Ethics in an Era of Globalization

M. S. Ronald Commers, Wim Vandekerckhove

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754671954
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351938921
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This much-needed volume represents all that is new in the field of global ethics. It recognizes the emergence of the search to move beyond relativism and the study of ethical aspects of globalization, acknowledging aspects of globalization that make ethical reasoning itself a challenging task. As such the young field of global ethics is a search for new approaches and methodologies that go beyond existing ones and succeed in addressing these ethical issues of globalization. This volume presents these new developments, focusing specifically on how to re-conceive ethics in order to come to grips with ethical and political life today. It sets out an agenda for the field of global ethics, addresses the critiques and illustrates the rapprochement of global ethics. This is a valuable collection of essays that connect theoretical innovation with substantive issues in the public realm and hence is suitable for a wide audience across philosophy, politics, international relations and development studies.

PART I
What is the Task of Global Ethics?

Chapter 1

The New Global Ethics and its Three Faces

Carol C. Gould

In this chapter, I attempt to explicate the project of a global ethics, in some of its core aspects. I will begin with a consideration of what global ethics is not, that is, some common misinterpretations of what a global ethics is supposed to do. Then I will analyze the three aspects or faces referred to in the title. This reflection is intended to serve as what philosophers have called a propadeutic, in that it is explicitly preparatory and oriented to helping guide future research in this field. I will then turn in the final section to two core concepts within global ethics, namely human rights and solidarity, which in many ways run through the three faces and which I regard as crucial for the further development of the field. I will also consider the relation of these two concepts to each other. Throughout this chapter my concern is to highlight some of the difficult philosophical questions that arise in global ethics and to begin addressing some of them.

What Global Ethics is Not—Some Common Misinterpretations

The notion of a global ethics can easily be misunderstood, in the first place as implying that what we are seeking is a single ethics for everyone in the entire world. Philosophers have made us keenly aware that normative ethics and the various areas of applied ethics admit of many variants and a diversity of approaches, and so too, I suggest, does global ethics. Thus, global ethics should not be interpreted as requiring worldwide agreement on a single set of norms or moral principles.

Secondly, global ethics is not a global religion. Although many of the moral issues have also been addressed by religious thinkers, I think we need to distinguish global ethics from religion. Rather, as a part of ethics, it is properly a branch of philosophy, although it engages many other disciplines and approaches including political theory, political economy, public affairs, and international relations theory. Thus, the ethical, and more generally, the normative approaches incorporated in the concept of global ethics should be susceptible to some degree of rational justification and be supported by arguments. Even where there is appeal to feeling, this cannot involve appeals to higher authority but rather involves intersubjectively shared and well-evidenced claims about human experience.

Third, global ethics is not simply the same as international ethics, but involves normative principles that emerge from and are applied in the newer transnational or global contexts that increasingly characterize our interconnected world. Thus, the interesting area for philosophical research concerns norms for relations that are distinctively transnational, if not fully global, rather than for more traditional relations among nation-states.

Fourth, global ethics cannot be limited to principles or other sorts of ethical guidelines that apply only to individuals in their specific interactions with other individuals. Thus, global ethics includes also social ethics, which implicates the relations among associations or groups as well as individuals. In addition to the transformations in moral principles or moral reasoning for individuals that may be required then, global ethics centrally deals with global justice, cosmopolitan democracy, and other more social, political or economic normative concepts.

But fifth, and conversely, global ethics is not simply a part of political philosophy, nor can it be reduced to social and political norms. It also marks out a place for reflecting on the type of informal, interpersonal social relations that are required by globalization. One question will be whether any specifically new modes of interaction are needed or instead whether it is just a matter of a greater extension of traditional values, i.e., of the domain over which they range.

The First Face—Ethics and Globalization

The first dimension of global ethics concerns the analysis of the ethical issues that arise with globalization, as well as the transformations in traditional applied ethics that globalization may necessitate. The first of these tasks has been rather intensively investigated already in philosophy, especially within the field of international ethics or as part of business ethics or environmental ethics, though the specifically global, rather than purely international, aspects are only emerging clearly of late.

Although the ethical issues raised by globalization are quite vast, perhaps the paramount ones concern the social responsibilities of transnational corporations and more broadly questions of global justice, as well as the issue of defining global ecological responsibilities. In regard to the first of these, global corporate responsibility, it can be observed that the question of the obligations of corporations to respect human rights has been thematized, but the scope of this responsibility remains unclear. Thus Thomas Donaldson, in his classic account of moral minimums for corporations, refrains from suggesting anything more than that corporations should avoid depriving workers and others in the host countries of their rights, though in some cases they should go beyond this to prevent the deprivation of rights, e.g., by providing workers with protective goggles where necessary (Donaldson 1999). But he holds that there is no specific obligation for corporations to assist people in gaining their human rights. Yet, we may raise the question of whether the division is as neat as Donaldson proposes and whether his account is sufficiently demanding. He also addresses the difficult question of whether corporations should use the standards of the home or host country, but like most business ethicists, he leaves this unanswered beyond an appeal for practical reasoning to determine it.

In addition to these corporate social responsibility issues, economic globalization poses more sharply than previously the question of articulating the requirements of global justice in dealing with the unjust distribution of resources among nation-states, as well as the exploitative aspects of the more global forms of capitalism that have emerged. Since this topic is addressed in other chapters of this book, I will not address it here, although it is a central issue for global ethics.

The second crucial set of applied ethics issues concerns global ecological responsibilities. We can call attention here to the important work of theorists like Tim Hayward who approach global ecology in terms of the idea of human rights. While such an approach may seem surprising in view of the prevalent tendency to emphasize ecological values for their own sake or in regard to animal rights, it is apparent from accounts like Hayward’s that human rights can also provide a helpful perspective in this connection.

Reflections on Globalization and the Transformation of Applied Ethics

We can go on to ask whether traditional applied ethics need to be changed in view of the development of increasingly global interconnections among people in economic, technological, and political contexts. While ethicists have begun to address some of the specific issues that in this new situation—e.g., the previously mentioned issue of the contrast in business expectations in a host vs a home country or the difficulty in imposing any regulations on the internet with its global reach, or the new groups of stakeholders that need to be taken into account, or the role of collective responsibility where the agents are now transnational—to my knowledge there have been few reflections on the basic principles and categories of applied ethics in this new context and specifically whether the traditionally-recognized ones require serious transformation. Yet it is becoming increasingly apparent that leading ethical approaches—rights-based, consequentialist, and communitarian views, along with the lower-level guidelines to which they give rise, confront unexpected difficulties when put into this increasingly global perspective, with new networks across borders that may render problematic the frameworks, rules, and practices that were developed primarily for relations among individuals within nation-states. I will suggest that, in an interesting way, human rights perspectives may fare better than consequentialist or communitarian ones in this new situation.

In one sense, the need for a reformulation of global ethics is trivially true—namely, inasmuch as there are new issues within this domain, for example, outsourcing, or again, divergent cultural expectations, e.g., regarding the acceptability of bribery in business. Yet, I would suggest that beyond this the impact of globalization may engage the principles used in applied ethics themselves. In one reading, this may also not engender much interest, if one has in mind lower-level guidelines derived from fundamental ethical principles, e.g., the idea of informed consent in medical ethics as a specification of the respect for persons characteristic of Kantian deontological views. However, I want to propose—or at least consider—something a little more radical here: namely, that the basic approaches that have governed applied ethics may themselves require reformulation.

In order to see this, it is necessary to back up for a moment in order to consider the status of theoretical approaches as they function in applied ethics. In the standard view, as presented by Richard DeGeorge among others, basic ethical principles are regarded as unaffected by practice. Thus DeGeorge writes,

If general ethical theories of the standard kinds are correct, they are not dependent on particular circumstances, even though one must consider particular circumstances in applying them. But utilitarianism and Kantianism do not depend on particular circumstances for their defense. (DeGeorge 2002: 458)

I would not follow DeGeorge in regarding these fundamental ethical approaches as being wholly independent of practice, implying that they exist sub specie aeternitatis. Rather, my own view is that while these approaches do have some universalistic dimensions, they nonetheless emerge historically and are partly dependent on social practices.

In terms of the foundational approach to applied ethics developed by Beauchamp and Childress in their classic work Principles of Biomedical Ethics, we might say that DeGeorge tacitly appeals in the passage above to the model of ethical reasoning that they call deductivist or the covering precept model, where moral judgments are held to be deduced from precepts or rules that cover it (Beauchamp and Childress 1994: 14). Beauchamp and Childress argue instead that moral reasoning proceeds inductively as well as deductively (Beauchamp and Childress 1994: 17), and they too argue for a dialectical relation between theory and practice, or what they come to see in later editions of their book as an application of Rawls’s idea of reflective equilibrium in this context. In such a coherentist approach, as they call it, one begins with considered judgments and goes back and forth with the theoretical principles that can guide and refine them (Beauchamp and Childress 1994: 23–6). These authors also follow Henry Richardson in emphasizing the importance of specifying norms for concrete situations, along with balancing the various norms involved (Beauchamp and Childress 1994: 28–37). DeGeorge does in fact recognize a role for such specification of norms when he turns to business ethics itself. Thus he observes that it “necessarily depends heavily for its content on the structures that define business and in which business operates” (DeGeorge 2002: 458). But the question I am raising takes this specificity further and asks whether globalization as a powerful contemporary phenomenon has implications for these principles of applied ethics themselves.

The consideration of the impact of globalization suggests some new foci and interpretations for existing normative frameworks. For one thing, it is apparent that considering the consequences of decisions and policies on those affected by them at a distance requires considering the effects of these policies on people from diverse cultural backgrounds. And most basically, it suggests that it is no longer possible to disregard these remote consequences of actions or policies as the philosopher J.J.C. Smart believed, whether these consequences are interpreted temporally or spatially. In a famous passage in his essay in Utilitarianism For and Against, Smart proposed that the situation is analogous to casting a stone in the waters of the pond, where the waves even out at a distance. He wrote,

We do not normally in practice need to consider very remote consequences, as these in the end approximate rapidly to zero like the furthermost ripples on a pond after a stone has been dropped into it. (Smart and Williams 1973: 33)

But does it in fact make sense to suggest that we can often leave out of account the remote consequences of an action or decision, especially in regard to globalization and its consequences? For here, economic decisions and actions, especially of global corporations with regard to e.g., outsourcing or foreign direct investment, along with the political actions and social policies of nation-states, have crucial impacts on those at a distance and on their life chances. And of course, there are the environmental impacts, not only on presently existing individuals (where even these impacts can often not be fully anticipated), but even more crucially, the effects on future generations. Accordingly, although not a utilitarian theory per se, stakeholder theory likewise comes up against the problem of the assessment of consequences and the impacts of decisions, actions, and policies on people who live at a distance, where these effects can clearly not be disregarded as Smart had (seemingly naively) hoped. Interestingly, we may add that Smart himself recognized that the unknowability of the course of future technological advancement makes utilitarianism very difficult to apply (Smart and Williams 1973:64).

I have suggested elsewhere (Gould 2004: ch. 10) that if the needs and interests of stakeholders at a distance are to be considered, it is necessary for concerned managers and others to find ways to actively solicit their input rather than simply considering these interests on their own without hearing from them in some way. Further, to the degree that managers and others give thought to the needs and interests of remotely situated people, I have argued that they need to attend to the basic human rights that are at stake and not only to rights as traditionally construed within a given nation-state context. These human rights include not only certain fundamental civil and political rights but also basic economic and social rights as well.

Beyond this, where genuinely cross-border issues are at stake, it may be necessary to devise modes of democratic participation in decisions that extend across traditional nation-state boundaries. The Internet is often pointed to as providing crucial help in this enterprise and it is promising in this respect. But there are well-known problems with just distribution of access to the Internet (the so-called “digital divide”), along with the potential for manipulation. as well as increased threats to privacy of these new uses of networking. Clearly, too, the Internet and the social and political networks that make use of it, cut across the bounded communities with which most communitarian approaches have operated. New communities are created in this process, where these are potentially more intercultural and transnational than earlier ones (Gould 2004, 2007a).

The discussion of international ethics poses the sharp requirement of respect for cosmopolitan human rights. But phenomena such as global terrorism suggest the normative relevance not only of human rights but also of empathy and solidarity, both in understanding what is ethically wrong about terrorist acts and in attempting to eliminate the conditions that may give rise to them (Gould 2004). More generally, in international contexts, care cannot be restricted to those near to us. New theories of the extension of care and empathy to those at a distance need to be devised, with the understanding that it will not be possible to restrict this to traditional models of mothering or nurturance, which are suitable for particular others standing to us in close personal relationships (Gould 2006, 2007b). In addition, of course, the role of democracy is increasingly relevant in this area of international ethics, and not only in the form of liberal democracy but in more substantive and empowering interpretations.

We can summarize these and related new directions for appli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: What Is the Task of Global Ethics?
• Part II: Is Global Ethics Possible?
• Part III: How Can We “Do” Global Ethics?
• Index