Ethics, Global

Global ethics refers to a diverse field of intellectual inquiry devoted to establishing norms, procedures, and practices for addressing issues of conduct, collaboration, and conflict in the global sphere. Such issues can be of consequence to individuals, communities, states, transnational organizations, or any combination thereof. What makes them global is their sphere of reference and resonance. Do they register on scales of import or significance and consequence that require interpretation within a global as opposed to a national, regional, or local frame?

From this perspective, there is always both a theoretical and a practical dimension to global ethics, but these two dimensions can produce very different forms of inquiry. Those forms concerned with issues already alleged to be global—environmental degradation, nuclear proliferation, refugee relief, international peace, regulation of multinational corporations, violence against women and children, and biomedical questions and protocols—usually tend to focus on the development and implementation of normative guidelines and rules for behavior in specific domains. Those forms concerned instead with the horizon of understanding appropriate for the definition, comprehension, and implications of such issues frequently take a more conceptual direction and seek to elaborate how ethical notions and practices, as well as modes of consciousness, would have to change if such a perspective were brought to bear. This distinction is reflected in the discipline of ethics in general, which is usually divided into applied and foundational branches.

Because the application of ethical perspectives and prescriptions to global problems is an immense and always changing project, this entry focuses instead on contemporary alternatives for defining a global ethics. Here the intellectual challenge has been twofold: first, to establish what kind of consensus on principles, rights, duties, values, and obligations an ethics of global scope fundamentally requires, and, second, to determine whether any ethics, consensual or not, can address the diversity of need, suffering, inequality, injustice, grievance, and moral confusion that the world in all its particularity actually represents. The first challenge turns on the question of whether there are any ethical universals to which all societies, and the individuals within them, should or can be held accountable. The second challenge proceeds from the fact that, even if certain values are held to be universal, different groups will always disagree about how to construe them, how to interpret their implications and applications, and how to assess and prioritize them.