Global Challenges Facing Humanity
15. Global Ethics How can ethical considerations become more routinely incorporated into global decisions?
Yet each year over $1 trillion is paid in bribes, organized crime takes in over $2 trillion, most of the annual 50 million tons of e-waste is dumped in developing countries, and 12–27 million people are slaves today. Meanwhile, trivial news and entertainment floods our minds with unneeded products and unethical behavior. The acceleration of technological change seems beyond the ability of most people and institutions to comprehend, leading to ethical uncertainties. Do we have the right to clone ourselves, or to rewrite genetic codes to create thousands of new life forms, or to genetically change ourselves and future generations into new species? Some experts speculate that the world is heading for a “singularity”—a time in which technological change is so fast and significant that we today are incapable of conceiving what life might be like beyond the year 2025.
Global decision making at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen gives rise to the ethics of allowing one population to pay another for their right to pollute. Similarly, is it right for pharmaceutical trials to move to poorer nations where rules are less strict and costs are lower? About 10% of the world's population lives with disabilities and most (mainly in developing countries) are denied access to education, work, and health care. This highlights the need for all governments to ratify and implement the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its Optional Protocol.
The highest rated future economic element to improve the human condition in an international assessment was: "Ethics becomes a key element in most work relations and economic exchanges." (See Chapter 3 on future economic elements.)
Individuals can experiment with genetics to create new life forms in home labs without safeguards of government and commercial laboratories. Globalization and advanced technology allow fewer people to do more damage and in less time, so that possibly one day a single individual may be able to make and deploy a weapon of mass destruction. Hence the healthy development of anyone should be the concern of everyone. Such observations are not new, but the consequences of failure to realize their importance may be much more serious in the future than in the past. New technologies also allow more people to do more good than ever before, such as single individuals organizing worldwide actions around specific ethical issues via the Internet. The moral will to act in collaboration across national, institutional, religious, and ideological boundaries that is necessary to address today’s global challenges requires global ethics.
Public morality based on religious metaphysics is challenged daily by growing secularism, leaving many unsure about the moral basis for decision making. Unfortunately, religions and ideologies that claim moral superiority give rise to “we-they” splits. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has stimulated more than 60 treaties to protect individual freedom and dignity and continues to shape discussions about global ethics and decisions across religious and ideological divides.
Memes could be promoted, like “make decisions that are good for me, you, and the world.” We need to promote parental guidance to establish a sense of values, 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 enlightened world, and make behavior match the values people say they believe in. Spiritual education should grow in balance with the new powers given humanity by technological progress.
Challenge 15 will be addressed seriously when corruption decreases by 50% from the World Bank estimates of 2006, when ethical business standards are internationally practiced and regularly audited, when essentially all students receive education in ethics and responsible citizenship, and when there is a general acknowledgment that global ethics transcends religion and nationality.
Regional Considerations
Africa: New approaches
to countering corruption are needed as a former World Bank official says most
African government anti-corruption units are embattled and officials are being
killed. Meanwhile, the Business Ethics Network of Africa continues to grow with
conferences, research, and publications. The South African special unit (the Scorpions)
that has been fighting organized crime and corruption since 1999 has been eliminated.
In eight African countries surveyed by Transparency International, 20% of those
interviewed who had contact with the judicial system reported having paid a bribe.
In South Africa and elsewhere on the continent, scholarly and popular articles
are focusing on the ethics of health care, patients’ rights, and media ethics.
Asia and Oceania: Should Myanmar’s
refusal to accept international aid for its people following the cyclone in 2008
cause the international community to define when human rights or needs outweigh
sovereignty of governments? The need to make so many decisions so quickly during
Asian urbanization apparently leaves little time to consider the ethical implications.
Some do not believe there are common global ethics and maintain that the pursuit
to create them is a western notion.
Europe: Although Russia has just developed
its national anti-corruption plan, Transparency International rated the country
the worst for bribery among 22 world powers in 2008. The European Ethics Network
is linking efforts to improve ethical decisionmaking. The European integration
process is helping establish ethical standards, yet increased non-European immigration
raises new ethical challenges.
Latin America:
Correlation between GDP/Capita and Corruption Index
This figure shows the correlation between GDP per capita and corruption for
30 countries over 12 years for which data are available. The corruption measure
is from Transparency International; 10 is low corruption. The GDP/capita data
are from World Bank. The fit is a straight line and has an r2 of .61. The graph
and fit were prepared using the JP7 software package, provided to the Millennium
Project under a grant from SAS.
