The Routledge Handbook of Global Ethics

Darrel Moellendorf, Heather Widdows, Darrel Moellendorf, Heather Widdows

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317592372
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Global ethics focuses on the most pressing contemporary ethical issues - poverty, global trade, terrorism, torture, pollution, climate change and the management of scarce recourses. It draws on moral and political philosophy, political and social science, empirical research, and real-world policy and activism. The Routledge Handbook of Global Ethics is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject, presenting an authoritative overview of the most significant issues and ideas in global ethics. The 31 chapters by a team of international contributors are structured into six key parts:

• normative theory
• conflict and violence
• poverty and development
• economic justice
• bioethics and health justice
• environment and climate ethics.

Covering the theoretical and practical aspects of global ethics as well as policy, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Global Ethics provides a benchmark for the study of global ethics to date, as well as outlining future developments. It will prove an invaluable reference for policy-makers, and is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, international relations, political science, environmental and development studies and human rights law.

1
Introduction

Darrel Moellendorf and Heather Widdows

The Handbook is the first volume to attempt comprehensively to map the current state of play of global ethics and to say something about possible futures, academically and in terms of policy and practice.

Global ethics is a discipline, field, area of study or approach that responds to the most pressing contemporary global challenges. These challenges are many and varied, and include the challenges of climate change; pressure on scarce resources (including food, clean water and aid, land and drugs); conflict, war and terrorism; health threats, such as pandemics and the depletion of effective drugs; the movement of people, goods, services and information; and, perhaps most importantly, continued poverty of the majority of the world’s population and extreme poverty of significant numbers. Global ethicists seek to respond to such challenges comprehensively and at all levels: from theory to policy to practice. Global ethicists engage in theoretical discussion about the nature of global justice and the good life, conceptions of which are necessary if we are to know what it would be for people to flourish and be respected, and for us to know when justice has, in fact, been done. In addition to developing overarching theory, global ethicists also seek to engage theoretically with the topical issues and responses, for instance, providing theories about ethical responses to particular challenges and assessing, ethically and politically, possible solutions. In this manner global ethicists are concerned directly with policy assessment, development and promotion. Likewise, global ethicists are eager to connect theory and policy to real-world practice and to impact and affect the lives of real individuals.

Given the breadth of global ethics, in terms of the topics it covers and the levels at which it works (theory, policy and practice), global ethics is necessarily multidisciplinary. It draws on moral and political philosophy, political and social science, empirical research, and real-world policy and activism. For global ethicists to engage with contemporary dilemmas they must understand the nature of the topics involved, and this requires expertise beyond the typical moral and political philosophical training of most ethicists. Accordingly, global ethicists cannot be “armchair” philosophers but must engage with experts of other disciplines – including economists, lawyers, development experts, sociologists – and be empirically informed, which means that, as well as knowing the relevant scientific and social-scientific data and theories, they often also work with practitioners, activists and policy-makers. This is demanding, as it requires far more knowledge and engagement than is standardly required of ethicists. But those who fail to do this will produce irrelevant or misguided theories, proposals and analysis. It is for this reason that the commitment of global ethics to multidisciplinarity has been termed fundamental and substantial, and not merely a contingent commitment, and it is methodologically defining of global ethics and one of its distinctive features.¹

To address contemporary global challenges The Handbook of Global Ethics brings together leading international scholars to present concise and authoritative overviews of the most significant issues and ideas in global ethics. Among the scholars who have contributed to this volume are those who have shaped, dominated and developed the areas of their specialties, as well as those who have spearheaded changes to policy and practice in response to their theories. Individually and collectively, the contributors of this volume are impressive and show just how engaged global ethicists are across the extensive field which constitutes global ethics. The contribution that these thinkers have had should not be underestimated. The hope is that global ethicists will continue to develop theories which are academically robust and discipline shaping, but which are also of policy and practice import.

The volume begins with an empirical account of globalization by Barrie Axford. This introduces the reader to the context, which gives rise to the normative discussion in the subsequent six parts. Each of these parts represents a core area of global ethics. The first part focuses on the theoretical structures within which global ethics is done and on theories from which global ethics draws. Included in this part are discussions of ethical theory, theories of justice, human rights, universalism, cosmopolitanism and gender justice. Each of the following five sections addresses a key area of global ethics. Part II is devoted to conflict and violence. It has chapters on the ethics of war, torture, humanitarian intervention and finally on nuclear proliferation and containment. Part III, concerning poverty and development, has four chapters, on poverty, development, aid and charity, and immigration. Part IV addresses economic justice, with chapters on international trade, international finance, multinational corporations, consumption, trafficking and distributive institutions. The fifth part focuses on bioethics and health justice, with four chapters on research, body part trade, reproductive rights and patenting. The sixth part of the volume addresses climate ethics, with five chapters on climate change, pollution, sustainability, biodiversity and population ethics. Each of these sections begins with an introduction, which serves to map the topic, to explore how the topic connects to wider global ethics theorizing and how it is interconnected with other topics, as well as to introduce the particular chapters in the section.

We turn now to a brief summary of Axford’s chapter. Axford begins by describing the two main understandings of globalization – globalization as interconnectivity and globalization as institutionalization – and the problems and criticisms of these positions. He suggests that whatever one’s view of the extent of globalization or the most important features of it (economic, social, cultural or political), “current signs all seem to suggest a world at once more interconnected and independent and yet in woeful turmoil.” Yet he also argues that historically there are stable long-term tendencies towards integration. To examine this complex picture Axford explores eight trends in turn, the first being that of “closer integration of the world economy.” Economic globalization is often taken as the most obvious and least contested aspect of globalization; for instance, at state level it is virtually impossible to avoid participation in the global economic system. However, as Axford points out, this is not a linear process; power has shifted over the past millennium and may well shift again. Currently notable is the significance of emerging economies to the extent that “it may not be too far-fetched to claim that for the next couple of decades emerging and developing economies will constitute the main driver of global integration and global growth”.

The second trend is the “crisis of the liberal global order.” The recent and ongoing financial crisis brings into question previous assumptions about the stability of global economic liberalism. Uncertainty surrounds not just the macroeconomic system, but also the sustainability of natural resources (addressed in detail in Chapter 29). The third trend is the current move to more flexible models for labour and production. These changes are responses both to the changing requirements of the global market, as outsourcing of production and labour becomes standard, and to the development of new technologies. The fourth trend Axford describes as the “cultural economy of speed,” by which he means the growth and reliance on global information and communication systems; systems that transform understandings of borders, time and connectivity. The fifth (and connected) trend concerns media and consumption, which is transformative of cultural connections and identities, although Axford cautions against asserting globally shared cultures. The sixth concerns the relationship between democracy and globalization. Axford suggests that, despite its ideological baggage, democracy is an index of globalization and one which is significant in considering the changes of the last few years. The penultimate trend is towards global governance. Global governance institutions, while in some ways thin institutions, are now established to the extent that it is almost impossible to imagine many actions by states without a global element (for explicit examples see Chapter 12 on nuclear proliferation; Chapter 17 on international trade; Chapter 18 on financial institutions; Chapter 26 on patents; and Chapter 27 on climate change; and most chapters demonstrate this implicitly). The final trend Axford maps concerns world society. He suggests three sub-trends that suggest a global consciousness is emerging.

In closing we would like to thank Daniel Callies for the great help that he provided in preparing the manuscript and Herjeet Marway for her stirling work in editing and proof reading the final drafts. Their efforts are very much appreciated.

Note

1 Elsewhere the key features of global ethics have been defined as being (a) global in scope, (b) multidisciplinary and (c) connecting theory and practice (Widdows 2011).

2
The Trends and Tendencies of Global Integration

Barrie Axford

At one remove globalization is a simple concept embracing two processes that are sometimes, but not always, related. These processes are interconnectivity and institutionalization. Of course, there is also the little matter of consciousness: the awareness by actors of global constraints and, as Roland Robertson (1992) rather delicately puts it, their propensity to “identify with” the global condition in one way or another. For the most part other literature concurs. Thus, John Tomlinson talks about the “complex, accelerating, integrating process of global connectivity … (a) rapidly developing and ever densening [sic] network of interconnections and interdependencies” (2003: 270). He later uses the telling phrase that global flows and structures have become “ubiquitous in everyday experience” (2007: 30). These words carry a powerful charge, reminding us of the importance of the quotidian in making contested globality.

The sense of globalization as intensive and extensive connectivity abounds and can be found in work with quite different theoretical and ideological pretensions (Held et al. 1999). Jan-Aart Scholte’s anthem to globalization as supra-territoriality is a prominent example (2005; see also Held et al. 1999), while Hardt and Negri’s treatise on Empire (2000) and Manuel Castells’s monumental trilogy on The Information Age ([1996] 2000, [1998] 2000, [1997] 2004) both traffic the image of a networked, de-centred and de-territorialized world of capitalism as a rejection of orthodox Marxism and state-centric models of international political economy. In all these accounts globalization appears as a form of intensified and increasingly extensive exchange, and or a process involving the diffusion of worldwide institutional rules and standards or cultural scripts. George Modelski and his colleagues (2008) underscore the sense of globalization as the emergence of institutions and networks of planetary scope and, crucially, point to its multidimensional character. This insight also directs us to treat globalization in all facets of social life, within and across the realms of economics, politics and culture, and not just as an exogenous force sufficient to meld all identities.

All of this is at a rather high level of generality and couched thus is quite anodyne. So too is the notion of globalization as the process by which the world is being compressed through new constructions of space and time, in David Harvey’s neat encapsulation (Harvey 1989). Yet the real charge in Harvey’s idea is that social relations and identities are being reconfigured on a world scale and that such changes result in the growth of a modal global consciousness. In light of the subject matter of this volume, it is worth noting that consciousness may breed discontent, including ethical objections and/or physical opposition to particular facets of globalization, or to the process in general.

The very idea of globalization presumes integration, and this motif is especially visible in so-called hyper-globalist accounts and in some of those conveniently summarized as transformationalist (see Held et al. 1999). To be sure, sceptical opinion remains doubtful about the world-integrative power of globalizing forces, even in the economic realm (Hirst et al. 2009), and there is now much talk of de-globalization, as global capitalism is buffeted by the extended financial and trading crisis. These days no one takes too seriously the idea that the process of global integration constitutes a neat teleology whereby borders and the identities tied to them have become nugatory, and territoriality as the organizational basis for much political and economic life is in demise. At the same time students of globalization still have trouble with the intuitively implausible notion that it is a contradictory process, one that does not even imply, let alone require, “uniformization”, in Francois Bayart’s inelegant, but still expressive description (Bayart 2007).

Caricatured and otherwise jaundiced accounts of globalization cavil at the idea of globalization as in some way indeterminate, because of the need to demonstrate homogeneity as a necessary outcome of the process. For in its absence, runs the sceptical argument, any globalization hypothesis must fail. To be sure, some critics of globalization do see an unremitting and explicitly regressive pattern of homogenization, damaging to diversity and locality, as well as being morally reprehensible when linked to patterns of deepening inequality and the failure of beyond-the-state governance to realize a more benign world order. But the balance of research findings tends to the counterintuitive and vaguely unsatisfactory conclusion that globalization implies and delivers the simultaneous production of sameness and difference.

All of which makes the notion of global integration central to the narrative about to unfold, but also one that is very difficult for the social-scientific observer. Difficult in that while it should muster as a purely empirical concept that is readable from a set of measurable indicators, it also carries a heavy normative burden. Moreover, the latter may be of greater weight in any reckoning of the impacts of globalization; especially in judgements about its progressive or regressive character. In this respect, it is not just a matter of weighing the consequences of variably intensive and extensive forms of global integration; it is also a judgement about how, or whether, globalization disrupts what Nancy Fraser (2008) calls “hegemonic frames” and, of especial interest in a book on global ethics, whether such changes alter both the quality of justice available to diverse actors and the sites at which it is meted out.

Fraser is exercised mainly by the question of how and for whom justice is served. Is another, better world of global justice possible, and is it being forged? She contends that in a period of intensive global integration, at the very least, the mapping of political space is more contested than ever and the hegemonic frame of the international system of states and national economies in some disarray. With this in mind, her own interests lie in the framing of social justice, where the issue of which mapping of political space is truly just and who counts as a bona fide subject of justice – citizens of territories or transnational “communities of risk”, as she has it – are the key questions for analysts (ibid.: 4).

These are indeed important questions, even if one does not support a transformationalist position on globalization. Current signs all seem to suggest a world at once more interconnected and interdependent and yet in woeful turmoil. We are living through a crisis that is certainly economic and increasingly one of legitimation. The United States seems trapped in political deadlock and its position as the guarantor of liberal internationalism and Western modernity feels distinctly shaky. Europe (at least the EU) is in parlous financial health and in some danger of fragmentation. China and the other BRICs are on the rise, and the balance of world economic power is undergoing a seismic shift.

The crisis, however construed, is itself a measure of the trammels of interdependence; of risks without boundaries, and thus of globalization (Beck & Sznaider 2006). Beck and Sznaider write quite convincingly about the raft of “interdependency crises” that both threaten and are the product of a more integrated world. They include the aforementioned crisis in the global financial economy, and also global warming, terrorism, pandemics and over-population. Because of these hazards – though still counterintuitively – crisis phenomena may reinforce the sense of unremitting global integration, or else highlight its effects, albeit in pathological guise. The very speed of contagion heightens the awareness of risks incurred through globalization (World Economic Forum 2011).

But in historical perspective, is the real narrative of the era actually the reverse; not epochal change and dislocation, but stability; in other words is there a secular integrative tendency, and what does that mean? To address these and other issues we need to interrogate the currents and trends in global integration more fully and begin to identify some of their normative implications. Implicit in what follows is a set of antinomies that make up the dialectic of globalization. These include the tension between networks and borders that lies at the heart of globalization as an integrative process; the playing out of convergence and divergence as forces shaping world (dis)order; the extent of stability or continuity versus evidence of dislocation; and finally, the matter of consciousness – whether the global is now the primary frame of reference for both situated and mobile actors.

The extent and intensity of global integration will be examined by way of eight trends, each of which is no more than a catch-all for a set of cognate issues and themes. The trends – each contestable – are:

• closer integration of the world economy;
• cris...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The trends and tendencies of global integration
• PART I Normative theory
• PART II Conflict and violence
• PART III Poverty and development
• PARI IV Economic justice
• PART V Bioethics and health justice
• PART VI Environmental and climate ethics
• Bibliography
• Index