Global Ethics

Lecture 1: Introduction •

Why study global ethics?

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What does ‘global ethics’ mean?

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And what is meant by the politics of global ethics?

Meanings of global ethics shift, and it often means different things for different people. Global ethics may mean treating everyone in the world equally and – concomitantly – striving to equalise the life chances of all human beings no matter what their country, race, relgion, or gender. Global ethics may involve an effort to globalise certain ethical value like justice, democracy, of sympathy. Or global ethics is sometimes understood in literal terms, as the ‘ethics of the globe’ or the globosphere, i.e global ethics as a synonym for environmental ethics. With so many meanings attached, it might be supposed that the academic study of global ethics will struggle to get as far as definition. One possible site from which to begin, is to look at how ‘talk’ of global ethics has proliferated in media, policy and academic discourses. The former head of the IMF Horst Kohler neatly quipped that ‘a global world needs global ethics’. In response to the credit crunch & financial turmoil, Gordon Brown has been adamant that the problem is now ‘global’, that we need a form of global regulation to ensure stable forms of finance in the future. There is a long tradition of tying global ethics to the market: for different reasons Adam Smith and Karl Marx argued that the socio-economic interdependence fostered by capitalism would mean a shift in morality. For instance, Smith spoke of how we are ‘unavoidably side by side’, an observation that has been taken on by liberal economists and political theorists alike to suggest that responsibilities extend beyond the immediate circles of family, clan, or nation to involve the people we buy our coffee from, for instance.

Extending from these initial observations, it is also clear that much of the important debate over global ethics has emerged on the back of debates about globalisation. On the one hand, as liberals and social democrats suggest, a global market economy brings with it the kinds social interconnections that present issues for conceiving of effective regulatory arrangements. Many authors have suggested that ethical values deduced within the confines of the nation state, need to be reconstructed on a global scale. On the other hand, the extant politics of globalisation has born witness to an ethical debate, which many liberals had not anticipated. By this I mean to suggest, in the political reactions to globalisation we see, a number of live questions about whether globalisation can be legitimated via piecemeal reforms of global governance? What is the politics of globalisation? An understanding of politics and the political is central to this and many other modules at Warwick. Some understand politics as located in the state primarily, others look to how power operates in society more broadly. In what follows, I focus on a view of politics as contest and contestability and how this affects the discussion of global ethics. Many cite reactions to the WTO Ministerial in Seattle as a turning point in the policy discourse of globalisation. Major states, businesses and economic journalists had successfully pushed for the ongoing liberalisation of the world economy. They did this on the basis that global liberalisation would foster greater economic growth. To that extent the neo-liberalism of the Washington Consensus can be understood as an ethical discourse. However, in Seattle a number of largely unconnected organisations, labelled as anti-globalisation, engaged in violent protests against neo-liberal global governance. The groups involved at Seattle are now refereed to as NGOs, global civil society, or networks. The key importance of these groups how they suggest alternative and often critical ideas in global politics. To this extent, I understand this particular area as the basis of an emerging global conversation about global ethics. Sometimes the conversation is good natured and convivial, as with the inclusion of campaigns like Amnesty on human rights, and Make Poverty History on development. Sometimes the conversation is

fractious and oppositional. This can involve direct action against MNCs and it can sometimes involve terrorism. I would argue that al Quaeda is a quintessentially global organisation. It is a trans-national network engaged in direct confrontation with the perceived dominance of Western values & interests in global politics.1 In summary then, the politics of global ethics can be understood as an emerging conversation about the content and boundaries of life. In principle, many advocates of global ethics believe that they are removing the boundaries to ethical discourse, however, as resistance to globalisation suggests and as we will see, boundaries between right and wrong, us and them, are normally retained. In reality the politics of global ethics spans academic and policy debates and so one task of this course is to retain a sensitivity to the subtle interconnections between knowledge about ethics and the practice of ethics. And finally, perhaps the overriding cautionary note is that – on this course at least – global ethics should be understood as an open conversation, a space for asking questions, engaging with ambivalence, becoming conscious or our personal and collective limits. The reason why it is important to study the politics of global ethics is because it is a potentially imaginative and hopeful space for engaging with difficult questions such as the fact that everyday between 30 and 60 thousand people die due to poverty related illnesses, or the way that decisions made in one part of he world are often unaccountable to people on the receiving in end in another. It is important to study these questions because the way we think about the world underpins the way we behave towards it. It is all very well to retain a normative belief in human welfare, but if the only conceptual tools we have for achieving such welfare is a free market economics textbook and the UN, then we are in trouble.

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A theme we will explore throughout the course is the suggestion that globalisation was always, to different extents, a securitised discourse. Economic co-operation is often synonymous with military cooperation, witness the close relationship between the US and Japan and the emerging relationship between the US and China.

Ok, so (broad) introduction out of the way, lets just introduce the three points to the more academic discussion in more detail: globalisation, ethical theory, politics and ‘the political’. Globalisation Globalisation studies is well established if diverse & internally contested terrain. It spans the social sciences and to that extent it is always-already inter- or trans-disciplinary. •

Three waves of the debate: hyper, sceptic and transformationalist.

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A fourth wave? Constitutive theorists address how particular discourses of globalisation frame social reality in particular ways (Hay, Rosamond, Watson). For instance, assumptions about the perceived natural tendencies of ‘global markets’ are often used to justify the liberalising tendencies of nation states. Moving on somewhat, these same perceived natural tendencies of global markets are now being invoked to justify massive state interventions in the financial markets.

Many theorists of globalisation have proceeded with an explicit or implicit normative dimension to their work. Indeed, globalisation theory has been associated with the rebirth of cosmopolitan thought in recent decades. •

Neo-liberalism: writers like Hayek equated freedom with liberty from interference, understood the price mechanism as best way of organising society, writers like Friedman took this on to stand as a model for the organisation of all social relations. The mantra of small states and free markets was ultimately founded on strongly ethical beliefs.

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Hirst and Thompson: major book ‘Globalisation in question’ undermined the strong thesis of globalisation by emphasising both the limited nature of global capital flows which are concentrated in the US, Europe and Japan. Also re-

animated old Listian ideas about the importance of the state in promoting the economy through subsidies and protection. The ethical state? •

Held: a transformationalist, idenfies important role for the state but suggests that there is a reconstruction of governance above, below and regional to the state. Cosmopolitan democracy based on need to ensure maximal accountability of globalisation to individuals.

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Scholte: associates globalisation with increasing importance of supra-territorial social relations. Provides an empirical and normative critique of territorialism as an organising framework for addressing social reality. Normative implication is that the ways in which major social structure like production, knowledge, trade, community and governance needs to be fundamentally re-thought as an academic and political exercise.

Ethics In many ways ethics is almost by definition a global discourse. In theory at least, broad signifiers like human rights, justice, democracy, etc. do not recognise arbitrary distinctions between people and many ethical theorists have been almost parochial in their disdain for parochialism. However, the academic study of ethics which has been couched in terms of political theory has previously located within a state based field only very recently attempting to ‘globalise’. •

Rawls: conceived of justice within the state, but did ultimately produce a conception of international justice which suggested that universal justice was impossible, that we should respect peoples’ right to structure their own internal affairs, but where possible should encourage respect for liberal freedoms like free speech, protection from persecution, religious choice, etc. etc.

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Cosmopolitan Justice: Beits and Pogge take issue with the first point of Rawls and attempt to extrapolate a conception of international justice. They use global interdependence and arguments based on the concept of harm, i.e. that rich

nations harm poor people by benefiting from imperialism and global capitalism to justify global redistribuitive justice. •

Deliberative Global Governance: hailing from the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, deliberative global governance is a emerging discourse of ethical theory which attempts to articulate how a decentred and multi-perspectival account of global politics might foster pluralism and fairness in global governance.

However, there is also a long tradition of thought about ethics which looks at the ontological questions of being and ‘being with’, of self and other, which might offer profitable route into the discussion of global ethics. For post-structuralists, ethics is not something that can be ‘added on’ to world politics (Walker, 1993). Ethics must be seen as a constitutive force in social reality. Rather, than trying to provide reasons for, or against, a particular ethical account of global governance, the post-structural charge is to think through and address its political implications. In this way post-structural approaches ca be seen to overlap with the constitutive approaches to globalisation identified in the previous section. More specifically, a post-structural approach to global governance would question how ethical subjects are constituted by particular discourses or rationalities. Thus, instead of asking how global governance might be reformed to help the global poor, a poststructural perspective would be concerned with how that very question constructs a subject ‘the poor’ as helpless, empty of political agency, and ‘global governance’ as the political centre apparent (See Edkins, 2000). Perhaps more than any other approach post-structuralism points us towards an evaluation of the actual content of ‘ethics’. Rather than assuming a straight split: ethics=good, politics=bad, post-structural authors blur those distinctions. For instance, at his most categorical Nietzsche (p.8) suggests

…we stand in need of a critique of moral values, the value of these values itself should first of all be called into question. This requires a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances of their growth, development and displacement (morality as consequence, symptom mask […] illness, misunderstanding: but also morality as cause, cure, stimulant, inhibition, poison. This view is updated and applied to the re-emergence of cosmopolitan ethics by Rob Walker (2003: 68) who argues that cosmopolitanism should be read as a constitutive element of the very problems it seeks to address. Simply put, by defining ‘what the problem is’ and suggesting ‘ways to solve it’ any ethical framework must thereby identify the boundaries of possible futures. In this way, post-structural authors highlight an essential ontological politics at the heart of global ethics. Politics and ‘the Political’ Traditional understandings of politics generally regard global ethics as a set of utopian hopes that simply do not match up with certain enduring social realities like state and private self-interest. Realists and Marxists coalesce on a view that ethics is at best wishful thinking and at worst a front to mask interest. We will discuss these approaches in week 6 as well as the possibility of extracting ethical viewpoints from within each tradition. What might be best now is if I just outline the broad contours of my own understanding of politics as contest and/or contestability and how this then relates to the discussion of global ethics. •

Constitutive approaches to globalisation and post-structural unite on the proposition that discourses are significant in the discussion of political and ethical possibility. While constitutive or better constructivist approaches are generally silent on what to do with this observation post-structural arguments emphasise the potential for violence but also ways of thinking which destabilise such discourses.

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Without making any grand claims to synthesis it is possible to conceive of an approach to the politics of global ethics which views each discursive intervention on global ethics as both a possibility and a limit. A discourse of cosmopolitan democracy suggests new forms of social organisation which de-emphasise the state to some extent, while leaving the notion of market capitalism relatively unquestioned.

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One way to de-centre cosmopolitanism to turn in on itself, to question the boundaries that are re-produced in large accounts of global governance and the global market (most notably an ignorance of the sorts of divergences alluded to by Hirst and Thompson). One of the theorists we will look at this term, Richard Rorty, characterises this as a form of irony, a self doubt about the ethical attractiveness of certain aspects of cosmopolitanism. Returning to the notion of global ethics as a conversation, a notion also borrowed from Rorty, we might then use the realisation as a moment for suggesting alternative possibilities.