Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers

Published in 2006 by W. W. Norton, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers is Appiah's most widely read book and the most accessible entry point to his philosophical project. Across eight chapters, the book develops the argument that human beings have genuine moral obligations to people they will never meet — obligations that coexist with, rather than replace, particular attachments to family, community, and nation. The book includes Appiah's famous essay 'The Case for Contamination,' originally published in the New York Times Magazine, which defends cultural mixing against the purity talk that characterizes both conservative defenders of national traditions and progressive defenders of indigenous authenticity. The book's central image — the funeral of Appiah's father Joe Appiah in Kumasi — becomes the paradigm case for the claim that particular attachment and universal concern can be held simultaneously. In the AI age, the book provides the framework for understanding why the distribution of the technology's