Global Ethics: A Short Reflection on Then and Now (original) (raw)
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Justice, Sustainability, and Security: Global Ethics for the 21st Century
In this interdisciplinary volume, Heinze and a diverse group of senior scholars explore global ethics through sustainability, justice, and security. They address topics within these categories based on recent world events (BP oil spill, 'War on Terror', UN Climate Conference, for example) with an eye toward reconciling the interests of states and other global power-holders with those of individual human beings and global society as a whole. Using a variety of techniques and approaches, including applied ethics, constructivist social science, normative political theory, and field research and narrative approaches, Justice, Sustainability, and Security not only enhances our knowledge of these issues, but it teases out their moral dimensions and offers prescriptions for how governments and global actors might craft their policies to better consider their effects on the global human condition. The volume thus seeks to illustrate the interplay between the 'theory' and 'practice' of global ethics.
Global Ethics in Relation to Our Global Social Contract
2016
Human beings are today in the throes of a paradigm-shift from the early-modern paradigm and toward a fundamentally different orientation that I call ‘the holistic paradigm’. The former is based on a series of false conclusions drawn from early-modern science (the so-called Newtonian paradigm). One of these false assumptions involves this radical distinction between fact and value that was introduced into much of Western thinking as a result of this scientism. This essay examines the role of holism behind the emerging global ethics in terms of ten global ethical principles. Each of these ten principles is discussed as intrinsic to a complete set of holistic and integrated global ethical principles. Finally, the essay considers the relation of these ten principles to our global social contract.
Global ethics: Increasing our Positive Impact
Journal of Global Ethics 10, 3 (2014)
Global ethics is no ordinary subject. It includes some of the most urgent and momentous issues the world faces, such as extreme poverty and climate change. Given this, any adequate review of that subject should, I suggest, ask some questions about the relation between what those working in that subject do, and the real-world phenomena that are the object of their study. The main question I focus on in this essay is this: should academics and others working in the field of global ethics take new measures aimed at having more real-world positive impact on the phenomena they study? Should they take new measures, that is, aimed at bringing about more improvements in those phenomena, improvements such as reductions in extreme poverty and in emissions of greenhouse gases? I defend a positive answer to this question against some objections, and also discuss some of the kinds of measure we might take in an attempt to have more positive impact.
Studies in Christian Ethics, 2007
The choice of topic for the conference is a response to the acute question of whether there is a connection between 'ethics' in its specific meaning and the political task of working together and solving conflicts, which in many cases goes far beyond limited regions or states to affect the global or 'international' sphere. Discussion of the diverse phenomena of 'globalisation' makes it ever more urgent to think about our 'world' or 'globe' in terms of a political entity, whatever this entity should be or is hoped to be. This is of course not a new perspective. Any political theory or political ethics must approach the global world as a political unity to the extent that the global effects of any processes or actions are taken into account. This general understanding of unity is different, however, from P ' 1 These are some few selected contributions from the conference. A documentation of the whole conference will be available in the 'Jahresbericht 2006' of the Societas Ethica.
Global Justice: An Exegesis of Contemporary Theories
The field of global justice is rife with academic disagreement on a number of fundamental questions - “What does ‘global’ mean in this context?”, “What would justice look like?”, “Who is best placed to achieve it?”, “Is the aim of global justice to set base standards, or as Stanley Hoffman describes, “starting from what is and groping towards the “ought”” (1991)?”. This essay will show that the lack of consensus on global justice is a microcosm of schisms present in international relations (IR) perspectives. This impasse renders a universal conception of global justice untenable and infeasible. More cogently, if one cannot construct a hypothetical, coherent solution to global justice, how will it be implemented?
Act of Ethics: A Special Section on Ethics and Global Activism
Ethics, Place & Environment, 2003
Center for Humans and Nature). Our sessions were sponsored by the Qualitative Research Specialty Group, Values, Ethics and Justice Specialty Group, the Socialist Geography Specialty Group, Ethics, Place and Environment and Philosophy and Geography, for which we are very thankful. Because we utilized a modified paper format that prioritized dialogue over lecture, our audience was centrally involved. Our rooms were packed, and there are too many individuals to name, but we extend our heartfelt appreciation for your presence and participation. Quakers have a saying that no individual effort is wasted, for though it may be a drop in a bucket, the oceans are made of many drops. We are under no illusion that this is the final word on the issue of ethics and activism, with respect to the academy, to globalization or to anything else. What we are confident of, however, is that the role of scholars and activists is central to the well-being of our world. We do hope you will not only find the papers engaging and insightful, but that you will be moved to respond to them with reflections, arguments and cases of your own. Cheers, Bill Lynn.
The Third Wave of Theorizing Global Justice. A Review Essay.
Debates on global justice are flourishing. In this review article I examine three recent contributions to this debate, which, even though they differ from each other in their overall approach and normative conclusion, exemplify what might be called the third wave of global justice theorizing. Aaron James’s Fairness in Practice, Mathias Risse’s On Global Justice, and Laura Valentini’s Justice in a Globalized World belong to the third wave of theories of global justice in virtue of a combination of features: They disentangle conceptual and normative disagreements that underpinned debates between cosmopolitans and non-cosmopolitans, or statists and globalists; drawing on their refined conceptual toolkit, they develop both substantive and methodological alternatives to familiar positions; and they take these alternatives as a vantage point for thinking about what justice would require of particular aspects of the international order, sometimes in very practical terms. My discussion of the third wave proceeds in four steps. First, I shall present the key arguments and most important ideas of each book. I introduce Valentini’s coercion framework for thinking about questions of global justice, explain how James thinks of structural equity as a requirement of fairness in international trade, and present Risse’s approach of pluralist internationalism and its focus on common ownership of the earth. Second, I shall explain how each contribution exhibits at least some of the features characteristic of the third wave. On the one hand, this section explains why in spite of their differences a common label is appropriate for James, Risse and Valentini. On the other hand, it offers an account of the virtues and strengths of each approach. Third, I present what I believe is a systematic challenge to the third wave of global justice: Each way of covering the middle ground between statism and globalism comes with a particular difficulty, giving rise to what one may call a third wave dilemma. Finally, I conclude by sketching how the third wave is likely to transform the research agenda of international political theorists. Even those developing alternatives to the third wave will have to be measured by the standards it sets.