We are the world.(Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers)(Book review)

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, by Kwame Anthony Appiah (Norton, 256 pp., $23.95)

PLURALISM--the coexistence of radically divergent moral, philosophical, cultural, and religious worldviews within the same geographical territory or under the same government--became an inescapable fact of Western life following the Reformation and Enlightenment. Consequently, toleration became the standard policy of modern Western governments, as the most realistic way of forestalling the violent conflicts between doctrines that might otherwise seem inevitable in the face of this diversity. But such grudging recognition of the de facto pluralism of modern social life has come to seem insufficient to many contemporary intellectuals. Pluralism de jure or "in principle" has replaced mere toleration as a moral and political ideal, especially with the onset of globalization and an increasing awareness of the political and economic interdependence of all nations. On this view, it isn't enough to acknowledge that people have to learn to get along despite their deep differences, as if it were a regrettable and contingent fact that the differences exist. Rather, we must come to see such differences as an inevitable part of the human condition, and indeed as salutary. Diversity isn't just something to be tolerated. It is something to be celebrated.

Some of those who take ...