Una critica del cosmopolitismo post-liberale. Pensando con Danilo Zolo

Abstract: Starting from Danilo Zolo’s critique of human rights universalism, the paper deals, first, with the concept of global justice and its cosmopolitan credentials from a realist standpoint. Secondly, it deploys some of the theses formulated by Zolo on cosmopolitan ethos and globalist universalism, radicalising their distrust of any generically universalist form of rights ethics, to analyse the post-liberal ethical substance of the the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It is often said that the MDGs/SDGs conjure up some sort of “global civil society”. The paper argues that, on the contrary, they instantiate a form of undifferentiated and efficientist ethics that distorts the original ethical fabric of rights, making it incapable of generating global justice. In other words, the MDGs/SDGs cannot dissolve the pessimism resulting from a realist appraisal of current world politics.