Nousland

Conceptual Problems of a Global Ethic Zhenming Zhai - (Zhongshan University)

Largely as a result of the “Declaration of the Religions for a Global Ethic” master-minded by Hans Küng, the concept of a “global ethic” has seized the attention of various intellectual communities in the world.  Though academic philosophers in the west may be well aware that a geographically defined “global ethic” is not equivalent to a “universal ethic” as philosophically understood, some proponents of a so-called “global ethic” have shown a tendency to confuse or conflate the two distinct concepts. In this paper, I will attempt to clarify how “global” does not entail “universal” in a philosophical sense, and illustrate why a substitution of philosophical reasoning in ethics with religious consensus is a misleading approach. Finally I will demonstrate why an appeal to religions for a ground of ethic will lead to either dogmatism or relativism, which is against the will of its initiators. My views demonstrated here might be taken for granted by many academic moral philosophers, but could be surprising to most of proponents of the religion-based “global ethic” or to some social scientists who are not familiar with the philosophical tradition of practical reason.

1.      Practical Reasoning and Universality

Since the beginning of philosophy, philosophers have tried to look for the universal principles from which criteria for telling the right from wrong can be derived. Such kind of philosophical endeavor implies a conviction that certain so-called “moral” rules actually held by the people of any particular tradition at any point of history could be invalid. That is, it’s possible that the majority of the people of any time and any place could hold invalid moral beliefs. There could be cases that what are held to be “right” are wrong, and what are held to be “wrong” are right. But how can we know what is right and what is wrong if not consulting the majority for their opinion?

 Philosophers believe that human rationality is a possible ground for a final verdict in matters of moral decision. Given a collection of alleged moral rules, we are capable of separating the valid ones from the invalid by using our reason in a methodic way. Such a way of using reason for the sake of deciding the right kinds of action or right action in a particular situation is called “practical reasoning,” and the discussion of issues pertaining to practical reasoning is usually called “moral philosophy.” As for ethics in the philosophical sense, it’s the actual use of practical reasoning by which to find the first valid moral principle and then the procedure for deriving valid rules of action from the principle. As we know, Kant’s deontological ethics and Mill’s utilitarian ethics are the two most respected examples of practical reasoning in moral philosophy and ethics.

Despite their actual disagreement on the first principle from which all moral rules are derived, philosophical ethicists do assume the common position that human rationality is the only means to reach a universal ethic.  This is so because universality is not a matter of incidental consensus as a contingent event, but a matter of self-evident necessity as a logical status.

Of course, such a philosophical conviction is not just a propensity of philosophers. As has been clearly demonstrated in the works of Habermas, Apel, and myself[1], no matter who makes a moral claim, it’s always meant to be a validity claim. A validity claim is a universal claim, that is, a claim whose validity does not depend on the particularity of the person who makes the claim. Thus anybody making an ethical claim is giving herself the burden of arguing for the claim’s validity by referring to impersonal reasons, that is, the burden of redeeming the claim by communicative rationality, as Habermas calls it. Suppose somebody claims: “Hitler was morally wrong in killing innocent Jews,” and then right away adds: “I just happened to feel that way, though, and everybody has an equal right to feel the opposite.” In such a case, we could legitimately accuse him of misusing the words “morally wrong” because an ethical claim as a validity claim does not allow for an opposite claim to hold. When we claim that X is wrong, we are responsible for demonstrating that it’s illegitimate to claim that X is right, no matter who makes the claim and in what circumstances. If the demonstration has finally succeeded, then the claim is redeemed as part of a universal ethic, which is based on communicative rationality. If communicative argumentation does not lead to a successful demonstration of a validity claim, then the claim is not redeemed, and no universal ethic is established.

The fact is that people do make diverse ethical claims about the same event.  That is, when people make supposedly universal ethical validity claims, they often fail to reach a universal agreement. People often attribute such a disagreement to cultural diversity, but such kind of disagreement occurs not only between people of different cultures, but also down to the individual level through every level in between.  No matter how we define “culture,” we will find that culture has no special significance in understanding ethical disagreement. Differences in age, gender, educational background, race, or any element of personal life may as well contribute to such a disagreement. The question now is: “How do we relate such a fact of disagreement to our understanding that all ethical claims are supposed to be universal claims?”

Some would draw the conclusion that a rationally established universal ethic is impossible from such a fact of actual disagreement. From a purely logical point of view, such a conclusion is certainly one of the possible options. That is:

1.      It’s impossible to establish a universal ethic in principle.

But there are many more options that allow for a universal ethic in principle despite the actual disagreement. If we take the opposite of option one as the second option, then we at least have the following alternatives that are compatible with the factual ethical disagreement:

2.      It’s possible to establish a universal ethic and:

2.1 Nobody has succeeded in doing it so far.

2.2     Somebody has established a universal ethic but some people have not recognized it.

2.3     Some people in society are unable to understand a universal ethic even if somebody has established it.

Therefore, we don’t have to follow MacIntyre and many sociologists and anthropologists in declaring the impossibility of a universal ethic in face of the disagreement on rules. Logical positivists claimed that reason could contribute nothing to the establishment of normative principles, and Max Weber followed the same line of thought. But the revival of normative philosophical approach since John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice has left behind the nihilistic attitude toward the possibility of reason-based universalistic ethics.

A universal ethic is a universally justified ethic, that is, it must be based on a system of philosophical ethics. Rules themselves are incapable of universality unless they are derived through a process of philosophical reasoning. Until somebody has unambiguously proven that philosophical reasoning is unable to establish the universality in question, we, as moral philosophers, will continue to look for it if we want to do moral philosophy at all.

2. Universal Ethics vs. a Global Ethic

       Whatever we might think of the possibility of a rationally established universal ethic, we must not confuse it with the so-called “global ethic” as proposed by Hans

Küng and other theologians of our time. The concept of a global ethic is based on the observation that many people in the world today do not seem to act in accordance with a common code of ethic, and that seems to be the cause of many avoidable conflicts. This is about how people act, not about what people believe as discussed above. Assuming such an observation is accurate, what can we make of it? If we take the second option that a rationally established universal ethic is possible, at least the following additional hypotheses are compatible with the option:

2.4      Some people have accepted the same (universal) ethic intellectually but they are unwilling to follow the ethic in action.

2.5      Some people have accepted the same (universal) ethic intellectually and are trying to follow the ethic in action, but their willpower is not strong enough to overcome their tendency to act in an unethical way.

2.6      Some people have accepted an invalid ethic but mistaken it for a universally valid ethic and act accordingly.

2.7      Some people believe that ethics is a matter of personal taste and thus there is nothing to agree or disagree on in matters of ethics so they just follow their arbitrary “ethic” in action.

2.8      Some people believe that the idea of an ethic is a result of human fantasy and thus dismiss it altogether, and disregard ethical considerations in their action.

These are hypothetical factual descriptions about people’s beliefs and actions. As has been widely accepted, no factual statements about what could be the case can alone logically lead to value statements about what ought to be or what we ought to do. Therefore, if anybody thinks that the truth-value of any or all of these factual statements can allow him to draw the conclusion that universally valid ethical principles pertaining to “ought” are impossible, he is illegitimately ignoring the logical gap between the factual “is” and the evaluative “ought.”

       Due to the triumph of the instrumental rationality and the decline of evaluative rationality since nineteenth century, the sociological or anthropological way of using the word “values” has prevailed.  The philosophical attempt to look for the rationally justifiable values, independently of what the majority of people within any particular culture actually hold to be values, has been largely disregarded by the public, the media, and most of social scientists.

       In the west, however, university professors in a philosophy department still know that to teach a course in ethics is to lead the students to see how great moral philosophers try to establish universal normative principles and derive specific rules from those principles.  It’s hardly imaginable that a philosophy professor would just report what people in different parts of the world, or simply what most people in their own nation, actually hold to be right or wrong, good or evil, just or unjust, etc.  No professor would be as ignorant as to call Kantian deontological ethic “German ethic,” or Mill’s Utilitarianism “British ethic” in a philosophical sense. Their ethics are both taught as competing universal ethics, though a final verdict is not usually reached as to which is the truly universally valid one, if any.

       Admittedly, Hans Küng’s intention of establishing a “better global order” is a noble one, and his effort to formulate a global ethic on the basis of a minimal fundamental consensus among major religions should be encouraged. But such an attempt, regardless of its outcome, has little to do with a universal ethic as philosophers understand it. As a further illumination of the distinction between “universal” and “global” on the one hand, and between fact and value in this particular case on the other hand, we can pay attention to the following two contrasts.

First, the word “global” refers to a desired factual unity of things of different geographical regions, whereas “universal” refers to a theoretical intersubjective recognition of the first principle and rules derived from the principle. Therefore, a universal ethic as such would be a result of practical reasoning, while a global ethic would be, as Hans Küng implies, a result of survey of the facts about precepts and practices of the world’s religions. In other words, a supposed global consensus on ethical issues is a factual discovery through inductive investigation, rather than a conclusion reached by using communicative rationality.

Secondly, a universal ethic includes principles that define the ultimate standards of good life, and it does not allow us to assume that we know what is good and what is evil at the beginning before we go through a process of practical reasoning. But a notion of a global ethic already assumes that we know what a good life is (as revealed by God?) and we need only to set up rules to realize the pre-given goals. In such a conceptual framework of a global ethic, we are supposed to have already known what is good and what is evil and thus known what “a fundamental crisis” is, before we have the proposed global ethic. As we can see in the “Declaration,” arrays of putative evils have already been identified as facts supporting the view that we need a global ethic.

       In light of these two contrasts, we can raise a serious question for the proponents of a global ethic: “Does the religious consensus on ethical issues already exists among different religions?” If the answer is a “yes,” as the declaration itself suggests, then there is no need to make such a declaration because a global ethic was already there. If the answer is a “no,” then people who did not share the same ethical views before the declaration would remain unbounded by the proposed “global ethic” unless they are forced to the commonwealth, since the survey to begin with did not include them.  If the proposed global ethic is forced to the people who do not accept it voluntarily, then the ethic already violates its own tenet that it should appeal to “the inner orientation, the whole mentality, the ‘hearts,’ of people” as stated in the declaration. Even if the consensus among religious people were reached, what about those non-religious people? Why do they have to accept a code of action based on what they do not believe at all?

       Therefore, if we cannot find a rational ground that can prove to be self-evident to every rational person, we can hardly see how a declaration of an alleged global ethic can accomplish much of what its initiators have envisioned.

3. Religion, Philosophy, and Ethics

              In the West, outside the philosophical circle, there is an overwhelming tendency to take religion as the final ground of ethics.  But as has been shown, grounding ethics in religion is impossible. At least, we know that non-religious people are as capable of ethical conduct as religious people. Some philosophers such as Nietzsche and Sartre even believe that, not pointlessly, religion is by nature against the real sense of human dignity since it degrades humans to mere tools for implementing alleged God’s plan and rids us of final responsibilities. Here we need not to discuss such a radical anti-religious view. At the bottom line, we need only to see that universality cannot be based on faith or any kind of non-intellectual authority. If it can be based on anything at all, that would be reason or reason-aided conscience.

Admittedly, an alleged global ethic proposed by theologians such as Hans Küng would presumably contain precepts that largely overlap with any imaginable rationally established universal ethic. But we have good reasons to suspect that rules concerning human affairs such as sexual conduct, marriage, as found in any religious scripture, can be rationally justified.

In a global ethic proposed by Hans Küng, there could be a rule, for example, against extra-marital sex (see his earlier work, Projekt Weltethos). But it’s hard to imagine that a rationally justified universal ethic would contain such a rule. As we know, there is a model of marriage in which the involved wife and husband agree to have an open relationship, in which both sides are each allowed to have other sex partners under certain specified conditions. Given the fact that sexual intercourse can nowadays be done without leading to a reproductive outcome, what could be the rational ground for rejecting such kind of marriage?  There doesn’t seem to be such a ground.

Another suspect in the proposed global ethic is the positive Golden Rule upheld in the Declaration: “What you wish done to yourself, do to others.”  This rule seems to encourage us to make decisions for others according to our own preferences, and do the same things for others as if others always had the same preferences as ours. But as Berlin and other liberal thinkers have convinced us, such a pattern of conduct based on a concept of promoting positive freedom, is a kind of violation of human autonomy, and may lead to some kind of dictatorship if practiced in politics. If so, we can hardly imagine that a rationally justified universal ethic would include such a positive Golden Rule.

    The rule of honesty does seem to be rationally justifiable if any rule is. We are glad that honesty is a rule in any major religion and certainly in a proposed global ethic. But honesty in its full sense certainly includes intellectual honesty in the Socratic sense: if you do not have sufficient reason to believe something, then acknowledge your ignorance. Religion, as we know it, appeals to the belief in the existence and the benevolence of a Supreme Being regardless of our lack of rational ground for such a belief, and celebrates it in the name of “faith.”  Pascal’s wager on the faith in God seems to be a rational one, but it’s based on the calculation of the possible consequence of each option, and in such a calculation, believing something false is not regarded as a loss in itself. In his bet, the final criterion for choosing one’s belief is utility, not intellectual honesty. The ethical rule of honesty, however, is based on the acknowledgement of the intrinsic value of honesty itself. Therefore, the rule of honesty appears to conflict with the religious practice based on faith.

       There have been theories of ethics that attempt to ground the ultimate sanctity of ethical demands in the alleged fact that they represent the commands of God. However, since Plato’s time philosophers have been clear about the philosophical problem involved in such an account of ethics. As most of students of philosophy have learned, in Plato’s dialogue, Euthyphro, a dilemma about the relationship between God’s command and piety is discussed. The analysis of the dilemma can easily be applied to any version of the divine command theory: Are good kinds of human conduct good because God makes them good as He wishes, or does God wish us to do them because they are good independent of His wishes?  On the first option, the choice of God creates goodness and value. If so, it would be pointless to praise God since whatever he wishes is good by definition, and saying “God is good” amounts to saying “God is whatever he wishes to be.”  This only shows God’s absolute freedom and power, not God’s benevolence. On the second option, there would be reasons that define the goodness and value independently of God’s wishes.  If so, God’s command would not be the final explanation of the source of goodness and value.  Either way, divine command theories cannot account for the possible validity of an ethic.

       The dilemma arises whenever an extra-rational authority is supposed to be the ground of an ethic: the sage king, the tradition, the parent, the written text, the church, the theologian, the government, the legal system, etc.  Consider the pluralistic nature of all these possible kinds of authority, our dependence on any of them in matters of ethics would lead to either dogmatism or relativism: dogmatism if we just pick one authority and totally disregard others in theory and in practice; relativism if we acknowledge the plurality in theory or in both theory and action.  Dogmatists would say: “Only my authority is a real authority who knows the complete set of ethical truths, other alleged authorities are just scandals.”  Relativists would say: “I know those people brought up in a different circumstance could have been taught a completely different ethic, so I have no problem with people holding different moral beliefs. Whatever they believe, they are as right as I am.”  As a matter of fact, philosophically uneducated people nowadays tend to swing between dogmatism and relativism. Suppose that you think that religion is the ground of ethics. If you are personally committed to a particular code of ethic from a religion, you are doomed to be a dogmatist; if you are not so personally committed, you will be a relativist. This is so even if an alleged global ethic based on world’s religions has been declared. Clearly, advocators of a global ethic do not intend to have either of these outcomes.

              In sum, even though theologians may play an active role in promoting a better global order, philosophers, qua philosopher, should follow a philosophical, instead of theological, way of doing moral philosophy and ethics. To do philosophy is not to promote ideas in view of what our world is supposed to need, but is in part to reflect on the rational ground for all fundamental assumptions, the assumption of need included.  If philosophy were as impotent as the postmodernist believes it to be, then we would rather give up the idea of universal ethic. For the sake of intellectual honesty, we don’t want to use a misleading label of “universal ethic” on an alleged global ethic.

[1] See Chapter 2 of my The Radical Choice and Moral Theory, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994.

Just Linkage: A Realistic Utopian Proposal for Promoting Global Labor Justice Christian Barry and Sanjay Reddy (The Commissioning Editor of Ethics & International Affairs at the Carnegie Council, Assistant Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University)

This essay presents a proposal for linking trade and labor standards. It argues that violations of agreed international labor standards can, in the appropriate institutional setting, provide solid grounds for invoking trade sanctions. It consists of three sections. The first section develops a proposal for linking respect for labor standards with the right to participate in international trade. We discuss the content of the appropriate labor standards, the conditions under which linkage would be justified, and the best forms that such linkage might take. We argue that implementing our proposal would improve working conditions and living standards in poor countries while also expressing an appropriate attitude towards seriously unjust labor practices. Our linkage proposal is thus defended in terms of both its consequential efficacy, and the importance of respecting the agency and integrity of those who participate in trade and other forms of economic interaction. The second section creates a typology of the arguments that international economists and policymakers have offered (or could plausibly offer) against linkage. We show that although these arguments articulate legitimate concerns, they rest on unwarranted assumptions concerning the realism and practicability of linkage, show an impoverished understanding of the forms that linkage might take, and generally neglect the importance of non-consequentialist values in the comparative assessment of institutions that facilitate trade and other commercial activities. The third section suggests some general lessons that emerge from the debates concerning linking trade and labor standards, not least the importance of reflecting more imaginatively on questions of institutional design and reform at the international level.