Good International Citizenship and Cosmopolitan Responsibilities to Protect: Balancing Responsibilities and Dirty Hands

This chapter examines a key question facing advocates of the cosmopolitan state: how can states best realize their cosmopolitan responsibilities to protect alongside their other responsibilities in cases where they conflict? It does so by focusing on a modest vision of cosmopolitan statehood—the notion of good international citizenship—and the idea that good international citizen states are faced with a continual need to ‘balance’ their potentially conflicting responsibilities. Drawing on the philosophy of value pluralism, the chapter interrogates this notion of ‘balance’ and makes two main claims. First, at times the plural responsibilities of good international citizenship can be successfully balanced through both contextual political decision and pragmatic action. Second, there are undoubtedly hard cases in which this balancing act is impossible, and good international citizens are faced with irresolvable dilemmas, in which ‘dirty hands’ are inevitable.