The Provenance and Development of a Global Ethic

Global Virtue Ethics Review, Oct, 2000 by James Gazell

Moreover, management scholar Frances Burke suggests that consideration of the concept of a global ethic in the singular amounts to a search for the one best set of standards analogous to scientific management with its emphasis on the one best way to perform a task and to manage, regardless of time, place, and circumstances (Burke, 1997: p. 2).

Third, besides its usage in the singular, the term has positive and negative denotations. For instance, as Burke writes, an ethic is sometimes used as a management tool to deter waste, fraud, abuse, and other forms of corruption. However, it is also invoked as a decision making approach to create honest organizations (Burke, 1997: p. 4). By implication, a global ethic could then be seen either as a correlated set of proscriptions against violations of human rights, damage to the environment, and threats to world peace or as a declaration of principles to build a just world order, paralleling its use as a decision making approach to establish organizations of integrity. Josephson implies his support for a positive view of a global ethic when he invokes what he calls "Six Pillars of Character" (trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship) to describe, in absolute language, laudatory human conduct (Josephson, 1998: p. 1). He assumed that a global ethic was a byproduct of countless praiseworthy individual characteristics and actions.

Fourth, the scope of a global ethic is narrower in scope than that of a universal ethic. If it were not, then it would really be just a new name for a concept that dates from Plato and Aristotle 2,400 years ago. However, the concept of a global ethic is redolent of natural law, a set of inalienable rights (for instance, life, liberty, and property) threatened by a mythical state of nature, a Hobbesian lawless realm, from which people sought to escape through the establishment of government for protecting those rights even at the risk of autocracy (Hallowell, 1950: pp. 74-75). To advocates of a global ethic, the world is a vast state of nature jeopardizing certain fundamental rights (such as the right to be free from the fear of nuclear catastrophe, human rights, the environment, a just economic order, and tolerance of cultural diversity), from which people want to flee through the creation of international law and a panoply of worldwide institutions like the United Nations, International Court of Justice, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund to foster those rights. However, unlike Hobbes, who sought refuge in absolute government at the national level, proponents of a global ethic seek its application on a voluntary, democratic basis throughout the world (Hallowell, 1950: pp. 77-78, 83).

Fifth--and finally--the term global ethic is a concept whose advocates defend it from the stigma of ethnocentricism (cultural superiority) or moral imperialism (a desire to impose the views of one nation or set of countries on the rest of the world). Its proponents seek a set of freely agreed-upon worldwide standards, which leave room national sovereignty and diversity of cultures. A search for such an ethic sometimes encounters the criticism that it originated in the West (particularly the United States) as an effort to subjugate the East or in the North as a means of dominating the South or as a way for the Christian areas of the world to convert non-Christian peoples. The provenance of the effort, therefore, makes it suspect. However, as ethicist John Hick points out: