His tendency to equate the terms in works such as Spheres of Justice can be a source of confusion when reading Walzer, and in at least one instance has resulted in the unfortunate description of his ‘view from the cave’ morality as a ‘Hegelian view’.²⁷ Yet, the cave from which Walzer views the moral world is not a metaphor for the state. It is important to recognize that the conceptual barrier between notions of community and state, so prominent in his early writings in Obligations, remains firmly intact in his subsequent work. This is evident in his treatment of the community. When he writes of the ‘political community’, he is referring to a body that has the power to give the state legitimacy, but he never assumes that this body is neatly defined by state borders. This important feature of Walzer’s philosophy is all too frequently overlooked in analyses of his best-known contribution to the study of international relations.

In his 1977 work, Just and Unjust Wars, Walzer maintains cross-culturally critical standards. He does not stand in the cave. Nevertheless, he recognizes that there is a view to be respected that is situated there: ‘the survival and freedom of political communities—whose members share a way of life, developed by their ancestors, to be passed on to their children—are the highest values of international society’.²⁸ This respect for the inherent value of the political community in Walzer’s treatise on just war provided the impetus for the harsh charges of ‘statism’ that appeared in its wake.²⁹ According to these indictments, statism, whereby states are the subjects of international morality, underlies Walzer’s principles of just war. Richard Wasserstrom and Kenneth Brown, in respective reviews, rely on just such a reading of Walzer. According to Wasserstrom, ‘[t]he rights of states…come to enjoy an exalted primary status within the moral critique of aggression’.³⁰ In close concurrence, Brown asserts that ‘[t]hrough-out his work, Walzer identifies the highest human aspirations with the supremacy of the nation-state’.³¹ These claims, however, rest on a misinterpretation. For Walzer, the state is not synonymous with the political community. Moreover, it is the political community, understood separately from the state, that is constitutive of moral identity and value—and which therefore warrants protection.

Beitz, another critic of Walzer’s alleged statism, argues that, ‘a main theme of Walzer’s book—that it is a crime to violate a state’s territorial integrity and political independence—invokes a principle of sovereignty’.³²To the contrary, Walzer appeals to the intrinsic value of community: a good that may be defended by, but is independent of, the state. Arguing for exceptions to a policy of non-intervention, Walzer clearly distinguishes between the political community and the state:

The ban on boundary crossings is not absolute in part because of the arbitrary and accidental character of state boundaries, in part because of the ambiguous relation of the political community or communities within the boundaries to the government who defends them.³³

This emphasis on the ‘accidental’ nature of state borders is reminiscent of the impartialist cosmopolitan positions addressed in Chapter 2. Moreover, this observation, along with Walzer’s additional point that one cannot assume that communities are coextensive with state borders, reiterates two of the concluding criticisms of the idea of the morally constitutive state put forth in the previous chapter.

Walzer reaffirms his important distinction between the morally constitutive community and the state in direct responses to those who accuse him of adopting a statist position in Just and Unjust Wars. ‘The real subject of my argument’, he clarifies, ‘is not the state at all but the political community that (usually) underlies it.’³⁴ Moreover, in carefully explaining his account of ‘supreme emergency’, or a situation in which extreme measures might legitimately be taken to defend the political community, Walzer is unambiguous both about the conceptual separation that he supports between community and state and with regard to his refusal to attribute inherent value to the state: ‘the state is nothing more than an instrument of the community, a particular structure for organizing collective action that can always be replaced by some other structure’.³⁵ Consistent with these responses is Beitz’s difficulty in reconciling a charge of statism against Walzer with Walzer’s belief that resort to war, and the violation of the international legal principle of territorial integrity that this often requires, can be justified in order to assist secessionist movements and to rescue people who are threatened with massacre.³⁶ Notions of territorial integrity and state sovereignty lose all force when the political community is no longer protected by the state. This is precisely because, according to Walzer, the political community and the state are distinct entities: only the former is esteemed as ‘a source of our identity and self-understanding’.³⁷

Whereas there is a general assumption within normative IR theory that communitarianism connotes a position according to which the morally constitutive community is synonymous with the state (as discussed in Chapter 3), Walzer supports no such assumption. Indeed, one of the reasons that Walzer’s work suggests promise for charting a course to an embedded cosmopolitan perspective is that he clearly distinguishes between the community (within which his particularist starting point is located) and the state. This distinction is fundamental to an embedded cosmopolitan perspective inspired by communitarian commitments because it allows for an understanding of the morally constitutive community that need be neither strictly delimited nor defined in terms of a determinant group of ‘outsiders’. Nevertheless, such a distinction can only be a first step. In order for Walzer to provide a coherent example of an embedded cosmopolitan position, he would have to remain loyal to the ‘view from the cave’ that informs his work on distributive justice and social criticism while simultaneously achieving the inclusive purview that allows him to speak of obligations that extend across communities—as well as enemy lines—in his earlier work on war.

Realizing this synthesis is, however, far from straightforward. The same features of Walzer’s thought that secure his place in the mixed company of those assigned the communitarian label translate uneasily into discussions of ethics beyond the domestic realm. As outlined in Chapter 1, moral perspectives that are embedded in particular relationships and practices face charges of being exclusive and conservative. Both sets of criticism are made in direct response to Walzer’s ‘view from the cave’.

According to the first charge—that an embedded ethical perspective is necessarily exclusive—placing value in the shared understandings of the community encourages apathy and fosters intolerance towards those who are not community members. This suspicion might be thought vindicated when one is faced with Walzer’s treatment of the distribution of membership in Spheres of Justice. In the context of this argument, Walzer makes a stark distinction between ‘members’ and ‘strangers’. He presents distributive justice as presupposing a ‘bounded world’, an ‘established group’, and a ‘fixed population’.³⁸ Moreover, he intermittently assumes a correlation between the community within which meanings and values are deciphered and the state. Alluding to Walzer’s position on membership, Onora O’Neill concludes that, ‘[t]hose who see boundaries as the limits of justificatory reasoning will not take seriously…the predicaments of those who are excluded’.³⁹ Indeed, she maintains that Walzer’s apparent acceptance of boundaries as morally constitutive effectively ‘pre-empts answers to questions of global justice’.⁴⁰

I have suggested that attention to the range of Walzer’s work indicates that he intends a sharp distinction between the state and the community or communities that underlie it. This is not only a feature of Walzer’s work that is often neglected by his critics, but it is also one that bodes well for the construction of an embedded cosmopolitan approach to global ethics. Yet, in the case of this discussion of membership, where the potentially exclusionary implications of Walzer’s blurring of ‘community’ and ‘political community’ are placed in sharp relief, the distinction offers limited comfort. With respect to this example of membership, Walzer seems ready (for the most part) to give those with shared understandings pride of place—and to define them as a strictly bounded, determinate group. This presents a problematic point from which to argue for an inclusive moral purview.

The second charge made against the ‘view from the cave’—that such a perspective is conservative—reinforces the perception of Walzer’s position as parochial. As well as stipulating that community boundaries do not demarcate a class of outsider whose moral standing is necessarily qualified, an inclusive ‘view from the cave’ must allow that shared understandings be open to critical reflection. According to the argument set out in Chapter 1, recognizing that the prevailing practices and policies of a particular community to which one belongs are not beyond question—and are open to modification and even rejection—is a way of ensuring that the values of those outside the community are not necessarily beyond comprehension. As Walzer’s ‘view from the cave’ precludes an external criterion for such evaluation, this would require internal review. However, Ronald Dworkin, for one, is deeply sceptical of this possibility. In a prominent debate with Walzer, Dworkin argues that by aiming to uncover the ‘meanings that we share’ we are doing no more than looking at a reflection of ourselves and uncritically accepting what we see. Walzer’s theory of social justice, Dworkin chastises, ‘promises a society at peace with its own traditions’.⁴¹ Indeed, Dworkin’s portrayal of Walzer’s social critic is reminiscent of Plato’s description of the inhabitants of the cave. Dworkin sees these critics as attributing meaning and moral value without question to the images before them. Like Plato’s prisoners, they naively trust their own delimited perceptions, at once rationalizing and apologizing for what are no more than shadows.

For Walzer, morality is located in the shared understandings of particular communities. Moreover, these communities, while distinct from the state, seem to be both bounded, and, in a marked shift from his much earlier writings, often take the form of political associations that are closely correlated with state borders. However, of significance to the search for an example of an embedded cosmopolitan position, and contrary to O’Neill’s assessment, Walzer is unwilling either to accept boundaries as the limits of justificatory reasoning or to eschew questions of global justice. Indeed, he strives to defend his position against both sets of criticism sketched above. It is possible that this unwillingness, in conjunction with his commitment to a ‘view from the cave’ and the particular way that the cave is conceived, cannot yield a position that is internally coherent. Nevertheless, Walzer’s attempts to construct a position that is radically particularist without being parochial are extremely instructive. It is to these attempts that I will now turn.

Walzer’s communitarianism faces serious charges. He stands accused of championing a relativist ethic, or an ethic that is rendered undecipherable when transmitted beyond its specific context.⁴² Of course, a position that claims a particularist starting point must differ in important ways from a conventional cosmopolitan stance. By questioning the degree to which Walzer’s ‘view from the cave’ might support an embedded cosmopolitan position, I am not expecting it to achieve either the guaranteed universal inclusion or the effortless cross-cultural critical capacity claimed by impartialist cosmopolitanism. If attainable at all, these are sacrificed when one rejects impartiality in moral reasoning. Yet, an embedded cosmopolitan perspective would require that one’s sphere of equal moral standing not be limited to any particular community or group of communities. This, in turn, means that one must have a way of both recognizing the equal moral standing of those beyond any particular community to which one belongs and maintaining a critical perspective from which to question those communal understandings that define one and that might stand in the way of such recognition.

Worryingly, as noted above, Walzer’s ‘view from the cave’ faces charges that, if true, would threaten to preclude these possibilities. One can extract from Walzer’s work three different types of defence against these objections: the interpretation and ‘connected criticism’ of situated values, the invocation of universal rights and minimalist constraints (which exist independently of situated values), and the appeal to particularist sources of universal claims.

In response to Walzer’s radical particularism, James Fishkin argues that ‘we require trans-cultural criteria for the alteration and permissible manipulation of moral cultures. But such criteria would require that we “leave the cave” and abstract from the vagaries of our particular culture.’⁴³ Walzer disagrees. He denies that his refusal to detach himself from the internal rules, conventions, and ideals of the community precludes either criticism or reform. Rather, he embraces an ‘interpretive’ approach, or an approach that claims a perspective within the community from which inconsistencies in the community’s prevailing practices and espoused norms might be challenged.⁴⁴ A crucial, and daring, element of Walzer’s interpretive approach is his view that shared understandings may be latent within the community in question.

On the one hand, this notion of latent, shared understandings means that the potential for challenging community practices and principles is indeed delimited by existing beliefs and commitments. For example, if we hope to champion egalitarian principles (principles to which Walzer is deeply committed), we must already enjoy the type of society that would support them: ‘If such a society isn’t already here—hidden, as it were, in concepts and categories—we will never know it concretely or realize it in fact.’⁴⁵ On the other hand, this means that current practices might be at odds with our (latent) internal ideals—and are thereby open to criticism and, indeed, negotiation and revision. One might, for example, discover that one belongs to a society in which torture (in certain circumstances and against certain types of enemy) is practised, or at least condoned through measures such as ‘extraordinary rendition’. Presumably, Dworkin would argue that the enslavement of Walzer’s conception of justice to the status quo means that no argument against such a practice can be made that would be consistent with his ‘view from the cave’. Yet the logic of Walzer’s position does not concede this conclusion. It would, rather, require one to interpret the shared understandings of one’s community. If careful study of the internal rules, maxims, and ideals of this moral culture show that such a practice is a contravention rather than a manifestation of these understandings, then a statement like, ‘[t]he values of this country are such that torture is not part of our soul’ might be the basis for internal criticism and reform (rather than a statement of denial, ignorance, or blatant hypocrisy).⁴⁶

For Walzer, moral culture is not fixed. He suggests that ‘the moral world has a lived-in quality, like a home occupied by a single family over many generations, with unplanned additions here and there, and all the available space filled with memory-laden objects and artifacts’.⁴⁷ Walzer thereby conveys an image of continuity and tradition juxtaposed with the potential for renovation and change. Relying on a similar juxtaposition, Walzer argues for the possibility (and necessity) of a radically particularist social critic. This critic, like Walzer himself, remains in the cave: ‘They [social critics] appeal to internal principles, already known, comprehensible to, somehow remembered by, the people they hope to convince.’⁴⁸ Nevertheless, he understands these shared beliefs that are found within the cave as existing ‘in the shadow of contingent and uncertain truths’.⁴⁹ Social criticism, Walzer argues, is able to expose internal tensions and contradictions. Indeed, he suggests that we can ‘mark off better from worse arguments, deep and inclusive accounts of our social life from shallow and partisan accounts’.⁵⁰ This response effectively counters Dworkin’s claim that Walzer simply assumes a society at peace with its own traditions. Yet, my suggestion that self-criticism within a community can contribute to a greater sense of solidarity with those outside it (both because exclusionary communal norms and conventions might be held up to scrutiny, and, perhaps more importantly, because incompatibilities between ‘our’ understandings and ‘their’ understandings might be seen as merely contingent) faces at least two potential obstacles. First, the evaluation of prevailing policies and practices within a community might serve to consolidate or strengthen, rather than challenge, divisive sentiments and prejudices vis-à-vis discrete communities.⁵¹ In other words, the social critic might conceivably conclude that a ‘deeper’ account of social life is one that is less concerned with the well-being of ‘outsiders’ and, perhaps, more amenable to condoning torture, for example, than the account currently portrayed through these practices and policies. Second, the strictly internal critical perspective that would refuse to see communal norms as static and beyond question would, nevertheless, lack a means of looking outwards and connecting this insight with the possibility that distant strangers are not so ‘strange’ after all.

For an interpretive approach to even consider the wide range of perspectives and values that we encounter in international politics, one might argue that we would have to assume a global community of latent, shared understandings—and this very range would, presumably, belie the existence of such an entity. As Walzer concedes—perhaps less adamantly in his most recent work⁵²—‘were we to take the globe as our setting, we would have to imagine what does not yet exist: a community that included men and women everywhere. We would have to invent a common set of meanings for these people.’⁵³ Connected criticism responds to some of the challenges faced by Walzer’s position, but, by itself, takes us little distance towards embedded cosmopolitanism.

Wholly unconvinced by Walzer’s interpretive approach, John Dunn judges that, ‘[t]o be self-critical is no doubt more edifying than to be complacent; but in political theory it hardly carries the clout of Plato’s theory of the Forms’.⁵⁴ Despite his professed loyalty to the cave, Walzer seems inclined to agree. Although he argues that morality must be interpreted from within the community, in Interpretation and Social Criticism, Walzer casually notes that some requirements of justice are applicable to all communities. Prohibitions against ‘murder, deception, betrayal and gross cruelty’ constitute ‘a kind of minimal and universal moral code’.⁵⁵ Acknowledging the necessity of a similar departure from the cave (and suggesting that he would be inclined to offer more than an internal criticism of the example of torture that I posed above), Walzer reiterates in a subsequent defence of Spheres of Justice that, ‘I am unsure that morality works, as it were, from the outside, except when it serves as a minimalist constraint’ on universal wrongs such as ‘[m]urder, torture, and enslavement’.⁵⁶

Upon making these qualifications to his particularist morality, Walzer does, however, distinguish between such universal moral prohibitions and a fully formed moral culture. He argues that these restrictions ‘provide a framework for any possible (moral) life, but only a framework, with all the substantive details still to be filled in before anyone could actually live one way rather than another’. His characterization of a minimalist code emphasizes the importance of individual moral cultures that are ‘specifications and elaborations of the code, variations on it’.⁵⁷ Walzer thereby addresses, and curbs, the relativist risks of his particularist theory. Where there is a ‘minimal and universal code’, criticism between communities, between cultures, and between states (not simply critical interpretation from within them) is possible. Significantly, this response allows for the derivation of an ethical position that is distinct from the interpretation of values inherent in the community. These prohibitions depend instead on a universalist position from which particular communities elaborate their own moral cultures.

Although this concession in Walzer’s work provides a strong reply to charges of moral relativism, it does not bring Walzer any closer to an embedded cosmopolitan perspective. Granted, he champions both a particularist moral starting point and claims an inclusive, cross-culturally critical perspective. However, in meeting this latter criterion of embedded cosmopolitanism, he supplements his ‘view from the cave’ with a stance that abstracts from the ethical particularism that defines it. This is a move that embedded cosmopolitanism cannot make. Indeed, the assumption that one has access to a perspective above and beyond all particular communities and contexts, from which a universal, moral code can be derived (and from which the ethical commitments of particular cultures might be judged) is exactly that which engenders scepticism among many critics of conventional cosmopolitan positions. These critics are wary of any privileged position from which one might assert, for example, that ‘[m]oral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place’, and then go on to base policies and condemn deviations on the understanding that one’s own beliefs meld seamlessly with this universal code.⁵⁸ Such a proposed non-partisan viewpoint, they warn, simply reflects the commitments of those with power.

There is a further problem with Walzer’s invocation of a minimal and universal moral code; namely, that such a move undermines the theoretical coherence of his work. Walzer could be said to have illustrated an embedded cosmopolitan position only if he were able to achieve an inclusive and cross-culturally critical perspective that remained faithful to his avowed particularist moral starting point. Yet, despite the apparent potential in Walzer’s work for providing an anti-impartialist and non-relativist approach to normative theorizing in IR—a communitarianism that is not antithetical to an ethical cosmopolitan agenda—there is an alarming inconsistency to which I have thus far only alluded. While Walzer’s moral starting point in both Spheres of Justice and Interpretation and Social Criticism is radically particularist, certain ‘fundamental rights’ are asserted independently of an internal perspective. Although this separation answers charges of relativism, it suggests that an exclusively particularist perspective is untenable. I will examine this fissure in Walzer’s moral framework as it is revealed in Spheres of Justice and Interpretation and Social Criticism. However, I will introduce this examination by momentarily returning to Just and Unjust Wars in which Walzer appears to be committed to a conception of moral argument that is premised on universal notions of right and wrong that are impartially derived.

The American intervention in Vietnam provided the motivation for Walzer’s influential account of ethical principles of war. While not articulated until Spheres of Justice, the notion that shared understandings can underwrite moral positions is a thematic presence, intermittently apparent just below the surface of this rights-based argument. In Just and Unjust Wars, Walzer assumes an inclusive moral vocabulary. He clarifies that the use of the first person plural pronouns ‘we’, ‘our’, ‘ourselves’, and ‘us’ throughout his argument refer not only to those who opposed the Vietnam War—a group to which he assigns himself—but to ‘the much larger group who understood the condemnation (whether or not they agreed with it)’.⁵⁹ Walzer is thereby able to appeal to the shared understandings of this group: ‘that its members share a common morality is the critical assumption of this book’.⁶⁰

This is an auspicious beginning for a work that might have tried to reconcile a morality that is situated exclusively in the community with questions of transnational justice and obligation. However, the notion of shared understandings upon which Walzer purports to rely in order to address his literary audience is not granted his confidence in sustaining a moral argument. Walzer’s means of arriving at a common moral language in this examination of war is radically different from his later approach to social justice and criticism. While, as I noted in my examination of his communitarianism, Walzer recognizes the community itself as a social good in Just and Unjust Wars, in defending moral principles he pays homage to an impartialist cosmopolitan perspective. Walzer prefaces his argument by establishing that, ‘the morality I shall expound is in its philosophical form a doctrine of human rights’.⁶¹ These rights achieve universal and critical appeal because their authority lies outside the community. They are independent of communal understandings. In other words, Just and Unjust Wars is an argument from outside the cave.

Of course, there could be a simple explanation for the apparent incompatibility between Walzer’s impartialist, rights-based argument in Just and Unjust Wars, and his ‘view from the cave’ approach to Spheres of Justice and Interpretation and Social Criticism. Walzer might have rethought the foundations of moral argument, adopted another framework, changed his mind. If this were true, there would be no point in speaking of theoretical fissures—the claim that a single understanding of justice could accommodate both human rights and communal understandings would not have been put forth for scrutiny. Yet, importantly, it is not simply the case that Walzer has articulated impartialist and radically particularist positions, respectively, in discrete works. The most intriguing, perplexing, and potentially undermining aspect of Walzer’s work is that he tenaciously asserts that his moral world-view includes both sources of value.

In Spheres of Justice, Walzer asserts that, ‘[e]very substantive account of distributive justice is a local account’.⁶² Yet, he concurrently embraces a moral position that he must reach beyond the community’s shared understandings to justify:

Some years ago, when I wrote about war, I relied heavily on the idea of rights. For the theory of justice in war can indeed be generated from the two most basic and widely recognized rights of human beings—and in their simplest (negative) form: not to be robbed of life or of liberty…What is perhaps more important, these two rights seem to account for the moral judgements that we most commonly make in times of war. They do real work. But they are only of limited help in thinking about distributive justice.

Walzer presents rights to life and liberty as arising from an impartialist starting point: our common humanity. While we may have additional social rights, Walzer is disparaging about the possibility that these are similarly derived: ‘Men and women do indeed have rights beyond life and liberty, but these do not follow from our common humanity; they follow instead from our shared conceptions of social goods; they are local and particular in character.’⁶³ In other words, the ethical principles of social justice have a distinct etymology. Walzer reasserts this distinction in Spheres of Justice when he interrupts his ‘view from the cave’ deliberation and alludes to an independent, rights-based ethical perspective in reference to two issues: the plight of immigrants and the prohibition on slavery.

According to Walzer, the principle of mutual aid, by which strangers are entitled to assistance, ‘extends across political (and also cultural, religious, and linguistic) frontiers’.⁶⁴ It is in this regard that Walzer explicitly addresses the claims of distant strangers. In this specific example, Walzer expounds the rights of prospective immigrants driven by famine from densely populated lands. These rights do not depend on the shared understandings of a particular community. Conversely, a community that attempts to circumvent the principle of mutual aid and override these rights by professing to ‘need’ an abundance of space (a claim that would seem to exemplify Walzer’s ‘shared understandings’) must recognize the more powerful moral claim of those who are outside the community. In Walzer’s example, the fact that Australians lay claim to ‘the great empty spaces of the subcontinent…does not seem a right that one would readily defend in the face of necessitous men and women, clamoring for entry’.⁶⁵ With respect to the perceived needs of Australians, Walzer concludes that, ‘such needs cannot be given moral priority over the claims of necessitous strangers’.⁶⁶ In fact, Walzer is arguing that the rights of these strangers would have priority over the claims that have arisen from within the community.⁶⁷ Despite his ‘radically particularist’ pretence, Walzer appears to be supporting an impartialist cosmopolitan position. This inclination towards ethical duality is also apparent in Walzer’s treatment of slavery.

In the context of his discussion of membership, Walzer states that ‘the injustice of slavery is not disputed these days’.⁶⁸ This is certainly true in societies that value equality, the societies upon which Walzer claims to focus. Our shared understandings reveal that slavery is base, degrading, and immoral. Walzer returns to the issue of slavery in his presentation of ‘blocked exchanges’, the boundaries that prevent monetary exchange for those things that our particular community agrees money should be unable to buy: ‘Human beings cannot be bought or sold. The sale of slaves, even of oneself as a slave, is ruled out.’⁶⁹ While this judgement seems entirely consistent with Walzer’s ‘view from the cave’ morality, Walzer’s condemnation of slavery does not rest exclusively on interpreting the community’s current conception of justice. Instead, in a brief aside further along in his argument, he makes a surprising appeal. In addressing the practice of slavery, Walzer reverts to the universal rights to life and liberty that determine justice in times of war rather than relying on the notion of shared understandings that he is supposedly propounding:

Slaves and masters do not inhabit a world of shared meanings. The two groups are simply at war, as Hegel claimed, and the morality of their encounter is best approached through the theory of just and unjust wars, not through the theory of distributive justice.⁷⁰

Apparently, in the case of slavery, prohibition ultimately rests on the notion of rights that exists independently of the community. Walzer thereby provides a strange combination of rights-based and situated appeals to justice. This is the most telling comment on Walzer’s moral theorizing, as well as the most disturbing in terms of determining a cohesive ethical framework for his work. Is Walzer arguing that even if our shared understandings allowed slavery of some sort—if there were no blocked exchanges preventing the sale of human beings—that slavery would nevertheless be immoral? If one takes Dunn’s position that the interpretation of communal values lacks the clout carried by moral principles justified from a position that transcends this context, then this is a reassuring proposition. However, in terms of the coherence of the moral framework within which Walzer is arguing, important questions remain. To what moral authority does the prohibition against slavery appeal? Does the gravity of this prohibition rule out sole reliance on our shared understandings? Walzer claims two distinct realms of moral deliberation: one that requires appeal to an impartialist perspective and another that warrants loyalty to his ‘view from the cave’. Furthermore, Walzer implies that there are invisible lines drawn between moral dilemmas as to which derivation each is entitled.

Perhaps Walzer is conceding fissures in moral theorizing that need not exist. A related possibility is that Walzer is building moral hierarchies through his intimations that certain principles demand an ethical derivation that is independent of the community. The suggestion that one must single out the ethical questions that cannot be derived from a particularist starting point betrays a startling feature of Walzer’s work. It is only in Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, published in 1994, that Walzer considers what might be an exclusively particularist source of values. This consideration neither offers the relativist resignation that these values cannot travel, nor avoids this resignation by positing a separate, supplementary sphere of impartialist moral deliberation.

‘Minimal morality is very important’, Walzer maintains, ‘both for the sake of criticism and for the sake of solidarity’.⁷¹ By proposing a radically revised conception of the source of this morality, Walzer provides an alternative to the fragmented ethical framework described above. Suggesting that we can remain in our local communities and, yet, make universal claims based on our particular shared understandings, he also develops an argument that seems, at first glance, to bring us closer to embedded cosmopolitanism.

In Thick and Thin, Walzer reverses his account of the relationship between a ‘universal moral code’ and the particular moral cultures rehearsed in Interpretation and Social Criticism. This reversal is significant in understanding Walzer’s attempt to reconcile his ‘view from the cave’ with universal ethical claims. In the language of his revised position, he distinguishes between ‘moral maximalism’, a framework that is local, ‘thick’, and derived from a particular historical, cultural, religious, and political orientation, and ‘moral minimalism’, a framework that is universal, ‘thin’, and capable of establishing correspondence between communities.⁷² The distinction between a single, crude set of universal prohibitions and a plurality of particular moral cultures ‘with judgement, value, the goodness of persons and things realized in detail’ is consistent with his earlier account.⁷³ However, whereas Walzer had previously described these particular moral cultures as elaborations of the universal code, in Thick and Thin particular moral cultures are the source of universal standards. With characteristic candour, Walzer rejects his former position as follows:

[p]hilosophers most often describe it [the dualism of a thick and a thin morality] in terms of a (thin) set of universal principles adapted (thickly) to these or those circumstances. I have in the past suggested the image of a core morality differently elaborated in different cultures. The idea of elaboration is better than adaptation, it seems to me, because it suggests a process less circumstantial and constrained, more creative: governed as much by ideal as by practical considerations…But both of these descriptions suggest mistakenly that the starting point for the development of morality is the same in every case.

Instead, Walzer argues, ‘[m]orality is thick from the beginning, culturally integrated, fully resonant, and it reveals itself thinly only on specific occasions, when moral language is turned to specific purposes’.⁷⁴ Any moral standard that is universal in scope necessarily arises from a particularist starting point.

I will draw on two colourful metaphors that Walzer employs in Thick and Thin in order to illustrate how this extension from particular moral culture to universal ethical standards might work. The first metaphor serves to explain the process by which a moral perspective that is embedded in a particular community can also be outward looking and inclusive. Walzer refers to this process as ‘vicarious endorsement’. The second, an interesting reversal of Platonic Forms, examines the nature of the resulting universal claims. These claims remain embedded in local networks of meaning. Walzer’s argument proceeds as follows.

At certain ‘universal moments’, while securely situated in our own political community, we observe people in trouble who are propounding standards and guidelines that are rooted in their own experience, envisioned from their unique perspective, and expressed in their own moral language. At these instances, we both recognize and endorse their claims. For Walzer, 1989 provided such a universal moment. He describes people marching in the streets of Prague, carrying signs that read ‘Truth’ and ‘Justice’. Despite being steeped in his own culture and circumstances, and removed from the context of the demonstrators, Walzer declares, ‘I could have walked comfortably in their midst. I could carry the same signs.’⁷⁵ ‘Truth’ and ‘Justice’ are not abstract concepts that we are able to hold in common because the shared understandings of our respective communities hark back to a common morality. ‘Rather,’ explains Walzer, ‘we recognize the occasion; we imaginatively join the march; our endorsement is more vicarious than detached and speculative.’⁷⁶ This metaphor is inherently ‘dualist’: while we participate vicariously in the parades of others, ‘we have our own parade’.⁷⁷ How we achieve a universal moral language (that allows us to march in the parades of distant strangers) from a particularist starting point is illustrated by Walzer’s second metaphor.

In Thick and Thin, Walzer provides a vital link between his maximalist insistence on maintaining a ‘view from the cave’ and the adamant rejection of moral relativism in his minimalist claims. In order to explain the nature of these minimalist claims, he quotes George Orwell’s maxim that ‘there’s a statue inside every block of stone’.⁷⁸ Walzer makes a parallel assertion that ‘there are the makings of a thin and universalist morality inside every thick and particularist morality’, and then drastically qualifies this comparison. The relationship between a thin morality and a thick morality differs from the relationship that Orwell presents between the statue and the stone: ‘they are differently formed and differently related’.⁷⁹

We have in fact no knowledge of the stone; we begin with the finished statue; maximalist in style, ancient, carved by many hands. And then, in moments of crisis, we hastily construct an abstract version, a stick figure, a cartoon, that only alludes to the complexity of the original.⁸⁰

In other words, if one were to take this imagery back to Walzer’s earlier articulation of universal moral prohibitions, Walzer had intimated that a single moral code, or block of stone, provides the core, or raw material, for the diversity of moral cultures that we encounter in the world. By this account, the stone is elaborated, or carved, into these individual cultures, which emerge over time like separate, intricate statues. His subsequent formulation is entirely different. There is no primordial stone, only a plurality of statues—each of which represents the moral starting point for a particular group of people. (More consistent with both of Walzer’s accounts than his description above, they are never ‘finished’ but are, rather, perpetual works in progress.) At a ‘universal moment’, all we can hope to do is to sketch a representation of these statues that somehow illustrates those features that they have in common. Walzer thereby argues that the resulting ‘minimal morality’ is both derivative of, and subordinate to, the original maximalism. In doing so, he seems, prima facie, to take us in an embedded cosmopolitan direction.

An embedded cosmopolitan position would reject an impartialist moral starting point while remaining inclusive and critical enough to ensure that the equal moral standing of no individual is necessarily beyond comprehension. However, how to achieve this combination without relying upon internally inconsistent theoretical postulates is a difficult problem. Walzer’s exposition of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ moralities provides instructive deliberation and a proposed solution. Nevertheless, four concerns arise from Walzer’s account that are important in terms of both analysing the sphere of equal moral standing afforded by his ‘view from the cave’ and identifying the parameters of a qualified ethical cosmopolitanism.

One concern involves the first of Walzer’s two steps to achieving a moral minimum. Before establishing a stick-figure representation of our common beliefs, we must, standing in our own caves, recognize and ‘vicariously endorse’ the claims of others. This first step is one of empathy. Walzer’s reliance on empathetic attachment carries the problem that moral consideration ‘between caves’ is thereby motivated by imaginative (and not real) associations. This notion of empathetic attachment is vulnerable to the invocation of hidden agendas for ‘granting’ moral concern. As Kathy Ferguson cautions, ‘empathy can readily be recruited into a gesture of appropriation (as in “I know what you mean” when I really don’t know at all)’.⁸¹ Empathy thus conceived is more akin to an imperialist venture of the particular community than to a means of achieving what I have called embedded cosmopolitanism.⁸²

A second quandary brings us again to the image of the cave. Walzer’s claim that he retains the embedded perspective that I have identified as characteristic of his ‘view from the cave’ morality, even while adopting an ethical cosmopolitan purview, can be questioned. A possibility that cannot be overlooked is that Walzer’s attempt to enter discussions of transnational justice and obligation from an embedded perspective relies on covert appeals to the abstract and impartialist reasoning that he claims to reject. Although he would have risked obscuring his argument with a mixed metaphor, it would have been interesting had Walzer pursued his allusion to Plato’s metaphorical cave in Thick and Thin. Does Walzer allow himself to leave the cave at universal moments? This would mean that the situated moral perspective requisite to a communitarian starting point faces abandonment when questions of value that claim a universal scope are raised. Whether Walzer depends on this transcendence is uncertain. It is obvious that he attempts to avoid it when he describes that we vicariously endorse the parades of others, while having our own parades. Elsewhere, he warns against transcending particularist identities and, instead, proposes that they be ‘refocused’.⁸³

A third problem is that if Walzer’s uncovering of a minimalist universal moral code—one identified through a process of vicarious endorsement carried out by moral agents as they are situated within their own communities—does allow an embedded ethical perspective to be critical, inclusive, and comprehensible beyond the state and beyond the political community, this is a precarious universal code. A particularist moral starting point becomes fused with an inclusive sphere of equal moral standing, yet this connection is tenuous and intermittent. It is dependent upon a sense of identification—an imagined bond that momentarily overcomes apathy and somehow prevails over potential emotional extensions that are every bit as powerful as empathy, and perhaps more deeply felt, such as fear, contempt, and animosity. In Walzer’s words, this identification requires a ‘universal moment’. If such global epiphanies are few and far between, the ‘view from the cave’ will at times be hopelessly parochial and susceptible to relativism.

A final, and equally unsettling, point of concern is that even when a (fleeting) ‘universal moment’ does occur, there is a risk that its achievement relies upon a perceived opposition that might prevent it from being truly universal in scope. Walzer explains that his ‘universal moment’ ‘is the product of historical conjuncture, not of a philosophical “in-the-beginning”’.⁸⁴ This is how it must be if it is to claim a particularist source of value (even if, as I have argued, the integrity of this claim might be challenged). Yet, in the absence of existing communal ties and ‘thick’ shared understandings beyond the cave, Walzer’s vicarious endorsement requires a spark of recognition, or anger (certainly passion), that propels, even momentarily, one’s sight and sentiments beyond the cave. Walzer speaks of ‘a personal or social crisis or a political confrontation’.⁸⁵ What fuels feelings of empathy during such crises? Walzer suggests that ‘[w]hat unites us at such a time is more the sense of a common enemy than the commitment to a common culture’.⁸⁶ He might simply be envisaging this common enemy in terms of ‘tyranny’, ‘oppression’, or ‘corruption’. Yet, he can just as easily be read as referring to a group of others against whom we see ourselves united in our pursuit of justice or emancipation. It is, perhaps, true that without a common culture or some sort of transcultural connection (between caves), even momentary concord demands a common foe. The condemnation of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States would seem to come very close to what Walzer describes, albeit problematically, as a ‘universal moment’—not only in the prominence of principles that others could vicariously endorse (such as the protection of ‘innocents’ from organized violence), and in the readily available (if rather ambiguously labelled) point of opposition implied in the ensuing call to a ‘war on terror’, but also in the exclusions necessarily entailed by this opposition. As Walzer acknowledges, such a moment of unity tends to rely on the perception of a common ‘enemy’. However, it is hard to imagine that a resulting moral minimum can constitute a ‘historical conjuncture’ that could be said to have also arisen from the maximal morality of those who we would place in this category.

In a world in which ‘enemies’ (both self-declared and appointed) abound and empathy is not the only emotion likely to colour one’s contemplation of distant others, a global ethic that threatens to exclude adversaries and rely on emotional extensions lacks the potential for universal inclusion required of an ethical cosmopolitan position. Indeed, in attempting to mediate between a radically particularist account of moral judgement and value and a critical, inclusive moral purview, Walzer’s notion of ‘vicarious endorsement’ encounters grave difficulties. This is why the careful negotiations that lead him to it are so useful. The points at which Walzer’s work seems to stride towards an embedded cosmopolitan position, but then either stumbles or changes course, offer important insights into the requisite features, and potential pitfalls, of an ethical cosmopolitanism that would take seriously anti-impartialist claims. I will briefly highlight these pitfalls and suggest the assumptions that contribute to them. Finally, I will propose ways in which a viable embedded cosmopolitanism might avoid similar traps by embracing certain aspects of Walzer’s ‘view from the cave’—and radically reconsidering others.

There are two snares that Walzer comes across in trying to defend a critical and inclusive moral purview from his particularist starting point: the necessary exclusion of a determinate group of ‘outsiders’; and, the covert appeal to just the type of impartialist stance that he claims to oppose. Moreover, his attempt to avoid one consistently seems to force him along a path towards the other. Standing in the ‘cave’ eschews impartiality in moral reasoning, but must leave some beyond the shared understandings that its walls contain; appealing, respectively, to a ‘universal moral framework’ (from which particular moral cultures are elaborated) and the idea of a ‘universal moment’ (that would allow discrete cultures, intermittently, to come together) promises a more inclusive purview, but at the cost of adopting a detached (and disclaimed) standpoint. It is conceivable that any ethical particularist position with inclusive aspirations must choose between the possibility of universal solidarity and theoretical coherence. (An embedded cosmopolitan position would then be unachievable.) But it is also possible that the need to sacrifice one for the other is the result of how Walzer defines his anti-impartialist stance, rather than of his particularist commitments per se. This possibility warrants consideration.

Walzer’s communitarian starting point provides a compelling account of ethical reasoning, the construction of values, and the moral agent for whom particular affiliations are inextricably bound to his or her capacity for deliberation. Yet the limits that Walzer places on his starting point are problematic and, I will suggest, unnecessary. Those pitfalls that Walzer encounters result from the way that he understands the community associated with his ‘view from the cave’. Indeed, Walzer’s vital distinction between the community and the state can all too easily be obscured if the walls of the cave are tied to geopolitical borders. This danger arises most prominently in Walzer’s discussion of membership. Yet, further evidence that Walzer’s figurative cave is strictly bounded can be observed in his consistent reference to a discrete body of self-contained shared understandings that the social critic is either ‘within’ or ‘without’. Furthermore, while he does not explicitly invoke the metaphor of the cave in Thick and Thin, its features dictate the moves that he deems necessary to achieve a moral minimalism. The separate parades that he describes in this work function as a comparable (if more festive) image. Local parades never merge; marchers take part in a single procession (and from there can only imaginatively join another). The illustration changes but the assumptions remain constant. A viable theory of embedded cosmopolitanism requires that these assumptions be held up to scrutiny.

Walzer’s image of the cave neglects important subtleties in both our moral and political experience. The communities that inform moral judgement are not singular, mutually exclusive, nor always reducible to a specific location. Transnational solidarity demands more than the temporary and fickle surges of ‘vicarious endorsement’ that might extend from such entities; our criticism of the practices in which we participate and the associations to which we belong are not simply inward-looking and self-referential within strict bounds. Walzer’s insight that moral culture, even viewed from a particularist perspective, need not be considered fixed is an extremely valuable point for an embedded cosmopolitan position to adopt. His concomitant assumption that this culture is defined and interpreted within boundaries that are fixed is, however, problematic and in need of correction. The possibility of transnational criticism and solidarity might better be understood as indebted to particularist attachments that require an alternative understanding of community membership and a revised account of one’s moral starting point to accurately describe. One way of approaching such a redescription is to envisage the community in a way that is not necessarily spatially defined like Walzer’s ‘cave’. Inspiration for a revised understanding of community might be found in feminist challenges to communitarian political thought. It is to these challenges that I will turn in Chapter 5.

Rethinking both the nature and the scope of an ethical perspective that locates itself in the community is an important project—one that finds both endorsement and preliminary shape in a comprehensive look at Walzer’s work. Taking this project one step further by refusing to define the morally constitutive community in strictly spatial terms might provide a stronger alliance between a communitarian moral starting point and an inclusive sphere of equal standing than that (as yet) summoned by Walzer. Such an alliance could allow one to challenge the impartialist assumptions underlying conventional ethical cosmopolitan positions, while remaining wary of the potential exclusionary implications of Walzer’s communitarian allegiance to the cave. From here, a robust, qualified cosmopolitanism—that would remain faithful to a particularist moral starting point without forfeiting the possibility of cross-cultural criticism and solidarity—is within reach.