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Toward a Global Ethic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2012

Extract

We are one humanity, but seven billion humans. This is the essential challenge of global ethics: how to accommodate the tension between our universal and particular natures. This tension is, of course, age-old and runs through all moral and political philosophy. But in the world of the early twenty-first century it plays out in distinctive new ways. Ethics has always engaged twin capacities inherent in every human: the capacity to harm and the capacity to help. But the profound set of transformations commonly referred to as globalization—the increasing mobility of goods, labor, and capital; the increasing interconnectedness of political, economic, and financial systems; and the radical empowerment of groups and individuals through technology—have enabled us to harm and to help others in ways that our forebears could not have imagined. What we require from a global ethic is shaped by these transformative forces; and global ethics—the success or failure of that project—will substantially shape the course of the twenty-first century.

Type
Symposium: In Search of a Global Ethic
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2012

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References

NOTES

1 Note that this usage differs from Michael Ignatieff's in “Reimagining a Global Ethic,” in this issue.

2 Ignatieff, “Reimagining a Global Ethic.”

3 To be sure, each of these rights has fuzzy edges. For example, different jurisdictions draw the distinction between self-defense and culpable homicide in slightly different ways. But we are much less inclined to view these differences as morally discretionary, as opposed to disagreements over moral facts. In any case, the prohibition of paradigm cases of murder, rape, torture, slavery, and the like is nonnegotiable.

4 Butterfield, Herbert, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965)Google Scholar.