CONCEPT
The Obligation to Strangers
Appiah's foundational cosmopolitan claim — that you have genuine moral obligations to people you will never meet — applied to the structural asymmetry between those who benefit from AI and those who bear its costs.
Cosmopolitan ethics begins with a proposition most moral philosophy prefers to avoid: you have obligations to people you will never meet. Not aspirational obligations. Not the soft duties of charitable feeling that can be satisfied by an annual donation and a moment of seasonal guilt. Genuine obligations — claims that strangers have on your behavior, your choices, your institutional designs, by virtue of being human beings affected by what you do. Applied to AI, the framework identifies a structural truth the discourse consistently evades: the people who benefit most from AI are benefiting from a structure that imposes costs on others. Those others are strangers. Most of the beneficiaries will never meet them. The cosmopolitan obligation is real. The Luddites of 1812 were destroyed in part because the people who benefited from the power looms acknowledged no obligation to the displaced. The pattern is not historical. It is contemporary.
