-- Brief overview --
Previous moral campaigns by one religion or ideology tend to give rise to “we-they” splits, making it difficult to solve world problems. Collaboration across national and institutional boundaries, as well as religious and ideological ones, seems necessary to address the global challenges in this chapter. Generating the moral will to act across such different systems may require acknowledgment of global ethics. The UN system, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Transparency International, and the Olympics are unique expressions of an evolving global ethics. Whether such ethics are discovered or constructed, they are emerging as important to world trade, biotechnology, climate change, countering terrorism, poverty alleviation, etc.
Globalization and advanced technology allows fewer people to damage more, in less time, than ever before, hence the welfare of anyone should be the concern of everyone. Such platitudes are not new, but the consequences of their failure will be quite different in the future than in the past.
The speed at which we have begun to change the fabric of life seems beyond the ability of science and technology regulators to manage. The prevalence of government corruption, linked with organized crime and terrorism, has become a global phenomenon. Expanding surveillance technology, connected with education and communications systems and the use of universal and accurate lie detectors to counter a range of threats, will force many questions of priorities, values, and global ethics.
The increasingly interconnected world and sophisticated media reporting are making it far more difficult today for unethical decisions to go unnoticed. As a result, we are flooded with far more incidents of deplorable decisions than our current systems are able to avert. This seems to be leading to a new sense of collective responsibility. In the past, public morality was solely based on religious metaphysics, which today is constantly challenged by growing secularism, cross-cultural experiences, and global media full of violence and selfish behavior. A new basis for public morality in a globalizing world is emerging through inter-religious dialogues, new corporate ethics indexes, UN commissions, think tanks, and the many ISO standards. Others explicitly try to develop global ethics, such as UNESCO’s Universal Ethics Project, the Commission on Global Governance, and the Institute for Global Ethics. The largest gathering of national leaders in history issued the Millennium Declaration in 2000 from the UN Millennium Summit as a statement of global values. The UN Secretary-General has challenged business leaders to join the Global Compact by accepting nine principles of global ethics in decisionmaking. The Internet is allowing individuals around the world to organize themselves around specific ethical issues, becoming a new moral force on decisionmaking.
Educating children to become responsible citizens will influence adults and thus the entire population. UNICEF estimates that it would cost $7 billion per year over 10 years to educate the world.
A set of universal values or morals from all religions may not be enough to shock us out of our current behavior. Global ethics must not only correspond to the major religious morals, it should also engage both believers and nonbelievers in a new alliance. We have to find effective policies to counter corruption, encourage the will to act (including acting in the interests of future generations), control lobbying, reduce greed and self-centeredness, encourage honor and honesty, promote parental guidance to establish a sense of values, reduce the barriers to the freedom of inquiry, encourage respect for legitimate authority, support the identification and success of the influence of role models, implement cost-effective strategies for global education for a more enlighten world, and create common agreements about ethics.
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