Cosmopolitan morality seperates contributing benefits and protecting from harm

Global cooperation rests on popular endorsement of cosmopolitan values—putting all humanity on a level with co-nationals, comparative judgments that may tradeoff, even sacrifice, the ingroup’s interests for the interests of all humanity. Moral cosmopolitanism finds support in large, nationally representative surveys from Spain, UK, Germany, China, Japan, US, Colombia, and Guatemala (N=9,871). Respondents everywhere distinguish preventing harm to foreign citizens, which almost all support, from redistributing resources, which only about half support. These two dimensions of moral cosmopolitanism, equitable security (preventing harm) and equitable benefits (redistributing resources), predict attitudes toward contested international policies, actual charitable donations, and preferences for mask and vaccine allocations in the COVID response. The dimensions are not correlated with several demographic variables, and only weakly with political ideology. Moral cosmopolitanism also differs from related psychological constructs. Finally, natural language processing probes people’s cognitive associations underlying moral cosmopolitanism (e.g., world, both) versus moral patriotism (USA, first). Making these global or parochial terms accessible introduces an effective intervention that at least temporarily makes people behave like moral cosmopolitans.