Gandhi’s Sentimental Cosmopolitanism and Duty to Alleviate Global Poverty: An Indian Response to the West

However, Kant and Gandhi share the idea on several occasions but Gandhi’s duty ethics to help the distant others departs from Kantian rationalist cosmopolitan ethics which informs most of the contemporary Western cosmopolitanism. Gandhi, unlike most of the Western liberals, does not view life as an alienated and fragmented concept rather he believes in the idea of shared humanity, a life which is deeply connected with each other including nature. Going beyond the rationalist and modernist justification for this moral interdependence, Gandhi (1909) in his seminal work, “Hind Swaraj” questions this mentality and argues that our life is essentially ‘unalienated’. According to Gandhi, the whole world is a “family” and we inhabit the same humanity. We all are morally and socially connected, our duties and responsibilities impact each other’s well-being. In Young India (1924) Gandhi wrote, “I want to identify myself with everything that lives. He believed in the essential unity of mankind. The proposed paper is a humble attempt to explore, why Western moral cosmopolitanism despite being philosophically sound, could not address the global poverty, especially in the Global South and we collectively as a society have failed in alleviating it. It also tries to explore why right-based approach of Western moral cosmopolitanism could not ground an idea of agency and duty ethics to alleviate global poverty. Gandhi, going beyond positivist understanding of the nature of global poverty, motivates individuals to be compassionate and help the poor across the globe, even though if they are not the direct cause of their poverty. He says, since we share the same humanity, it is our moral duty to help our fellow being. Gandhi’s duty ethics to help the distant ‘others’ is based on the idea of human sentiment and compassion. Gandhi’s individual is not a possessive individual, unlike western liberal individual; he is not an “owner” rather a “trustee”. In the Harijan, 1-2-1942, Gandhi discusses the “Duty of the Rich”, and he says that “The rich should ponder well as to what their duty is today. They who employ mercenaries to guard their wealth may find those very guardians turning on them.” Western liberal cosmopolitans like Pogge and Caney do prescribe negative and positive ‘duty of justice’ to help the global poor respectively but they are trapped in the logic of either institutional or interactional imperative rather than realizing the intrinsic value of shared humanity. I argue that Gandhian idea of socially connected needs and the harm principles has much broader moral outlook than most of the Western cosmopolitan frameworks. Gandhi says: “We are socially so connected that even a single penny on luxury may inflict harm in one or another way on the destitute who are in dire need of our help.” This is what I call Gandhi’s sentimental cosmopolitanism, primarily based on “Karuna” (compassion) and “Ahimsa” (non-violence) and Asteya (non-stealing). I argue that Gandhian understanding of moral interdependence has potential to come up with be a plausible non-Western alternative of distributive obligations what I call “agency of shared humanity”.