The Provenance and Development of a Global Ethic

Global Virtue Ethics Review, Oct, 2000 by James Gazell

      It cannot count as a legitimate criticism that the search for a global
   ethic has originated in the West; for it had to originate somewhere! And
   the West probably contains more abundantly than elsewhere the practical
   resources required to launch and promote the process. But it would be a
   ground for legitimate criticism if the search remained around our Western
   contribution to it. The challenge is now to find ways of opening the
   discussion up on an equal basis within all the great traditions of the
   earth (Hick, 1997: p. 3).

Converging Forces

Political

The first force providing impetus for the establishment of a global ethic was political grounded in a newly found widespread sensitivity toward human rights. The search for a global ethic began mainly as a reaction to World War II, although more broadly it was a general revulsion against two such conflicts in less than a half century, following a comparatively peaceful nineteenth century. The massive casualties, genocide, and widespread destruction caused especially by the latter war, resulted in the establishment of what many hoped would be a permanent worldwide structure for peace and justice: the United Nations (UN) in 1945. One of the new organization's first preoccupations was human rights whose delineation would serve as a partial framework for an eventual global ethic. Respect for such rights was generally considered essential as a way of reducing the prospect of a third world war, which might be fought with what were then called atomic (now nuclear) weapons, and of eliminating a concomitant, mortal threat to the survival of the human race. In 1946 the UN created the Commission on Human Rights, composed of nearly one-third of its membership (eighteen nations out of fifty-eight). The new commission began to work on a draft of a document that would describe and advocate human rights for all, a worldwide charter. The draft became the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by forty-eight of the UN's members in 1948 ("Universal Declaration of Human Rights: a Magna Carta for All Humanity (Press Kit)," 1997: pp. 1-2).

The Declaration consisted of two subdivisions: a preamble and a set of thirty articles. The former emphasized that people possess an inherent dignity (or worth) simply by virtue of their humanness and therefore fundamental, inalienable rights. The latter enumerates a series of individual, political rights, which read as if they were mostly an elaboration on the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment (particularly, the due process and equal protection clauses) of the United States Constitution. But the Declaration, in addition to its numerous political articles, also contained a few economic ones, foreshadowing broad interest by the 1980s in a highly developed component of an overall global ethic. These provisions espoused rights to humane working conditions and compensation above a subsistence level for a decent standard of living--no more slave labor. The Declaration sought to sketch a vision of what the world should seek to become over decades and inspired the creation of more than sixty human rights documents that together constitute an International Bill of Rights ("Universal Declaration of Human Rights," 1998: pp. 1-5).