Justice, Sustainability, and Security

Global Ethics for the 21st Century

E. Heinze

• Éditeur: Palgrave Macmillan
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137322944
• Sujet: Economics
• Sous-sujet: Econometrics

Justice, Sustainability, and Security not only enhances our knowledge of these issues, but it teases out our moral dimensions and offer prescriptions for how governments and global actors might craft their policies to better consider their effects on the global human condition.

Chapter 1

Justice, Sustainability, and Security: An Introduction

Eric A. Heinze

Introduction

The importance of ethical issues in global affairs is self-evident, given the prevalence of human suffering around the world today. According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), about one billion people across the globe are living in extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1 per day, while according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), in 2009, about 25 thousand children under the age of five died each day from preventable causes related to poverty.¹ While important progress has been made in the area of “human development” in recent decades, reflecting aggregate improvements in life expectancy, education, income, and literacy, inequality between rich and poor countries continues to deepen, as it does between rich and poor individuals living in almost all of these countries.² Furthermore, environmental degradation continues to be a vitally important issue of international affairs as we continue into the twenty-first century, as the poor and disadvantaged are the most vulnerable to the effects of environmental harm. Thus, the UNDP reports that the “continuing failure to reduce the grave environmental risks and deepening social inequalities threatens to slow decades of sustained progress by the world’s poor majority—and even to reverse the global convergence in human development.”³ And this somewhat-bleak picture says nothing of the enduring problem of war and other forms of political violence. Millions have died in the conflicts in Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo, while the US-led war in Iraq and the broader “war on terror” have not only killed many thousands, but have also been accompanied by the widespread use (and increasing acceptance) of torture, targeted assassination, and created an incentive for governments to pursue ever more insidious and destructive weapons—all in the name of state security.

Yet even amidst such vast human misery, there is cause for at least cautious optimism. For a variety of reasons having to do with “globalization” and accompanying advances in technology, people in the world today are more aware of the various forms of injustice, deprivation, and insecurity throughout the globe and have organized in meaningful ways to try and alleviate such human suffering and hold those responsible for it accountable. As of 2010, there were nearly 3,400 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with consultative status with the UN, and some estimate the total number of NGOs operating worldwide at around 100,000.⁴ This vast assemblage of groups defies classification because of the enormous diversity of their origins, goals, and resources, yet very often advocate for governments to enact policies in order to achieve certain (normally more humane or “moral”) outcomes, help states and other global actors implement such policies, as well as act as “norm entrepreneurs” by mobilizing support for certain standards of morally appropriate conduct and trying to persuade states and other actors to abide by these norms.⁵ They are also playing an increasingly important role in shaping the behavior and discourse of states, as well as contributing to the emergence of a “global civil society” of groups and individuals based on shared ideas and values that transcend the particular interests of individual states.⁶ NGOs in this regard have been described as “the conscience of the world,” influencing the moral development of states and international and world society more broadly.⁷

Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that advocacy for causes that seek to promote a more just, sustainable, and secure world is the exclusive purview of non-state actors. While state governments and other global power-holders (e.g., corporations, armed groups) are frequently considered to be the cause of much human misery in the world, states and other state-based intergovernmental organizations have nevertheless also contributed to the moral development of global society. For decades now, studies have shown how sympathetic states and non-state actors have acted in concert as “transnational advocacy networks” (TANs) in order to bring about compliance with international human rights norms.⁸ Furthermore, states as well as NGOs and various UN officials, programs, and agencies, have contributed to the development of ideas and concepts with the specific aim of changing the way that we talk and think about certain international issues in order to achieve morally desirable outcomes. Ideas such as “sustainable human development,” “human security,” and the “responsibility to protect”—intensively discussed and advanced by state diplomats, UN officials, and NGOs alike—can all be thought of as broad international policy agendas informed by a strong normative commitment to certain moral principles.

These developments in the decades preceding the twenty-first century—both disheartening and promising—all speak to an ethical dimension of global politics and affairs, which is the subject of this volume. Indeed, because of these and other global developments, moral values and ethical reasoning have become increasingly important in the study and practice of international relations and global affairs. Yet the link between ethical arguments and the practical application and effects of such arguments is continuously evolving as global events influence and challenge ethical debates in both academia and the policy communities. Recent global developments therefore necessitate a fresh look at the ethical challenges that the world faces in the twenty-first century. What are the requirements and most important concerns of global ethics in light of recent events in the twenty-first century, and how do, and should, global actors respond to such requirements and concerns?

This book seeks to address these questions with a set of essays that examine ethical dilemmas and concerns that arise within the broad categories of justice, sustainability, and security, and that also explore how global actors have responded to such concerns and how they might better do so. How are we to think about global justice in the twenty-first century in light of the “unknown” injustices that accompany poverty and the complex social and moral impacts of global corporations? What is the contribution of the sustainability discourse to the ethics and practice of contemporary global environmentalism and how should we move forward toward a new agenda for climate ethics? To what extent is moral progress being made in the ongoing struggle for human security?

The chapters of this volume seek to provide answers to these important questions, though they do not claim to be exhaustive of the broad categories of justice, sustainability, or security. Rather, they seek to highlight salient concerns or topics within each, investigate the various ethical dilemmas and obligations that arise, advance ethical prescriptions, and ultimately, explore how ethical concerns about justice, sustainability, and security do and should inform the policy and practice of important global actors. Therefore, the ultimate aim of this book is to show that moral concerns have indeed influenced the recent behavior and discourse of states and other global actors, but that more is required of everyday citizens and global activists if we are to alleviate the worst global injustices, protect the global environment, and defend human and international security.

The reminder of this introductory chapter will briefly outline what we mean by the term “global ethics” in both theory and practice, and describe how ethics relates to law and politics as organizational systems of human social life. It also outlines the three main organizational themes of this volume (justice, sustainability, and security), briefly summarizes the book’s contents, and ends with some advice on how this volume may be used as both a standalone resource for scholars and researchers, as well as in conjunction with other texts on the broad topic of global ethics. In short, the essays of this volume are original studies that not only make their own individual contribution to their respective literatures, but are also suitable to supplement textbooks on global or international ethics by illustrating the interplay between the theory and practice of global ethics in light of recent developments in international affairs.

The Theory and Practice of Global Ethics

This book understands global ethics to entail normative arguments or concerns about questions of right and wrong that arise from (1) the interconnectedness and interdependence of the world’s population, and/or (2) the fact that human beings exist in diverse societies that frequently have different interests, concerns, and values. Before elaborating on this concept in detail, I must address two concerns that immediately arise in this term: What is “ethics” and how is it different from “morality,” and what does “global” mean? First, generally speaking, and while some make more of this distinction than others, this volume will use the terms “ethics” and “morality” as interchangeable to denote a concern for issues of right and wrong and how to promote “the good.” Yet I acknowledge that Ethics (upper case) is normally considered a field of inquiry, while morality normally references substantive (often purportedly universal) principles about right and wrong. In this sense, Ethics is the study of morality. I thus leave discussion of the ethics/morality distinction to others and proceed to use these terms as described.⁹

Second, the term “global” is also hotly contested, particularly in the context of “globalization” or what it means to say that we now live in a global society or community.¹⁰ This volume understands the term “global” simply as a reference to the scale at which individuals and societies are connected to, and dependent upon, one another in their everyday existence. The term “global” is also used here deliberately as a contrast to the related term “international.” In other words, international implies a more narrow scope of interactions among nation-states, whereas, as this volume will illustrate, relations among states are hardly exhaustive of world affairs, given the proliferation and influence of a variety of non-state actors, from multinational corporations (MNCs) to NGOs. Thus, this volume understands the term “global” specifically to encompass both interstate relations, as well as the relations among the constellation of non-state actors whose activities transcend international boundaries.

Returning, then, to our understanding of global ethics as entailing normative arguments or concerns about questions of right and wrong (morality/ethics) that arise from global issues, this volume sees global ethics in two different but related dimensions: an academic or theoretical dimension, as well as a more practical dimension. As such, the chapters of this volume speak to global ethics in both senses with an eye toward bridging the gap between the theory and practice of global ethics. In the academic sense, global ethics is a field of study as well as an object of study. As a field of study, Global Ethics (upper case) is an interdisciplinary field that includes Ethics as a branch of philosophy, which involves “systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior,”¹¹ as well as International Ethics as a branch of international relations (IR), which does essentially the same thing, although more self-consciously, considering the fundamentally different set of realities and dilemmas of international and global relations versus interpersonal ones.

Ethics as a branch of philosophy is normally divided into three general domains: Meta-Ethics, which more abstractly investigates the origins and meaning of ethical principles; Normative Ethics, which delineates normative arguments about which moral principles ought to govern human behavior; and Applied Ethics, which applies these moral principles to specific issues, such as abortion, euthanasia, and so on. It is within Normative Ethics that one finds the common substantive ethical theories—namely consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics—that largely animate the discourse on a variety of contemporary ethical debates. While some may consider Global Ethics to be a branch of Applied Ethics (akin to Medical Ethics, Business Ethics, M...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1   Justice, Sustainability, and Security: An Introduction
• Chapter 2   The Hardest Cases of Global Injustice: The Responsibility to Inquire
• Chapter 3   Business and Human Rights: An Insider’s Journey with BP and Beyond
• Chapter 4   Reflections on “Actually Existing Sustainability”
• Chapter 5   Beyond Durban: A New Agenda for Climate Ethics
• Chapter 6   Moral Mission Accomplished? Assessing the Landmine Ban
• Chapter 7   The Insecurity of America: The Curious Case of Torture’s Escalating Popularity
• Chapter 8   Conclusion: Toward a Global Ethics for the Twenty-First Century
• Bibliography
• Index