17261. Toward a Global Ethic
- Author:
- David Rodin
- Publication Date:
- 04-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Institution:
- Carnegie Council
- Abstract:
- We are one humanity, but seven billion humans. This is the essential challenge of global ethics: how to accommodate the tension between our universal and particular natures. This tension is, of course, age-old and runs through all moral and political philosophy. But in the world of the early twenty-first century it plays out in distinctive new ways. Ethics has always engaged twin capacities inherent in every human: the capacity to harm and the capacity to help. But the profound set of transformations commonly referred to as globalization-the increasing mobility of goods, labor, and capital; the increasing interconnectedness of political, economic, and financial systems; and the radical empowerment of groups and individuals through technology-have enabled us to harm and to help others in ways that our forebears could not have imagined. What we require from a global ethic is shaped by these transformative forces; and global ethics-the success or failure of that project-will substantially shape the course of the twenty-first century.
- Topic:
- Economics, Globalization, and Politics