tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64677101034433127762024-03-12T21:57:01.988-04:00An Ethics of Global ResponsibilityThis book-blog develops a conception of a global ethics that attempts to describe an ethical framework for a global moral community that includes all living human beings, near and distant future generations, and all of those non-human living beings possessing moral status whose well-being and survival are deserving of moral consideration by human moral agents.Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.comBlogger61125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-71009631141069800252008-03-31T10:00:00.003-04:002008-06-15T05:51:12.000-04:00Geopoliticus Child<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_r5LtoOMg51o/R_DurLx5qfI/AAAAAAAABMw/46ZYBaI9O2M/s1600-h/geopoliticus+child.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_r5LtoOMg51o/R_DurLx5qfI/AAAAAAAABMw/46ZYBaI9O2M/s320/geopoliticus+child.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5183905596767316466" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:verdana;">This painting by Salvador Dali, </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:verdana;" >The Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man,</span><span style="font-family:verdana;"> is my choice for an image to represent the main themes of this book. It depicts the birth struggle of a "New Man", a global citizen, who accepts responsibility for being the steward and guardian of the earth. The woman and child who look on represent the concepts of care and vulnerability which form the underpinning of the ethic of global responsibility which must come into being as the means to repair the world system. The image of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Geopoliticus Child</span>, which Dali painted in 1943 during the Second World War, depicts the present world as "broken." The broken world cannot be repaired and made whole again until new men are born who act with a sense of global moral responsibility.<br /><br />This book is an exercise in philosophical midwifery intended to assist the birth struggle of such new men.</span><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_r5LtoOMg51o/R_DurLx5qfI/AAAAAAAABMw/46ZYBaI9O2M/s1600-h/geopoliticus+child.jpg"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></a>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-20567918597718021082008-03-30T09:18:00.002-04:002008-05-07T09:26:06.571-04:00Epigram - Tikkun Olam<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.25in;" align="center"><span style="font-size:180%;">תיקון עולם</span><span style="line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><br /><h3 id="l6lg">The Meaning of Tikkun Olam</h3> The Hebrew words transliterated as "tikkun olam,"which mean to heal (or repair) the world, have become something of a buzzword in progressive Jewish thought in recent years. They have come to signify virtually any good deed or action that one thinks might be beneficial to the world in some way.<br /><br />But this broad meaning, empty of specific moral and religious content, is troublesome because it does not adequately capture the historic meaning and origins of the term in Jewish thought. Rabbi Jill Jacobs has attempted to remedy this problem by proposing that the deeper meaning of this term weaves together four distinct historical strands of meaning. (Jacobs, Jill. "The History Of "Tikkun Olam"." <i id="h402" style="">Zeek</i>, June 2007).<br /><br />The first strand refers to the mystical idea from the Kabbalah of removing impurities from the world that impede the full manifestation of divine presence; the second implies the establishment of a sustainable physical world; the third argues for reforming untenable laws and structures of power that produce social injustices and oppressions, and the fourth draws on the Lurianic belief that a individual’s actions can affect the fate of the cosmos.<br /><br />Drawing on these four strands of meaning, Jacobs proposes that “tikkun olam” means the process of fixing large social and environmental problems through the belief that our individual actions can have a positive effect on the material and the spiritual worlds. Large social problems that affect humanity include problems such as poverty, discrimination, social injustice, human rights abuses, and disease. The large environmental problems of the present time include those that affect the well-being of the physical world and that of other living things, such as global warming, deforestation, species extinction, depletion of natural resources, destruction of wilderness, and so on. The idea that ties these two together is the idea that human actions can affect these large scale issues in a positive way, and that by acting in this way, human beings can act so as to repair the world, even if the things they do are only a “small fix” to a much larger problem. By applying human thought, imagination, and caring to the world, we act as "co-creators" of the world. The idea of repairing the world reminds us of our shared social and environmental responsibilities. <span id="rg3e" style="font-style: italic;">Tikkun olam</span> signifies a universal moral responsibility borne by all moral agents to cooperate in sustaining and repairing the social and physical environments we all occupy.<br /><br /><p id="r:b5" class="MsoNormal"><!--[if supportFields]><span style="'mso-element:field-begin'"></span><span style="'mso-spacerun:yes'"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE <endnote><cite><author>Jacobs</author><year>2007</year><recnum>36</recnum><record><rec-number>36</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app=""EN"" id=""dw5zdszs8w29z7e9x5t55a2lzve0zr2wzafz"">36</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name=""Magazine">19</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Jill Jacobs</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>The History of "Tikkun Olam"</title><secondary-title>Zeek</secondary-title></titles><dates><year>2007</year><pub-dates><date>June</date></pub-dates></dates><urls></urls></record></cite></endnote><span style="'mso-element:field-separator'"></span><![endif]--><!--[if supportFields]><span style="'mso-element:field-end'"></span><![endif]--></p><h3 id="l6lg"></h3>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-88812507987567731812008-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:002008-04-03T11:41:58.317-04:00Global ThreatsWe live during times in which we are aware that hundreds of millions of persons suffer from conditions of severe poverty, economic deprivation and exploitation, political repression, social injustice, cultural exclusion, and other kinds of human rights abuse. We are also aware that this is a time when human civilization is facing an environmental crisis of historic proportions. We all have heard about global warming, deforestation, species extinction, depletion of natural resources, scarcity of water, toxic pollution, desertification and a variety of other environmental threats and risks. Many of us believe that if we do not act urgently in order to change our present unsustainable patterns of economic production and consumption, and control the growth of the human population of the planet, our children and grandchildren who will live in the latter half of this century, will be facing an environmental catastrophe of unprecedented proportions, a crisis carrying potentially severe consequences not only for human beings but for the myriad other species with which we share the planet. While there is always a tension between our vision and aspirations for a better world and our perception of the present reality, the problems we find ourselves facing are qualitatively different than what we have ever faced before. Here is a brief catalog of some of these major global threats:<br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; text-align: left;"><span class="Heading4Char"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />Population Growth</span> </span>– The human population of Earth is expected to reach approximately 10 billion by the middle of the century despite efforts to control and reduce the fertility rates. Almost all of the additional population growth will occur in less developed countries (LDCs), those least able to afford the burden of additional people to feed, clothe, house, and employ. The growth of the human population will place additional strains on natural and other resources that are already becoming critically depleted. In addition, population growth is an important factor in reinforcing other problems, for instance, rapid unplanned urbanization, the spread of infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, and rising levels of internal and international migrations of people seeking better standards of living.<span style="font-weight: bold;" class="Heading4Char"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-weight: bold;" class="Heading4Char"><br />Chronic Poverty</span> – While the one and a half billion people living in the world’s rich countries generally have fairly commodious lifestyles, collectively they consume more than their fair share of the Earth’s resources, while the other three-quarters of the Earth’s human population, mostly those living in LDCs, barely scrape by with the bare essentials of life, and half of all human beings live on less than $2 a day. Some of the consequences associated with this endemic poverty are that: 850 million adults remain illiterate. 2.7 billion people lack adequate basic sanitation. 1.3 billion do not have clean water for drinking and cooking. More than 1 billion live in extreme poverty barely subsisting on the equivalent of less than $1 a day. Almost all of these are malnourished and lack adequate housing.<br /></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-weight: bold;" class="Heading4Char">Social Inequality</span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"> </span>– The gap between the rich and the poor both between nations and within nations is widening rather than decreasing. 1.2 billion people are unemployed or employed in exploitative labor situations. Poverty and social inequality is placing unprecedented stress of tradition family structures and familial breakdown is becoming commonplace. There is persistent gender bias against women in many countries. Conflicts and civil wars based on ethnic or racial identity and competition for control of increasingly scarce resources such as arable land and fresh water are increasing. Increasing demands for higher standards of living are often met by incompetence, indifference, or political repression. Failed and collapsed states are common and often become breeding grounds humanitarian catastrophes and terrorism.<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-weight: bold;" class="Heading4Char"><br />Depleted Natural Resources</span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"> </span>– Fresh water is becoming scarce in many parts of the globe, and this trend is likely to continue if nothing is done to stabilize the atmosphere. Soil needed for growing crops is being eroded by run-off and development, or depleted by over-farming. Oceanic fisheries have been decimated and in some cases have collapsed. Rangeland is being overgrazed. Desertification is accelerating in many regions of the world that were formerly able to support human and other species.<span style=""> </span>Deforestation for land and fuel is continuing and is eroding the Earth’s atmosphere’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide, the key greenhouse gas.<span style="font-weight: bold;" class="Heading4Char"><br /><br />Global Climate Change</span> – The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that by the end of the twenty-first century the Earth’s average temperature will rise by as much as 10 degrees F due to global warming, largely produced by the burning of fossil fuels such as gas, oil, and coal. The Arctic ice cap, and Greenland’s ice sheet are melting as are glaciers world-wide. This global increase in temperatures in predicted to cause changes in global weather patterns, increases in droughts and floods, violent storms, and sea-level rise.<span style="font-weight: bold;" class="Heading4Char"><br /><br />Environmental Pollution</span><em> </em>- Nitrogen run-offs from crop fertilizers have altered the chemistry of rivers and streams. Dumping of human waste and the build-up of persistent toxic compounds has further damaged water quality. Atmospheric ozone is still being depleted despite measures undertaken to slow the process. Nuclear and other persistent toxic wastes make large quantities of land and water unusable for human needs. Burning of fossil fuels, such a coal, and the products of internal combustion engines create unhealthy atmospheric pollution in some cities, such as Bangkok, Beijing, and Mexico City.<span style="font-weight: bold;" class="Heading4Char"><br /><br />Loss of Biodiversity</span> – Due to deforestation, desertification, air and water pollution, and global climate change millions of species are at risk of extinction. There is an accelerating loss of habitat for wild species leading to a loss of biodiversity. Wetlands and coral reefs are threatened by development and pollution. At the same time, there are increasing numbers of bio-invasions of alien species into already weakened ecosystems, further disrupting these systems ability to avoid collapse.<span class="Heading4Char"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><br />Nuclear proliferation</span> </span>– Despite the end of the Cold War, the United States and Russia continue to maintain massive nuclear arsenals which are capable of destroying the Earth many times over. Attempts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons technology, and other lethal technologies of mass destruction, have proven largely ineffective as more states have joined the nuclear club or appear to have plans to do so. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, much of US security policy has been premised on the presumed importance of preventing “rogue states” and terrorist organizations from acquiring nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction.<br /></div> <p style="text-align: left;" class="Normalindent">People who study these issues understand that these twin social and environmental crises of the twenty-first century are interlinked in various ways. We know, for instance, that the extreme poverty that afflicts roughly one third of humanity is one of the causes of environmental destruction of forest lands, endangered species, and fisheries, and is a major driver of the migration of millions of poor people from rural villages to urban slums. We also understand that the high-consumption life-styles of the roughly one billion people who live in the rich world are also contributing to the global environmental crisis. For instance, by continuing the profligate burning of fossil fuels we are adding to the burden of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere, which if left unchecked, will produce a global rise in the sea level which will inundate many coastal and low-lying areas. If we switch from gasoline to biofuels like ethanol that is made from crops like corn or soybeans, we drive up the price of food which hurts poor people, and indirectly promote deforestation by means of the economic incentive to convert rainforest into cropland, and will produce a net increase in the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.<br /></p><p class="Normalindent"> While we want to promote economic development that will lift people out of poverty we realize that it cannot follow the same pattern as was followed the Western economies developed during the last two centuries. Billions more people emulating our Western high-consumption lifestyles would imposed additional burdens would on the Earth’s resources and environment would be too great to bear.<br /></p><p class="Normalindent">There is a sense that human civilization has reached a critical inflection point in its history at which the traditional ways in which we think and act have to change in fundamental ways. But it seems that our current political institutions are just not up to the task of tackling these sorts of problems in an effective and timely fashion. While academic theorizing and campaigning by social activists and nongovernmental organizations <span style=""> </span>have succeeded in keeping these issues on the radar screen of social awareness, and some progress is being made in addressing some of these problems, these efforts have not yet succeeded in bringing about progressive change on the scale that is required.<br /></p><p class="Normalindent"> The gap between what we need to do in the twenty-first century to solve these global problems and our effective capacity to solve them through the mechanisms provided by our existing national and international institutions is called “the global governance gap”. Whether one blames the governance gap it on “short-term” thinking, the parochialism of our current political institutions, ideological blindness, cultural warfare, or other factors, the bottom line is that our current methods for solving global problems are too slow and largely ineffective. As former World Bank official J. F. Rischard puts it: “Quite simply, the current setup for solving global problems doesn’t work. We need a better one and fast” (2002, 60).</p><p class="Normalindent"><br /></p>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-91359363651466788742008-03-28T00:50:00.000-04:002008-04-03T11:42:32.171-04:00Characteristics of Global Threats<p id="l1lp" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst">These global threats are not the only ones that we face, but they form an important subset because they represent kinds of threats that differ in significant ways from traditional threats. </p><p id="l1lp" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst"> </p><p id="l1lp" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst">Traditional threats are ones that can be identified with the action or behavior of particular human agents, are local, are immediate or imminent, and are relatively simple to understand and respond to. For instance, common crimes are examples of standard threats. Threats of these kind cause harm through the deliberate actions of identifiable individual agents, and do so in an immediate and obvious fashion. One generally deals with these kinds of threats by attempting to deter them and by restraining or incapacitating the human agents that produce them. There are also various kinds of standard threats that do not arise from the actions of human agents, for instance, infectious diseases, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, and so forth. These have sometimes been termed “natural evils,” and we have been living with them for all of our history as a species. In recent centuries we have been able to devise some effective technologies for containing and controlling these natural threats to human well-being, for instance, in the fields of public health and hygiene and medicine, but preventing many natural threats, such as hurricanes and earthquakes, remains largely beyond our control. </p> <p id="lq3v" class="NormalindentCxSpLast"> </p><p id="lq3v" class="NormalindentCxSpLast">But the global threats we now face have distinctive qualitative and quantitative features that distinguish them from standard threats and also make them particularly difficult to solve. </p><p id="lq3v" class="NormalindentCxSpLast"> </p><p id="lq3v" class="NormalindentCxSpLast">First, they are global in their scope and potentially affect the well-being of every single person and indeed all living things on the planet. This feature concerns the scope of the problem and also by implication the scale of the changes that need to take place to solve it. Local problems can have local solutions, but global problems require global solutions and our current institutions for global governance are too weak to deal with them. </p><p id="lq3v" class="NormalindentCxSpLast"> </p> <p id="o403" class="MsoNormal">Second, rather than arising from a specific determinate cause or small set of causes, the etiologies of these global threats are complex and their causes are diffuse. In most cases, the problems mentioned arise as the result of the aggregated behavior of large numbers of independent actors, individual human beings, individual corporations, or individual states. The individual actions that produce the unwanted consequences, e.g. driving ones car to work, producing electricity by means of burning coal, or converting rainforests into grazing land, may not by themselves be very harmful, but when aggregated in massive numbers, they can produce catastrophic consequences that threaten the well-being of the planet and its living inhabitants.</p><p id="o403" class="MsoNormal"> </p><p id="o403" class="MsoNormal">Third, because the harms and risks produced by these threat are the result of aggregated individual actions, the agents who are responsible for causing them cannot (in most cases) be said to have acted with malice of forethought or with the intention to do harm to others. Global threats are unintentional and no one is in particular to blame for having caused them. Because they result from the aggregation of large number of actions it may be pointless to attempt to assign responsibility in the sense of blame or liability for many of them. </p><p id="o403" class="MsoNormal"> </p><p id="o403" class="MsoNormal">Fourth, unlike traditional agent-centered threats, these global threats are slow rather than fast; the costs and harms that results are deferred into the future, and the harms they produce are merely probable rather than immediately discernable in their effects on particular persons. </p><p id="o403" class="MsoNormal"> </p><p id="o403" class="MsoNormal">Fifth, the global threats humankind is currently facing are complex and dynamic. There are complex interdependencies and causal loops connecting the various problems we are facing: for instance, population growth leads to greater demands for resources such as land and water, which produces more pressure to cut down forests, which in turn accelerates soil erosion and water pollution and exacerbates the problem of global warming. One cannot hope to understand these sorts of problem using linear causal reasoning. Their complexity, interactivity, and dynamism require that we adopt a systems theoretic approach to understanding and dealing with these kinds of threats. </p><p id="o403" class="MsoNormal"> </p><p id="p3tk" class="Normalindent">The sixth important feature of global threats is they are to one degree or another the result of the human use of modern technology. Many of these problems have arisen in part because of new powers given to us by technological progress, powers which we have not learned to use wisely and responsibly. Part of the problem is that technology has been allowed to assume control of human affairs such that its widespread use has produced unexpected and unpleasant consequences. While there is a temptation to blame our current problems on science and technology, ridding ourselves of modern technologies and returning to some pristine state of nature is not the solution to our problems. If our use of technology is part of the problem, it must also be part of the solution. The problem is not in our having technological power, but in our inability to use it responsibly. </p><p id="p3tk" class="Normalindent"> </p><p id="p3tk" class="Normalindent">The seventh feature of these threats is that their existence indicates that we are running up against the limits of the Earth’s carrying capacity for a human population, which is currently at about 6.6 billion and is expected to rise to between 10 and 11 billion by mid-century. The patterns of economic development that powered the Industrial Revolution and which produced many of these threats are clearly unsustainable. In the past when human groups despoiled their environments they could usually simply move on to another place. But there are no more places left to move -- the Earth is now fully occupied. While some people continue to dream of space colonies as the last frontier for human exploration, those of us in the reality-based community have understood that the Earth, with its finite resources, is our only home in the Cosmos and we human beings finally have to learn to take responsibility for protecting it and preserving it. </p>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-37184684078231707352008-03-27T13:23:00.002-04:002008-05-07T10:31:33.589-04:00Taking Responsibility<p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span><span style="font-family:arial;"> If this narrative resonates at all with you, then the obvious question that presents itself is: “What am I to do?” Perhaps as individuals we accept some responsibility for addressing these twin social and environmental crises of the twenty-first century. Maybe we ride our bikes to work rather drive our cars; maybe we decide to become vegetarians, plant gardens in our back yards, or buy only locally grown organic foods and shop for fair-traded or fairly made goods. Maybe we donate money to various charities and nongovernmental organizations that work in the fields of human rights, humanitarian relief, development, or to environmental organizations working to prevent the destruction of the rainforest, protect endangered species, preserve the wilderness, and so forth. We may do these things partly out of a sense of guilt (because we have so much while so many others have so little), or perhaps out of a sense of gratitude (also because we have so much while so many others have so little).</span></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal">But some of us do these kinds of things because we believe that it is our <i style="">social responsibility </i>to do so. <span style=""> </span>Those of us who think in this way choose to “take responsibility” for solving some of these big problems, for repairing the world, even though we do so with the knowledge that the little bit we can do in our own lives, with our own homes and families, and in the institutions and organizations in which we work, is really insignificant and will hardly make a dent on the enormous challenges human civilization is facing. Yet we do these things anyway, not because (in most cases) the law tells us that we must do them, but because our reason and our consciences tell us that we ought to.<br /></p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Some people take their commitment to an ethics of social responsibility a step further by working for an nongovernmental organization (NGO) or a civil society organization (CSO) whose mission is specifically directed toward addressing some aspects of the twin crises. We understand that as individuals we cannot be very effective, so we combine our talents and energies and work in organizations that are trying to address one or more of the many aspects of the twin crises of the twenty-first century. Many of these organizations try to get governments and corporations, both of which are more powerful and better resourced organizations than NGOs and CSOs, to do less harm and do more good, both in the developing world and in our own societies. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Those of us who work in these kinds of organizations fire up our computers every morning and hunt and gather information that we think might be useful in finding solutions to these problems, and put those gems we have gathered into articles, reports, and books, hoping that someone will read them who can make a difference. We fly in jet planes around the planet to meetings and conferences trading memes with other people who share our sense of social responsibility in the belief that if we gather enough committed, like-minded people, we can create a broad-based global social movement, and through it the major institutions of society, government and business, may reach a tipping point from which real change can begin. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >But in the back of our minds, perhaps, is the doubt that any of this activity is really making a difference. We may have good intentions, and go to bed each night with a clear conscience that assures us that we are doing our part to address these global problems, but we worry that all that we are doing may turn out to be too little too late.</span><span style=""><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Many thoughtful people have a sense of helplessness and powerlessness when thinking about these kinds of problems. In large measure this reaction is due not only to the enormity of the problems which we face, but to the nature of these problems. There are basically two ways in which people react to these threats. One group sees in this a portent of doom about which they can do nothing, and so they decide to retreat into individualist ego satisfactions, a comfortable life for themselves and their dear ones, but not much involvement in the problems of society, since, they rationalize, such activity is a waste of time. Another group of people come to the conclusion that this retreat from public issues into the satisfactions of private life is part of the problem, and that society can no longer afford not to be oriented towards the collective, long term interests of humanity. They suggest that in order to preserve the world we all share, we must also attempt build into our political and economic systems a concern for the common interests of humanity, for future generations, and for other living things.</span><o:p style="font-family: arial;"></o:p></span><span style="font-family:arial;"> </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Given their urgency, seriousness, and complexity, these global threats are of concern to many people working in diverse disciplines who are actively studying these problems from a variety of different theoretical and practical perspectives. Engineers, economists, ecologists, atmospheric scientists, hydrologists, oceanographers, urban planners, sociologists, political scientists, policy makers, and many other specific scientific specialties can provide useful information and perspectives, and perhaps solutions, to these problems. Human rights activists, environmental campaigners, humanitarian workers, and many others are actively campaigning to find and implement practical solutions to these kinds of problems. And many well-informed individuals are taking steps in their own lives to respond to these kinds of global problems.<br /><br /></span><span style=";font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" >Being a philosopher, the kinds of questions that I ask about this constellation of problems and issues concerns the ethical framework we should use when attempting to address and solve them. What should be our ethical response to these kinds of global threats? How do threats of these kinds affect our moral values and the moral norms we live by? Do these kinds of threats raise questions and problems that cannot be adequately handled by our traditional ethics, or are they amenable to being understood and appropriately responded to within the framework of conventional ethical theory? In short, what kind of ethical framework is needed in order to address and solve these kinds of global problems? By providing answers to these kinds of questions perhaps moral philosophers can also make a contribution towards solving them. </span>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-38268592333276374462008-03-26T13:03:00.003-04:002008-05-28T12:09:00.497-04:00The Concept of a Global Ethics<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The general thesis I will argue for in this book is that in order to solve these global problems a significant portion of humanity ought to adopt a global ethics.<br /><br />Our present, conventional ethical ideas and values are largely incapable of dealing with the kinds of global threats we are facing. Global threats represent moral challenges of a kind that we have not experienced before in human history and they require an innovative ethical response. Indeed, dealing with these threats will require a revaluing of our values, a rethinking and reinventing of our ethical frameworks. I will argue that we need to have a new understanding of some basic assumptions we make about human rights and social responsibilities, and about the nature and scope of the moral community, if we are to develop an ethical framework that will enable us to more effectively address and solve the problems that humanity is facing. In short, I will argue that we need to develop a global ethics. This book explores the possibility of constructing a global ethics based on the concepts of human rights and social responsibilities.</span></div><p style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;" id="qbwz" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst"> </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;" id="ze0l" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle"> </p><p style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;" id="ze0l" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle">A global ethics can be understood in contrast to conventional ethics. Within our conventional ethical framework most people regard themselves as having certain rights and responsibilities. Conventionally speaking, there are individual rights which persons can claim against other members of their own societies and which their own governments are supposed to enforce and protect. Additionally according to the conventional ethics most people accept, individual competent moral agents also have moral responsibilities to take care of themselves, to care for their families and loved ones, and to respect the civil rights of their co-nationals. But one’s moral responsibilities are generally thought to stop at national borders. On the conventional moral view, worrying about protecting the rights and well-being of people in other countries is their job, not ours.<br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;" id="ze0l" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle"><br />Moreover, under conventional ethics we do not really have any serious moral responsibilities towards non-human life forms, e.g., animals, insects, plants, microorganisms, and to the complex ecosystems that support them. The non-human parts of the biological world are just not considered to be proper objects of moral concern and do not have any more moral standing than mere things.<br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;" id="ze0l" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle">Finally, under our conventional moral outlook, most people think we have significant moral responsibilities to care for our own children while they are young, and see to it that they grow up to become competent and responsible adults. Perhaps we also acknowledge a moral duty to ensure that our children and grandchildren will enjoy at least as good lives as we have had. But few people think that our moral responsibilities extend much further than the next one or two generations.<br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;" id="ze0l" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle">These ethical assumptions are, I believe, no longer viable in the global age we have now entered -- the Anthropocene Era.<br /></p>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-89074946268827402832008-03-26T12:00:00.004-04:002008-05-28T12:10:54.805-04:00The Anthropocene<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">We are living in the Anthropocene era, the age of the Earth in which human civilization is changing the very condition of the planet through the impact of its socio-technological practices on the land, the sea, and the atmosphere.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">The term 'Anthropocene' was coined by geologists Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer in 2000. According to their reckoning the Anthropocene era began in the late 18th century, because “during the past two centuries, the global effects of human activities have become clearly noticeable. This is the period when data retrieved from glacial ice cores show the beginning of a growth in the atmospheric concentrations of several 'greenhouse gases", in particular C02 and CH4. Such a starting date also coincides with James Watt's invention of the steam engine in 1784” (2000, 17-18).</span><a style="font-family: verdana;" id="p5v1" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6467710103443312776&postID=3826859233327637446#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title="">[i]</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> William Ruddiman has argued that human beings became the dominate influence on the earth's atmosphere long before the Industrial Revolution. According to his reckoning, the Anthropocene began with the Agricultural Revolution approximately 10,000 years ago when humans began clearing land for agriculture and causing deforestation. It is also the first time at which humans began domesticating wild grains and animal species, and breeding these species so as to select variants that better fit human needs.</span></div><p style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;" id="ze0l" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle">While hominids have been evolving for millions of years, modern human beings like us, that is, homo sapiens (wise humans), have only been around for about 200,000 years. During most of our evolutionary history we lived as hunter-gatherers in small nomadic clans, and we had little impact on the ecology of the Earth. But due to our talent for technological innovation we have moved rapidly from the Stone Age to the Neolithic era (New Stone Age, circa 8500 BC) in which farming began in the Levant, to the use of metal tools in Copper, Bronze and Iron ages, and then in the 1750s onto the Industrial Revolution. While humans have been altering their natural environment in significant ways for about 10,000 years through farming and the domestication of wild plants and animals, only in the last several centuries has the scale and scope of our activities begun to pose a threat to our survival as a species.<br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;" id="ze0l" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle">In the twentieth century we acquired the capacity to destroy the Earth many times over with our nuclear weapons; with the advent of genetic engineering we have now learned how to alter life itself at the genetic level; and our current fossil-fuel dependent modes of industry and commerce are disrupting the atmosphere by pumping greenhouse gases into at an ever-increasing rate, risking major climate disruption.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;" id="gvf:" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle"> </p><p style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;" id="gvf:" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle">In each of the earlier periods in which technological changes have made it possible for humans to alter their environments human cultures have adapted their ethics to the new kinds of social realities that their increasingly technological modes of living created. It was Karl Marx who proposed the general thesis that the technological base of society embodied in its dominant modes of production determines its cultural superstructure, including its dominant ethical outlook: “The handmill gives you society with feudal lords; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist;” and Peter Singer has suggested adding, “The jet plane, the telephone, and the Internet give you a global society with the transnational corporation and the World Economic Forum” (Singer 2002, 10).<br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;" id="gvf:" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle">In the Anthropocene epoch the technologies of globalization are creating new kinds of social relations and new kinds of interdependence among peoples, and also new kinds of global threats. Consequently, we must revise our ethics in order to adapt them to the conditions of a planetary civilization in which human action is the most significant force in shaping the future of the Earth. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;" id="kgmr" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle"> </p><p style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;" id="kgmr" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle">Philosophers have long believed that ethics, the theories we have of moral goodness, duty, rightness, and virtue, cannot be directly derived from any set facts about human nature. To attempt to derive moral judgments directly on facts concerning natural human characteristics and dispositions is to commit the "naturalistic fallacy." However, in recent years there has also been a recognition that ethical theories should be developed in some sense empirically, within the context of our best current biological, anthropological, sociological, and psychological theories. In ethics we must alter our received ethical theories in order to better take account of our characteristics as natural and as social beings.<br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;" id="kgmr" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle">Traditional ethics has tended to abstract from the historical conditions of human existence, and has tried to frame theories which apply to all "rational beings." In doing so moral philosophers have sacrificed specificity to the existing human condition. We have failed, by and large, to take into account features of morality which vary according to the stages of the life cycle and have made exceptions of children, the sick, the mentally incapable, and the elderly. Through this abstraction we have made it appear that human beings pop into the world fully capable with a functional capacity for rational decision‑making and fully in command of their faculties and behavior. We have ignored the obvious fact that human beings come into the world in a state of utter dependency and vulnerability, that they attain maturity embedded within a network of interpersonal relationships involving parents, families, friends, teachers, and significant others, and that these relationship condition our existence as moral agents in fundamental ways.<br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;" id="kgmr" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle">We have also ignored the fact that human beings are related by history to their distant ancestors and to their future progeny, by commonalities of development within their communities and cultures, and that these networks of social relationships must be taken into account in our ethics. Above all, traditional ethics has been anthropocentric: we have regarded humans as separate from nature, and as the only parts of nature which have moral value and moral standing, and so have treated other species of living beings, as mere "things." While a preference for our own kind is perhaps predictable and in some sense natural for us, it cannot be defended on these grounds.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;" id="r9w:" class="NormalindentCxSpLast"> This book is an attempt to correct for these biases of traditional ethical theory. A naturalized ethics is one that takes seriously the idea that humans are natural biological beings who bear special moral relationships to other persons and to other members of the biological world. My approach to global ethics is also secular and nonconsequentialist but draws elements from various other ethical traditions.<br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;" id="r9w:" class="NormalindentCxSpLast">I am not particularly interested in arguing against some other approaches that have attempted to develop a global ethics by reinterpreting traditional religious doctrines or applying utilitarian theory.<a id="pov3" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6467710103443312776&postID=3826859233327637446#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""> </a>My approach to global ethics is pluralistic, but draws heavily on the work of philosophers such as Hans Jonas (1984) <span style="font-style: italic;">The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age</span>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Robert E. Goodin (1985). <span style="font-style: italic;">Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities</span>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; and Virginia Held (2006). <span style="font-style: italic;">The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, Global</span>. New York: Oxford University Press, each of whom have developed ethical theories based on the conceptions of responsibility, vulnerability, and care, notions that I believe are particularly well-suited to addressing the global problems we are facing.<br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;" id="r9w:" class="NormalindentCxSpLast">My approach to developing a global ethics also builds upon the existence of the contemporary human rights paradigm, which is, in my view, the closest thing we currently have to the kind of global ethics that I envision. Both the responsibility-based approach and the rights-based approaches to ethical theory are going to be needed in order to construct a comprehensive global ethics, and my specific object here is to integrate them by means of an unorthodox theory of human rights that derives them from social responsibilities. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;" id="nsry"> <hr style="margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px;" id="wj:q" size="1" width="33%"> <div id="edn1"> <p id="d8zf" class="MsoEndnoteTextCxSpFirst"><a id="piiv" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6467710103443312776&postID=3826859233327637446#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title="">[i]</a> (See William F. Ruddiman. (2007) <span style="font-style: italic;">Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate</span>. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. My own preference would be to place the beginning of the Anthropocene Era around 1968 when the Apollo 8 spacecraft sent back the now iconic image of the Earth rising above the surface of the moon. This date is also close to the first time a human being set foot on the moon, July 20, 1969, and the first Earth Day held on April 22, 1970. I prefer this date because it marks the beginning of "conscious evolution" -- the point at which humans realized that we are responsible for the future evolution of life on Earth.<br /></p> </div><br /></div>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-54906844740102617302008-03-25T14:02:00.002-04:002008-04-03T14:41:00.241-04:00Extending the Boundaries of the Moral Community<p id="pin_" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst"> </p><p id="pin_" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst">Conventional accounts of human rights tend to view them as “natural” or “God-given”, and see them as providing the grounds for responsibilities, mainly responsibilities borne by states. On my theory, social responsibilities that we owe towards other members of the human moral community to protect the vulnerable provide the grounds for creating rights. Persons have rights because they are valuable, and vulnerable, and other members of the moral community have the capacity and power to affect their vital interests for good or for ill. Human rights, on this view, are moral constructs which are designed to protect persons from the most commons forms of systematic or institutionalized oppression. While the primary responsibilities for observing and protecting human rights are ascribed to governments, states are only one among several kinds of institutions to which we ascribe the responsibility for observing, protecting, and fulfilling human rights. The shared social responsibility to protect the vulnerable among us is the basis for the moral obligation to oppose and prevent oppression and hence for the construction of human rights norms and their associated implementing institutions.<br /></p><p id="pin_" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst">This inversion of the conventional view of the relationship between rights and responsibilities clears the way for subsuming the ethics of human rights within a more comprehensive ethics of social responsibility which extends the vulnerability/care principle to other kinds of moral relationships, in particular, to non-human species and the environments they depend upon, and to future generations of human beings, relationships that are not currently adequately addressed by the human rights framework. The ethical framework that results places moral responsibilities in the foreground without diminishing the importance of human rights. But it also leads away from our present anthropocentric understanding of the moral community and towards a conception of a global moral community that encompasses nonhuman nature and future generations. </p> <p id="azgc" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle"><span id="ipk3"> </span></p><p id="y1lk" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle">Global ethics involves a radical extension of the boundaries of the moral community assumed by our conventional ethics. This expansion of the boundaries of the moral community entails a radical extension of our social responsibilities into three dimensions. First, we need a <i id="t7ci">cosmopolitan ethics</i> that describes the moral relations among human individuals (persons) who belong to different particular political communities, that is, people of different, ethnicities, nationalities, and citizenships. In a cosmopolitan ethical framework one regards all living persons as citizens of the same country and as members of a single extended moral community in which all of us have certain moral rights and also certain social responsibilities which we owe to others members of this extended moral community. The ethos of international solidarity is already part of the ethics of human rights and it is not very controversial because of the progress of the global human rights movement in the last sixty years. I will argue that we possess significant moral responsibilities towards our fellow human beings who have the same moral status as we do within this cosmopolitan moral community, and that the scope of these moral responsibilities is wider and the responsibilities they entail are stronger than we generally think. </p><p id="y1lk" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle"> </p><p id="y1lk" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle">The particular version of a global ethics developed here is thus highly inflationary in terms of our moral responsibilities. I argue that we adult human beings living at the dawn of the Third Millennium and (those who come after us) will have to accept moral responsibilities to other members of the global moral community that we rarely even acknowledge as having and even more rarely effectively fulfill. In particular, as members of a global moral community, nation states, corporations and other organizations, as well as individuals, have non-optional, and non-voluntary moral responsibilities to observe, promote, and protect the enjoyment of internationally recognized human rights for all living persons. A primary message of this book is that we must now acknowledge and accept these responsibilities and devise more effective global institutions as the means for implementing and discharging them. </p> <p id="xb:q" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle"> </p><p id="q2y6" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle">In order to do this we must analyze the implicit division of moral labor assumed by our conventional ethics, and construct a new one based up an ethics of global social responsibility. Doing this requires that we revise our traditional interactional and personal view of moral responsibility in which individual persons are thought to be personally responsible for shouldering the burdens of solving the big problems of the world, and take an “institutional turn” under which our primary responsibility as individuals is to support the creation of new kinds of political, economic and social governance institutions at the local, national, and global level, that will more effectively fulfill these shared collective responsibilities on our behalves. Governments, transnational corporations and other business enterprises, and nongovernmental and civil society organizations must all shoulder some of the responsibility for managing our planetary civilization. While individuals must also assume the kinds of social responsibilities that fall within their own spheres of competence and capacity, the principal tasks in the new division of moral labor will be carried by institutions and organizations. Because the concept of organizational responsibility is relatively newly and largely unexplored, I will spend a good deal of time discussing this topic. </p> <p id="gtag" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle"> </p><p id="p.e7" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle">But, as I conceive it, a global ethics does not end with moral cosmopolitanism. It must also to extend the boundaries of the moral community into a second dimension -- to an <i id="q6mz">intergenerational ethic</i> that describes the moral responsibilities that living persons have towards both near and distant generations of human beings. The intergenerational ethics extends the moral community both backwards and forwards in time, from the present generations who are now alive back in time to our ancestors and forward to those who will come after us. I will argue that an ethics of global responsibility based on the concepts of vulnerability and care also provides a way of understanding these kinds of moral relationships, and indeed that it provides guidance and insight that a rights-only ethical framework cannot match.</p><p id="p.e7" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle"> </p> <p id="k_vm" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle">Finally, a global ethics also requires the expansion of the moral community into a third dimension -- a <i id="sh7-">biocentric ethics--</i> that describes the moral relations between human beings and members of other biological species and the elements of the natural world on which they depend. A biocentric ethics ascribes to living beings a moral standing different than mere “things”, which makes them the proper objects of moral concern and therefore of human moral responsibilities. Unlike many other approaches to environmental ethics, my approach employs a multicriterial theory of moral status, similar to that developed by Mary Anne Warren (1997), that creates several plateaus of moral status based upon the different of intrinsic and relational values of different kinds of creatures.</p> <p id="xbp7" class="NormalindentCxSpLast"> </p><p id="xbp7" class="NormalindentCxSpLast">To summarize, as I will use the term, a global ethics is one that attempts to describe an ethical framework for a global moral community -- a community that includes all living persons irrespective national, racial, religious, ethnic, gender or other differences; previous generations of human beings as well as near and distant future generations, and all of those classes of organisms which possess some degree of moral standing and whose well-being, freedom, and survival are deserving of moral consideration by human moral agents. This third extension overturns the dominant anthropocentric character of most previous ethical systems by subsuming human ethics within the broader conception of a biocentric ethics. I believe that this fundamental change in our moral consciousness is now required by conditions of our present evolutionary stage – the Anthropocene Era – the age of the Earth in which human civilization is the dominant causal factor shaping the future of the planet. </p><p id="xbp7" class="NormalindentCxSpLast"> </p>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-62345896564995901792008-02-27T10:28:00.000-05:002008-05-01T10:38:52.777-04:00Moral Constructivism<p id="b2yp3" class="Normalindent">Any attempt to construct a system of ethics must issue from a particular ideological and political standpoint, as well as from a particular historical and cultural point of view. In the past, ethical theories have often been presented as absolute and eternal truths that describe an unchanging objective moral reality. I do not believe that ethics should be regarded as body of eternal truths, rather the point of view adopted here is that ethical ideas are products of human intelligence and have evolved and must continue to change in response to the changing conditions of human existence.<br /></p><p id="b2yp3" class="Normalindent"><br />My attempt to describe a global ethics is not being put forward as a master narrative that will stand for all time, or for all conceivable human cultures. Instead my goal is to describe a historically-situated, and indeed, provisional ethical theory, one that I believe roughly approximates the kinds of ethical system that will be needed in order to govern the global community of human beings living on Earth in the twenty-first century and beyond. In other words, the sense of the word "ethics” as it is used here is not the eternal or transcendent sense of an objectively true body of norms laid down by divine command or grasped through a pure rational intuition. Thus, while the present work is a good deal less ambitious than some earlier ethical theories produced by philosophers, e.g., those of Aristotle, Aquinas, or Kant who attempted to attain a philosophical standpoint that transcended history and culture, it is nevertheless quite ambitious.</p> <p id="f9d00" class="NormalindentCxSpLast">The metaethical position from which the current work proceeds is moral constructivism, the metaethical view which sees morality, ethics, and law as social technologies that we invent in order to regulate human behavior. While the ethical framework I am describing aspires to universality, it is proposed as universal here only in the pragmatic sense that it attempts to provide a description of a global moral community based upon the ideas of universal human rights and corresponding social responsibilities that ought to be included in the ethical culture of human civilization in the twenty-first century. In order for any ethical theory to become universal in this sense, it needs to be effectively communicated and scaled up, so that a significant number of opinion-makers and other persons of influence take it up and employ it.</p> <p id="b2yp3" class="Normalindent"> </p>My approach to ethics is Nietzschean in that I assume that human values are at bottom products of the will -- we construct ethics and morality -- it is not something present in nature itself apart from the human will, nor is it divinely dictated. I believe that we can derive the concept of moral responsibility from the fact that we do, in fact, will certain ends, such as the end of human flourishing, or the end of the preservation and flourishing of life on earth. To say that moral values and imperatives are phenomena of the will, however, is not necessarily to agree that the moral will is arbitrary, subjective or that it must be irrational. The will can be brought under the sway of intelligence, imagination, and reason. Reason's counsel is the one which ought to be heeded if we hope to promote the good of humankind overall, for reason instructs us concerning the relations of means and ends, and so shows us whether the means which we choose are adapted to the ends which we will to promote. Reason can also help us to evaluate ends themselves by providing a theory of the human good, which, while fallible and subject to revision, offers the best available basis for belief concerning what ends we ought to will. <p id="f9d08" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle">The mistake of the rationalist philosophers of the Enlightenment was not in seeking a rational basis for morality, but in assuming that rationality had to yield an ethical theory that was unified, unchallengable, apodictic, and a priori. In place of this conception of a rationality, I substitute a pluralistic, fallible, revisable search for an adequate ethical theory which can guide our weak and inconstant wills. The moral ends, laws, and virtues which define our societies are social products. This is to say that we create them, and can change them, improve them, or destroy them. Nietzsche was right in thinking that morality is ultimately phenomenon of the will, but he was wrong in thinking that it is the creation of the individual will; rather it is the product of the collective will of society in particular cultures at particular times.<br /></p><p id="f9d08" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle">The dominant ethos of human societies is more like Rousseau's idea of the general will. Given its collective character, the dominant ethos is created out of "We-intentions", that is, out of shared moral values and norms which become social realities by their being generally intended. The general moral will rarely be unified, but instead will represent a mosaic of various and sometimes conflicting wills which coexist in uneasy tension. Politics is the process whereby this divided and inconstant collective will, this set of partially overlapping "We-intentions" is translated into decisions concerning collective policies and action. Individuals can affect the general will only as a political actors. The individual, to the extent to which he is socially isolated, betrays his own will by condemning it to ineffectuality.<br /></p><p id="f9d08" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle">Thus, it follows, that in order to create a new table of values and a new conception of moral responsibility -- a global ethics -- one must engage an audience who will internalize this conception and promote it as forming a part of the dominant ethos. This is why I have decided to publish this book on the Internet as a philosophical blog. In doing so I am hoping to reach my intended audience, what Paul H. Ray has called "cultural creatives."</p><p id="f9d08" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle"><br /></p>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-68210653357571788662008-02-25T11:18:00.000-05:002008-05-01T11:23:29.380-04:00Cultural Creatives and the Cosmopolitan Class<p id="y87m0" class="Normalindent">I labor under no illusions, however, about how likely it is that the philosophical musings of a college professor will have world-changing implications. No one pays much attention to philosophers anymore. Thomas Nagel (another philosophy professor) has written that, “philosophy, when it has an impact on the world, affects the world only indirectly, through gradual penetration, usually over generations, of questions and arguments from abstruse theoretical writings into the consciousness and habits of thought of educated persons, and from there into political and legal argument, and eventually into the structure of alternatives among which political and practical choices are actually made” (quoted in Alterman, The Nation, 2002), 10). Given the urgency and seriousness of the global threats we are now facing this is hardly good enough. Philosophical ideas need to put on a faster track and made more politically relevant. In an age of instantaneous global communication philosophers need to give careful consideration to the question of how they are communicating their messages and to the audiences they are addressing. Writing for the audience of professional philosophers may be a good way to earn tenure and the respect of one’s professional peers, but it fails as a method for getting one’s ideas into mainstream social consciousness. For this to happen, the important theses and conclusions derived from philosophical analysis and reflection need to be taken up by social movements that will disseminate them to audiences who are in a position to do something about them. </p> <p id="b7vx0" class="Normalindent"> </p><p id="b7vx0" class="Normalindent">This is the reason why I have chosen to address this book to what have been called "cultural creatives", or to members of what I call the “cosmopolitan class”.<span id="b7vx1"> Paul Ray, who coined the term, says that,</span></p><blockquote id="q2ln1"><p id="b7vx0" class="Normalindent"><span id="b7vx1">Cultural Creatives tend to reject the hedonism, materialism, and cynicism generally associated with one-sided elite globalization. They are less concerned with making a lot of money, although most live comfortably. The also tend to walk their talk, three-fourths being involved in volunteer activities. On the deepest level, they are powerfully attuned to global issues and whole systems. Their icon is a photograph of the earth as a blue pearl hanging in black space. (Ray, P.H. Cultural Creatives: How Fifty Million People are Changing the World. New York: Harmony Books, 2000)</span> </p></blockquote><p id="b7vx0" class="Normalindent">Another interesting discussion about this group of people, has been published by Paul Hawken who describes a social movement of "global citizens" consisting of (roughly) 100 million people and 2 million civil society organizations. (Hawken, Paul. Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. New York: Viking, 2007). This movement has no leader, no headquarters, and no unified agenda. However, what unites the various individuals and groups who identify with this movement is the perception that human civilization is reaching a critical inflection point in the current century, and that a major course correction will be needed if we are to avoid a global catastrophe. </p><p id="b7vx0" class="Normalindent"> </p><p id="b7vx0" class="Normalindent">While there have always been a few people who had this kind of cosmopolitan outlook, recent changes in communication and transportation technologies are creating a global civil society, and within that society there is emerging a significant class of people who are, I believe, in the best position to take up and enact the kind of ethical framework I develop in this book. This cosmopolitan class is composed of people from all nationalities and religious faiths, all racial and ethnic groups, and from many particular walks of life. It includes scientists and scholars, politicians and statesmen, business men and women, social activists and social entrepreneurs, and others who are involved in progressive social movements. Cosmopolitans tend better travelled, speak more languages, and are more conversant with international affairs than many of their compatriots. To be sure there are some professional philosophers and other academics that belong to the cosmopolitan class; but this book is not addressed only to them. Rather, the audience I have in mind for my moral philosophy are members of progressive social movements, and the leaders of socially responsible corporations, and nongovernmental organizations, who can give these philosophical ideas and theories the legs they will need in order to inspire the mass movement of cultural creatives, the members of the cosmopolitan class who are changing the world. </p> <p id="jkrn0" class="Normalindent">I hope that the audience of culturally creative cosmopolitans to whom this book is addressed will not find it odd to be counseled by a professional philosopher about an ethical theory for thinking about the global threats of the twenty-first century. There is in fact a great deal of recent philosophy that is highly relevant to addressing and solving these big problems of the world, but little of it manages to get outside of the ambit of peer-reviewed specialty journals and academic books. In the current age of mass media, pundits and spin-doctors get a lot more air time than philosophers, whose voices barely manage into penetrate public discourse. My hope is that by publishing this book as an Internet blog its fate will be different, and that it will serve as a means of making the insights of moral and political philosophers available to a wider audience of committed social activists who can translate the ethical ideas discussed here into practical solutions to the global problems of the twenty-first century. </p>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-88885345076816789042008-02-24T13:16:00.000-05:002008-05-01T13:37:56.810-04:00Is a Global Ethics Even Possible?<p id="wqmu2" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst">But before we begin to elaborate our conception of a global ethics it might be useful to ask the question: “Is a global ethics of the kind described here even possible?” At the end of the book I will offer a cautiously optimistic answer to this question. But at the outset it should be noted that there are several good reasons for thinking that a global ethics of the kind outlined here might not be possible. </p><p id="wqmu2" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst"> </p><p id="wqmu2" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst">Basic facts about the innate human moral sense that is the evolutionary product of millions of years of hunter-gather existence, set limits on how far we can project our empathy and with what constancy we can maintain it. History and tradition, as well social and political facts pertaining to the nature and powers in our present global economic system will also be significant obstacles towards achieving any large scale revaluation of values of the kind that I think is needed. Significant kinds of social and economic inequalities both within and among our present human societies will also make it difficult for all people to take up this kind of ethical framework at the same rate or to the same degree. </p><p id="wqmu2" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst"> </p><p id="wqmu2" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst">Large-scale changes in ethical beliefs and values do not happen overnight. Rather they begin with a small number of individuals who embrace them and then they are spread by means of social movements. They are taken up piecemeal, by different people at different rates, and they undergo changes in the process of social diffusion. </p> <p id="wqmu6" class="NormalindentCxSpLast"> </p><p id="wqmu6" class="NormalindentCxSpLast">However, one basis for an initial cautious affirmation of the possibility of a global ethics is an existence proof: there are, in fact, some individuals, those people who are among the 'cultural creatives' or 'global citizens' who are presently living in accordance with the basic values that a global ethics would dictate. </p><p id="wqmu6" class="NormalindentCxSpLast"> </p><p id="wqmu6" class="NormalindentCxSpLast">Some years ago I came across a website on which there appeared a “Declaration of Interdependence” which said that,<br /></p><p style="font-style: italic;" id="wqmu6" class="NormalindentCxSpLast">"We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all people are evolved equal; that they are endowed by their existence with certain undeniable responsibilities; that among these are respect for all life forms; stewardship of the biosphere, and the pursuit of a joyful and intelligent exploration of the Earth and the universe." </p><p style="font-style: italic;" id="wqmu6" class="NormalindentCxSpLast"> </p><p id="wqmu6" class="NormalindentCxSpLast">The kind of global perspective that inspired whoever wrote these words is becoming more widespread. One can find echoes of it in the lives of contemporary people who, through their personal choices, actions and lifestyles, demonstrate the kind of responsibility for themselves and for others that a global ethics requires. Such persons care about the international protection of human rights for all people, and strive to protect and sustain the natural environments they occupy. They also have a lively moral concern about what kind of world they will be leaving to their children and grandchildren, and to future generations to come. Since there are already some people who are enacting the model of global citizenship that I am attempting to describe here, there are grounds for hoping that the seeds of the future that are already present can be nurtured and spread. </p>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-85292605617600058542008-02-23T13:34:00.001-05:002008-05-01T13:40:38.608-04:00Conditions for Success of a Global Ethics<p id="acfm0" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst">In order for this philosophical theory to have any practical impact, the ethics of global responsibility needs to be scaled up. The fundamental practical question about the ethical framework described in this book is whether it can achieve sufficient scale of acceptance within the global community to make a difference in how a significantly large number of people think about the moral condition of humanity in the twenty-first century. How successfully this ethical theory can be scaled up depends upon a number of factors. Let me mention a few of the criteria that can be used to determine how potentially scalable a global ethics that requires a radical expansion of human responsibilities might be.</p><p id="acfm0" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst"> </p> <p id="acfm1" class="NormalindentCxSpLast">In order to achieve widespread acceptance and become internalized as part of the dominant ethos an account of a global ethics should:</p><p id="acfm2" class="NormalindentCxSpLast"> <span id="acfm4" class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span id="acfm5"></span></span></p> <p id="acfm7" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin: 0in 0.4in 12pt 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span id="acfm8" style="font-family:Symbol;"><span id="acfm9">· </span></span>Provide a coherent account of the nature, scope, and limitations of the moral responsibilities which moral agents have towards co-nationals, citizens of other states, future generations, and non-human species and the ecosystems on which they depend.</p> <p id="acfm11" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0.4in 12pt 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span id="acfm12" style="font-family:Symbol;"><span id="acfm13">· </span></span>Allocate the burdens of fulfilling these responsibilities in ways that are practically feasible given the limitations imposed by our nature, our powers and capacities, and our existing traditions. </p> <p id="acfm15" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0.4in 12pt 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span id="acfm16" style="font-family:Symbol;"><span id="acfm17">· </span></span>Be sustainable and enable future generations to elaborate it and improve it in useful and appropriate ways. </p> <p id="acfm19" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0.4in 12pt 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span id="acfm20" style="font-family:Symbol;"><span id="acfm21">· </span></span>Be teachable and be understandable by ordinary people, and not so complex and abstract that its implications for practical action cannot be apprehended..</p> <p id="acfm23" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0.4in 12pt 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span id="acfm24" style="font-family:Symbol;"><span id="acfm25">· </span></span>Be capable of achieving widespread adherence across diverse political, cultural, and economic systems and ideologies.</p> <p id="acfm27" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0.4in 12pt 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span id="acfm28" style="font-family:Symbol;"><span id="acfm29">· </span></span>Support and provide guidance concerning effective and feasible public policies for addressing global threats and provide practical guidance for policy-makers in dealing with these kinds of issues.</p> <p id="acfm31" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0.4in 12pt 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span id="acfm32" style="font-family:Symbol;"><span id="acfm33">· </span></span>Provide guidance in resolving conflicts involving different values, rights, and duties and between different fundamental ethical principles. </p> <p id="acfm35" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin: 0in 0.4in 12pt 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span id="acfm36" style="font-family:Symbol;"><span id="acfm37">· </span></span>Be able to withstand criticism, and demonstrate fruitfulness in solving new problems within the range of issues the overall framework is supposed to address.</p> <p id="acfm39" class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">There can be no prior assurance that any, let alone all, of these conditions can be satisfied. There is no way to prove that a global ethics is possible before we try to construct and deploy it. In other words, embarking on this project requires that one be willing to “risk the impossible” and to attempt to bring into being something that perhaps cannot be. I am willing to take that risk.</p> <p id="acfm39" class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst"> </p><p id="acfm39" class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst"> </p>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-70494078960583994632008-02-22T14:12:00.003-05:002008-05-01T14:33:47.921-04:00Top-Down and Bottom-Up Reflective Equilibrium<div style="text-align: left;">The methodology I will employ is a version of the method that John Rawls employed in his Theory of Justice (1971) in which he attempted to attain "reflective equilibrium" between commonsense moral intuitions and more abstract ethical principles. One can use this approach in either at "top-down" fashion beginning with an abstract ethical principle and using it to predict and guide moral conclusions about a range of cases calling for moral judgment. Or, on can begin by describing a range of cases which evoke moral intuitions, and then attempt to frame a more abstract ethical principle which would account for that pattern of intuitions. This is the "bottom-up" approach. In either case, the goal of research is to try to bring our moral intuitions in line with our ethical principles so that they align with one another.<br /><br />One can do this either by revising the moral principles when they conflict with strong moral intuitions about cases, or by setting aside certain of our moral intuitions when they conflict with what our ethical principles predict should be regarded as the morally correct judgment. One must approach this task with an open mind and be willing to regard at least some of one pre-analytic moral intuitions as fallible or illusory, and also be willing to revise or even abandon<br />one's proposed ethical principles when they are incapable of being squared with our robust moral intuitions. There is, of course, no reason why one cannot employ both top-down and bottom-up kinds of reasoning in this kind of endeavor and this is the way in which I shall proceed.<br /><br />My aim in the next chapter is to present a moral principle, which I will call the Vulnerability-Care Principle (VCP) and to try to make the case that it is a plausible candidate for the status of a fundamental ethical principle. For the moment I only wish to convince my readers that the VCP is plausibly thought to be capable of accounting for a wide range of standard moral intuitions which normally conscientious moral observers have about a wide range of moral cases. If I am successful in this, it will not show that the VCP is true in any interesting sense. In order to gain further justification for accepting the VCP as a fundamental principle of ethics one needs also to supply a general rationale for why there should be such a principle of ethics, to show how accepting the VCP as basic helps to illuminate and explain certain moral issues for which we normally think that other ethical principles are more appropriate, and how it helps us to resolve conflicts and solve problems in ethical theory and applied ethics.<br /><br />Like scientific theories, ethical theories can gain credence by demonstrating they are competitively supported by the available evidence and that they cohere with our considered beliefs in related domains of inquiry. So, for example, the theory of evolution in biology that assumes that extant species evolved over very long periods of time until they reached their present states, must cohere with theories in geology concerning the age of the earth. If the earth were in fact very much younger than is now generally believed, it would imply that either biological evolution would have to work much more quickly than is usually assumed, or that the theory of evolution is false or at least incomplete.<br /><br />Normative ethical theories about our rights and responsibilities will ultimately have to cohere with theories in the social sciences and in psychology about the nature of social relations and human motivation. If the ethical theory that features the VCP or something like it turns out for one reason or another not to cohere with facts and reliable theories about these matters, then it would count against its feasibility as a fundamental principle of ethics.</div><p style="text-align: left;">So the attainment of a reflective equilibrium between ones ethical theory and a range of moral intuitions is only the first step in providing a rational justification for believing that the VCP, or any ethical principle, is indeed a fundamental principle in ethics. I am not suggesting that can provide such a justification at the present time, but am only attempting to present the VCP as a plausible candidate for this status.</p><div> </div><p style="text-align: left;" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst">Fortunately, there have been other thinkers who have explored much of the territory I plan to cover and whose guidance I will be relying on for much of what I will have to say about the VCP. In particular, Robert Goodin and Virginia Held have pioneered this approach to ethical theory, and, as will become obvious, I am greatly in their debt as concerns the task of demonstrating the plausibility of the VCP. </p><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><p style="text-align: left;" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle">My specific contribution will be to attempt to go further than either of these authors and to show that, when properly understood, the VCP is able to provide an account of what we normally think of as the social responsibilities derived from human rights. If I am successful in showing how this is the case, then we will be in a theoretical position in which becomes possible to connect the discourse of human rights with the discourse of social responsibility, and to show how human rights are derived from social responsibilities rather than the other way around, as is normally assumed. </p><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><p style="text-align: left;" class="NormalindentCxSpLast">Having made the connection between social responsibilities and human rights, we will then be in a position to argue that the range of our social responsibilities is wider than only those that ground human rights, and extend the VCP to the bio-centric and intergenerational realms. If this is successful, then I believe that I will have succeeded in making the case that the VCP is a plausible candidate for a fundamental principle of ethics, one which when properly understood, can provide a common normative framework for a global ethics of the kind I envision.<br /></p><p style="text-align: left;" class="NormalindentCxSpLast"><br /></p>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-32471944699554860322008-02-21T09:52:00.003-05:002010-06-24T09:25:04.934-04:00A Meta-Ethical Digression: Moral Pluralism<p id="xocd0" style="margin: 0in; font-weight: bold; font-family: arial; font-size: 12pt;"></p><span><span><br /> Meta-ethics is a set of theories about doing ethics. Ethics, considered broadly, is a normative theory about the nature of the moral life or the moral realm, that is, the realm in which we talk about things like values, duties, rights, virtues, responsibility, blame, guilt, and a variety of other moral concepts. Normative ethics is that branch of ethics that attempts to explain morality, that is, roughly, to give an account of what it is moral agents owe to one another as members of a moral community. I say roughly, because as I will define the notion of a moral community, it will include as members moral patients who are not also moral agents to whom (or to which) moral agents owe moral responsibilities. Morality concerns what it is we should do, and normative ethical theory attempts to give a systematic answer to this question.<br /><br /></span></span><div><span><span>In meta-ethics there is a theoretical dispute between the partisans of a monistic approach, and those of a pluralistic approach. Monists hope to find a single, comprehensive ethical principle which is capable of explaining all of our considered moral judgments about moral matters.<br /><br />The leading candidate for this status is the principle of utility, particularly that version championed by John Stuart Mill, known as the Greatest Happiness Principle. According to this theory, what is morally right for moral agents to do is to act so as to maximize that happiness (or well-being) of all of those (sentient) individuals who are affected by our actions in the long term counting each individuals interest in happiness as equal. This is sometimes referred to as the ethics of universal benevolence. The principle of utility has many variants and many defenders, so many, that I do not have time to review them here. I want to focus only on that group of utilitarians who join this principle of normative ethics to the assumption of theoretical monism, that is, the idea that there is only one fundamental principle of ethics. It is this idea that I want to reject.<br /><br /></span></span></div><div><span><span>In my view, the duty to maximize utility is an ordinary standing moral responsibility like the duty to prevent harm, to protect and care for the vulnerable, the duty to do justice, or the duty to respect another person's autonomy. The mistake that some utilitarians make is that they try to portray the maximization of utility as a kind of "master principle" that encapsulates all other moral considerations. But from a pluralistic, deontological point of view, like the one I prefer, utility maximization is only one normative principle among many others with which it may agree or conflict. While it would be theoretically "sweet" to have a "master principle" in ethics, just as it would be theoretically sweet to have a grand unified field theory in physics, I do not believe that any such theory is in the offing, at least as far as normative ethics is concerned.<br /><br />Instead, on my view, there will be a plurality of fundamental principles of normative ethics that together describe and explain the moral intuitions that normal, morally sensitive individuals have over a wide range of cases and contexts. In some cases and in some contexts, utility provides a useful moral guide to what conscientious moral agents ought to do. But it is not the only guide to normative rightness and must give way in certain kinds of cases to moral considerations deriving from other fundamental moral principles. <br />One can appreciate the pluralism of normative ethical principles by focusing on the nature of the arguments that are commonly employed against utilitarianism when it is cast in the role of the master principle of ethics. One finds counter-intuitive examples in which considerations of utility conflict with those of justice, for instance, in the case of the drifter who can be framed for a crime he did not commit. Or arguments involving conflicts between the duty to maximize impartial utility and duties of care that arise because of special interpersonal relationships. Or cases in which the duty to respect personal autonomy runs up against a attempt to do what ones knows to be in another person's best interests. In all of these kinds of arguments the basic structure consists in noticing that the duty to maximize utility conflicts with some other kinds of moral obligations derived from some other moral principle. <br /><br /></span></span></div><div><span><span>But this problem is not unique to the theory of utility or other consequentialist theories in ethics. The same kind of argument can be used to draw attention to conflicts between justice and care or between justice and autonomy or between autonomy and care, and so on. The conclusion that one should draw then is that there is simply no master principle of morality that can be used to guide moral decision-making and evaluation in all cases. As Kwame Anthony Appiah has put it, "Anyone looking for decision procedures, a way of ranking values or a set of rules for choosing among them, such be warned that 'naturalized ethics' is never going to get us there. This isn't because of any crevasse between 'is' and 'ought'; it is because there's no there there. Normative theories, if they are sensible, do not offer algorithms for action." (Experiments in Ethics. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, p. 193).<br /><br /> </span></span></div><div><span><span>The meta-ethical stance known as moral pluralism supposes that rather than a single table of values and a single master principle of morality, what we have is a plurality of values and a plurality of fundamental ethical principles. The standard objection to this view is that it lacks theoretical simplicity and offers no means by which to decide which duties shall take precedence when duties derived from independent principles conflict with one another in practical cases. But while theoretical simplicity may be an important value in the empirical sciences, its value in the moral sciences is overrated. <br /><br /></span></span></div><div><span><span>The reason for this is that in normative ethics what we are aiming for, in part, is a social consensus about what kinds of actions and policies ought to be generally accepted as morally right. In order to justify any particular proposed normative policy to a lot of moral agents one needs to find what John Rawls called a overlapping consensus, that is, everyone may not agree to endorse a particular course of action or policy for the same reason, but if there is enough convergence among everybody's own reasons, then we can say that the policy has strong support, even though everybody's back story about why they endorse the policy may be a different one. Most favored policies and practices are those that are supported by the convergence of a variety of independent reasons deriving from various sorts of moral and non-moral considerations. They have what in science is termed "consilience", that is, support from a number of independent lines of evidence or argument. Having a plurality of fundamental moral principles and values is what makes such multiple, independent but sometimes intersecting kinds of justifications possible, and thus it is what allows us to achieve a broad-based social consensus. <br /></span></span><p id="xocd12" style="margin: 0in; font-family:arial;font-size:12pt;"><br /></p><p id="xocd12" face="arial" size="12pt" style="margin: 0in; ">The current global consensus on human rights is a good example of this kind of "many-legged" justificatory strategy. Human rights norms and values are justified by a variety of different sorts of moral and practical considerations deriving from considerations of justice, utility, nonmalefiecence, vulnerability, dignity, equality, convention, as well as<span id="xocd13" style=""> </span>by religious or metaphysical and metaphysical beliefs. There is no such thing as <span id="xocd14" style="font-style: italic;">the</span> justification for human rights. Rather there are a set of partially adequate overlapping justifications for various particular rights as well as a general set of philosophical and political rationales for holding that certain rights should be regarded as belonging to persons as such, irrespective of their particular identities. (See Morton Winston, "Human Rights as Moral Rebellion and Social Construction." <span style="font-style: italic;">Journal of Human Rights</span>, Vol. 6, No. 3 2007: 279-305. for a fuller account).</p><p id="xocd12" face="Tahoma" size="12pt" style="margin: 0in; font-family: arial;"><br /></p> <p id="xocd15" style="margin: 0in; font-family: arial; font-size: 12pt;"> </p> <p id="xocd16" style="margin: 0in; font-family: arial; font-size: 12pt;"></p><span><span>A plurality of principles also enables us to achieve a better fit between our principles and our moral intuitions over a wide variety of kinds of situations and issues calling for moral reflection and decision. No single moral principle can do the job of describing our actual patterns of moral judgment as well as a set of multiple moral principles. It is not just that normative ethics is just a "messy" field of inquiry that has not yet achieved its true paradigm -- the moral life is just too complex to be reduced to a single over-arching theory of what makes actions morally right, what makes some things morally valuable, and what the good life for human beings consists of. <br /><br /></span></span></div><div><span><span>To borrow some terms from linguistic theory, ethical theories must strive to attain both descriptive and explanatory adequacy. To attain descriptive adequacy they must provide a plausible account of why people's moral intuitions about cases or situations calling for moral judgment or evaluation are as they are. In order to achieve this, it is often necessary to hypothesize the existence of a variety of moral rules and higher-level ethical principles, a moral grammar, that correctly predicts how ordinary competent moral observers will respond to cases calling for moral evaluation. However, there are likely to be many descriptively adequate ethical theories in this sense. Theory choice in ethics, as in other sciences, is underdetermined by the empirical evidence. So one needs to find other considerations to motivate the choice among competing normative theories. One then resorts to looking as theoretical parsimony, explanatory power, fruitfulness, coherence with theories in related domains of inquiry, and so forth, in order to find additional factors that can be used to help determine the choice of theories. But theoretical parsimony or simplicity should not be traded off against descriptive adequacy, in general, but especially in ethics. Because normative rules and principles are developed in order to guide the ordinary moral decision-making of typical moral agents, it is better that they be practical and accurate. <br /><br /></span></span></div><div><span><span>So, then, by advancing the Vulnerability-Care Principle as a fundamental principle of normative ethics I am not suggesting it is a "master principle" that supplants other fundamental principles of ethics. Nor should my narrative about vulnerability, dependence, care, and responsibility be construed taking the place of a much richer moral vocabulary that also talks about rights, justice, virtue, utility, and other matters relevant to the moral life. As in the case of other fundamental moral principles found in normative ethics, the VCP must compete with and often conflict with the demands of other moral principles, and when it does so, its victory is not assured in advance. <br />But because the VCP is a relatively under-studied principle of ethics, one whose theoretical value and importance is not widely understood or appreciated, I think it worth emphasizing it in order to reveal its potential. In my view the VCP is not just as a normative principle that can be used in the private sphere of the family, where it finds it most natural home, but also in the public sphere whether it is often considered not to apply at all or to apply in only limited ways. <br /><br /></span></span></div><div><span><span>The burden of my argument will be to make a plausible case that the VCP is indeed a fundamental principle of normative ethics, not to claim that it is the only or the most important one. But I do wish to claim that the VCP and the associated concept of social responsibility derived from it do helps to account for a wide range of moral intuitions we have about our moral responsibilities, and that looking at some problems in normative ethics from the perspective of vulnerability and responsibility reveals some interesting insights about the relationship of the VCP to other moral concepts, in particular, the concept of human rights.</span></span><p id="xocd26" style="margin: 0in; font-family:arial;font-size:12pt;"><br /><span id="xocd27" style=""> </span></p> <p id="xocd28" style="margin: 0in; font-family: arial; font-size: 12pt;"> </p></div>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-24013963158370431762008-02-20T17:00:00.002-05:002010-06-24T09:36:23.946-04:00The Vulnerability Principle<div style="text-align: justify;font-family:verdana;"><span style="font-family:verdana;">In one of the most under appreciated</span><span id="xb-42" style="font-family:verdana;"> </span><span style="font-family:verdana;">books in moral philosophy to come out in the past few decades</span><i id="xb-41">, Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities</i><span style="font-family:verdana;"> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) , Robert Goodin argued that moral responsibilities, though diverse in many ways, all derive from a common underlying moral principle, which he called the Vulnerability Principle (VP):</span> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:georgia;" class="Blockquote" id="xb-43"> <i id="xb-44"><span id="xb-45"> </span></i> </p><div face="verdana" style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:georgia;" class="Blockquote" id="xb-47"> <i id="xb-48"><span id="xb-49"> </span></i><b face="verdana" id="xb-410"><i></i></b></p><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><b>(VP): Moral agents acquire special responsibilities to protect the interests of others to the extent that those others are specially vulnerable or in some way dependent on their choices and actions. </b></span></span></span><p face="verdana" style="text-align: justify; font-family: verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst" id="xb-414"> According to Goodin, when we analyze many commonsense moral intuitions about our moral responsibilities towards others we recognize that what is crucial to them, "is that others are depending on us. They are particularly vulnerable to our actions and choices. That, I argue, is the true source of all the standard special responsibilities that we so readily acknowledge. The same considerations of vulnerability that make our obligations to our families, friends, clients, and compatriots especially strong can also give rise to similar responsibilities toward a much larger group of people who stand in none of the standard relationships to us" (Goodin 1985, 11). He says that this will use the VP to "ratchet up" from our intuitions about special role-related responsibilities to argue that what we normally think of as general moral duties "derive from fundamentally the same sorts of moral considerations" (11). Before summarizing key aspects of Goodin's argument, it might be helpful to define what is meant by vulnerability. </p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: verdana;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify; font-family: verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle" id="xb-415"> </p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: verdana;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle" id="xb-415"><span style="font-family:verdana;"> </span></p><span style="font-family:verdana;">The concept of vulnerability is, essentially, the state of affairs in which a moral patient is in some way susceptible to injury or harm. The most vulnerable people in the world are, for example, refugees who have lost everything; they are without food, shelter. or clean water; children who have lost their parents and are without schools or caregivers; those stricken with natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods; those who are sick without access to medical care; those who are captives and are at the mercy of others, and in general, anyone who lacks the ability to protect their own most basic interests. The vulnerability principle (VP), calls upon competent and capable moral agents to act so as to avoid placing vulnerable people at risk, and to prevent harm or injury from befalling those who are at risk or are specially vulnerable in some </span><span><span>way.</span></span><div><span><span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;">A quote from Goodin serves to clarify this idea further: "It makes perfectly good sense to speak of someone's being vulnerable either to manmade threats or natural ones. Likewise, it makes perfectly good sense to speak of someone's being vulnerable either to harms that come about through others' omissions or neglect or to harms that come about through others' positive actions" (110). His notion of vulnerability is further explained the same page: "This point emerges particularly in relation to such cognate notions as 'helplessness' and 'dependence.' The former is defined as the state of being 'unable to help oneself'; the latter as 'depending upon, being conditioned or subordinate or subject; living at another's cost; reliance, confident trust.' In both these situations, the vulnerability in view is to harms that come about through other people's inactions rather than their actions" (110, note 3). Vulnerability is a dispositional property of things. To be vulnerable is to be </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;">susceptible to being harmed. But harmed in what way, and by whom, and under what circumstances?</span><span style="font-family:verdana;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-family:verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family:verdana;">Philosophers who have analyzed the concept of a disposition have distinguished dispositions that are intrinsic to things from those that extrinsic. An example of an extrinsic disposition is the property of my front door key to unlock my front door. My key has the dispositional property of unlocking only the lock on my door; it does not have the disposition to unlock other doors. Similarly, other dispositional properties such as weight, visibility, recognizability, solubility, and many others are relational in that a complete description requires at least two variables, usually more than two.</span><div><span style="font-family:verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family:verdana;">We can understand vulnerability, in a general sense, as susceptibility to being harmed. To be harmed is to be made worse off than one was at an earlier time. Moral patients can be harmed either by the direct acts of another or by the omissions of others who fail to intervene so as to protect them from threats that they themselves do not create but which they can prevent or thwart. In both cases, a moral agent who possesses some capacity to affect a vulnerable other's well being acts or refrains from acting so as to bring it about that the vulnerable moral patient who is the object of his moral responsibilities is not made worse off because of the agent's acts or omissions. Moral responsibilities to protect the vulnerable, then, are moral obligations that require moral agents to avoid causing harm and to act so as to prevent harm from coming to moral patients whose well-being they have to power to affect. It is important to see that the idea of vulnerability that Goodin is using is a relational one: "Vulnerability implies that there is some agent (actual or metaphorical) capable of exercising some effective choice...over whether to cause or to avert threatened harm" (112). Similarly for the notion of dependency, "one depends upon someone for something." Goodin explain this as follows:</span><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: verdana;"><blockquote><p class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" id="xb-426" style="font-family:georgia;">References to vulnerability imply two other references. One is <span style="font-style: italic;">to what </span>the persons or things are vulnerable. Where do their weaknesses lie? What mechanisms are capable of inflicting harm on them? The other is <span style="font-style: italic;">to whom</span> the persons or things are vulnerable. Who can inflict harms on me? Who can protect me against them? One is alway vulnerable to particular agents with respect to particular sorts of threats....Like the notions of power and freedom, that of vulnerability is inherent object and agent relative. (112)<span id="xb-427"><br /></span></p></blockquote></div><p face="georgia" style="text-align: justify;" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle" id="xb-416"></p><span style="font-family:verdana;">Rather than a three-place relation, I think it is preferable to think of vulnerability as a four place relationship. The vulnerability relation can be presented in general as having the following four-variable form: </span></div><div><span style="font-family:verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family:verdana;"><b>The Vulnerability Relation: A is vulnerable to B because of C with respect to D.</b> </span></div><div><span style="font-family:verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family:verdana;">In this formula (A) stands for a moral patient who is the object of a moral agent's (B) moral responsibility. (B) is the subject or bearer of a moral responsibility towards (A). (C) represents some aspect of A's good, well-being, or interest that is at risk or is threatened by B's acts or omissions. (D) stands for some power or capacity that B possesses that allows B to affect A's good, well-being, or interest. (C) is the condition or circumstance that makes A specially vulnerable, and (D) refers to a feature of B's power, capacity, or ability to affect C. I will clarify what is meant by special vulnerability at a later time (See Special Vulnerability).</span><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family:verdana;">In thinking of vulnerability as a dispositional and relational notion, Goodin theory resembles the feminist ethics of care developed by philosophers such as Virginia Held who notes that, "It is characteristic of the ethics of care to view persons as relational and as interdependent" (The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 46). Both the ethics of care and the ethics of vulnerability differ from traditional deontological and consequentialist ethical theories which regard moral agents as independent and equal autonomous individuals, and which sees them as competing with other independent individuals for resources and advantages. In contrast, the ethics of care, "conceptualizes persons as deeply affected by, and involved in, relations with others;…it does not assume that relations relevant for morality have been entered into voluntarily by free and equal individuals, as do dominant moral theories. It appreciates as well the values of care between persons of unequal power in unchosen relations such as those between parents and children and between members of social groups of various kinds" (Held, 46). </span></div><div><span style="font-family:verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family:verdana;">Goodin's vulnerability principles and Held's ethic of care share more than just this basic similarity, and are in fact, I shall argue, complementary accounts of the kinds of moral responsibilities that arise as the result of relationships characterized by vulnerability and dependence. The apprehension of the vulnerability of others induces the moral response of care in socially responsible moral agents. Held tends to see the vulnerability relationship from the point of view of the caregiver who responds to the vulnerability of others, while Goodin tends sees it from the point of view of the vulnerable others who deserves to be cared for. But it is possible, and indeed necessary, to see it both ways.</span><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">I think it possible to combine Goodin's VP and Held's ethics of care into a general approach to normative ethical theory that I will sometimes refer to as the Ethics of Vulnerability and Care. At a later stage in my argument I shall suggest some important modifications in the way Goodin's Vulnerability Principle (VP) is framed and combine it with some insights Held and others into a single general ethical principle, what I will call the Vulnerability-Care Principle (VCP). </span></div><div><span style="font-family:verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family:verdana;">Goodin's version of the VP has certain theoretical limitations; it is designed to explain what are called "special obligations" or "special responsibilities", but I want to use it as the basis of a general theory of moral responsibilities and as a fundamental principle of a global ethics. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:verdana;">In order to extend the VP in this way I will need to clarify what is meant by the notion of moral responsibility. I will also need to define and explain the concept of moral status, which will be used to specify what sorts of things can count as moral agents and moral patients within the vulnerability relationship.</span><p style="text-align: justify; font-family:georgia;" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle" id="xb-416"><span style="font-family:verdana;">But before turning to these tasks I need to say more about the notions of care and vulnerability.</span><br /></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle" id="xb-416"> </p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle" id="xb-416"> </p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle" id="xb-417"> </p></div></div>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-19676154104656919662008-02-20T14:55:00.002-05:002008-08-19T15:20:58.738-04:00Special Vulnerability<span style="font-family:verdana;"> It is necessary now to clarify what is meant by the notion of </span><i style="font-family: verdana;" id="v8f4">special</i><span style="font-family:verdana;"> vulnerability. Moral patients are, in general, always vulnerable in the sense that they can be harmed. However, there are certain kinds of circumstances or conditions in which moral patients are actually under threat of being harmed; in these cases we can say that they are specially vulnerable.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">Many of the standard ethical thought experiments that philosophers use to elicit strong moral intuitions are ones that employ some kind of threat that makes the moral patient seems specially vulnerable. For instance, in the ever popular trolley examples, the scenario always involves some people who are tied to trolley tracks and are in danger of being run over by a trolley. Individuals who are tied to trolley tracks are unable to flee to avoid the on-rushing trolley and so are specially vulnerable to being harmed or killed. It is the present danger that makes this kind of case so compelling as an example for the duty to rescue. One has a completely different response if the stipulation that they are tied to the tracks is omitted. Suppose that there are five people who are merely standing in the path of the trolley, but who are perfectly capable of moving off the tracks as the trolley approaches. Suppose on the other track there is a person who is lying unconscious across the track. In this case, I would not suppose that many people would opt for directing the trolley towards the one who is specially vulnerable -- the unconscious one. It would be assumed that the five others can protect themselves from the trolley by merely stepping to one side of the tracks, and so the moral agent should send the trolley toward them on the assumption that it would be preferable to risk hitting five people who can avoid being hit than it would be to surely kill the one specially vulnerable individual. The special vulnerability of the people on the tracks is a feature of this familiar case that is rarely remarked upon by commentators. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">Or consider Peter Singer's famous case of the small child drowning in a shallow lake. The child in this scenario is specially vulnerable in the way in which, for instance, another child walking quietly on the shore beside the lake is not. One would not, I expect, be inclined to think that one has a special responsibility to rush over to the later child and warn him not to go into the lake where he might drown. He might well be equally vulnerable to drowning, in the general sense, but because he is not immediately threatened with drowning the special responsibility to protect the vulnerable is not triggered where it would be in the case of the child who is actually floundering helplessly in the water. Again, the scenario works to evoke the moral intuition that bystanders have a special responsibility to rescue the floundering child precisely because she is in a circumstance which makes her specially vulnerable. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">There are other famous philosophical arguments that trade on the special vulnerability of a moral patient. Hobbes, for instance, in describing the "state of nature" makes it abundantly clear that persons in the state of nature are vulnerable to a great many harms, such as being killed in their sleep. But in discussing the right to life, he stipulates that it comes into play in cases where one's own life is actually being threatened. In such cases, he argued, we have a right of self-defense that allows us to act so as to protect our own lives, even if this means killing an aggressor. Indeed, for Hobbes, the right to life is the most fundamental and the only natural right we have, and we do not lose it even when we enter into civil society and live under the rule of a sovereign monarch; we would still in his view have the natural right to defend our own lives when mortally threatened by the King. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">As Goodin explains it:</span><br /><blockquote style="font-family: verdana;" id="vtyg">According to the Oxford English Dictionary, something is "vulnerable" if it "may be wounded," either literally or figuratively; it is "susceptible of injury, not proof against weapon, criticism, etc." Essentially, then the principle of protecting the vulnerable amounts to an injunction to prevent harms from befalling people. Conceptually, "vulnerability" is essentially a matter of <i id="vtyg0">being under threat of harm</i>; therefore, protecting the vulnerable is primarily a matter of forestalling threatened harms. (Goodin, 1985, p. 110, italics added)<br /></blockquote><span style="font-family:verdana;">In the Vulnerability Relation, the C term, is the condition or circumstance that constitutes the threat which makes a moral patient specially vulnerable. Goodin mentions infants and young children as classes of moral patients who are specially vulnerable (p .33). Also the mentally and physically handicapped, the poor, the aged and infirm (p. 34), terminally-ill cancer patients (38), American Indian tribes (40), refugees and stateless persons (168), and he suggests in passing, animals and future generations (169). I will develop and defend this suggestion at a later stage of the argument, but for the time being, it should be clear that when I use the term "vulnerability" I will mean actually being under threat of harm, rather than just the abstract possibility of being harmed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">Given this meaning of vulnerability we should be able to say things like: members of an endangered species a vulnerable, while those of a non-endangered species are not. Prisoners as a class are vulnerable, while those not imprisoned are not. What makes prisoners specially vulnerable is the fact that their condition of incarceration removes the possibility of their defending themselves from threats by fleeing. This is one of the feature that make the practice of torture so morally horrendous -- the person who is being tortured is typically a captive who has no means of escape nor any means of defending himself from assaults upon his person. It is the deliberate infliction of pain upon a person who is specially vulnerable that make torture so appalling. As we shall see, many of the things that we call "human rights" are designed to forestall threats of just this kind, that is, threats upon persons who are, for some reason or another, specially vulnerable. Indeed, oppressed persons generally are an important class of specially vulnerable moral patients. If oppressed persons, as a class of moral patients, are specially vulnerable, and if the VP is a fundamental principle of ethics, then it follows that those moral agents who have the ability to protect the oppressed and prevent them from being harmed, have the moral responsibility to do so. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">Under the VP moral agents who have some ability D to forestall or prevent oppressed persons from being harmed have a special responsibility towards them. This is, I believe, the ethical basis of the responsibility to protect that has recently been developed to articulate the requirement to aid those peoples threatened with genocide or ethnic cleansing. Bystander nations have the special responsibility to protect this class of specially vulnerable moral patients. As Goodin, insists, "What the vulnerability model emphasizes is not just their special need, ... but also your special ability to help. That is the crucial factor in imposing the duty upon you in particular" (p .34). This special ability to help is the D factor in the Vulnerability Relation. Moral agents who are incapable of helping the vulnerable can be excused from their moral responsibility to protect the vulnerable, other things being equal. But those who are able to help, and who have no other legitimate excuse, acquire an actual moral obligation to act so as to protect the vulnerable.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">We can say that members of the class of moral agents who possess D occupy the role of a potential rescuers. To illustrate this notion, suppose that a fellow airplane passenger suddenly stops breathing while in flight. The persons who are that individual's potential rescuers include those trained in CPR or who have special medical knowledge that might enable them to render assistance. Another passenger, for instance, a philosopher who does not know how to perform CPR, does not have the relevant D factor in this case. The responsibility to attempt to resuscitate the stricken passenger falls more heavily on those who have the relevant D, than it would on someone who lacks that critical skill. The class of potential rescuers might contain the flight attendants, a physician or nurse who is on the plane, or another bystander who has been trained in CPR. While the incompetent philosopher also has a prima facie moral responsibility to rescue the stricken passenger, he may be excused from actually trying to help on grounds of his incompetence, particularly, if there are other, competent moral agents present who rightfully can fulfill the role of potential rescuers because of some special training, skill, or ability they possess. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">Some people might find it odd to speak about roles in this context. We normally think of roles as being defined by social conventions, e.g., the roles of doctor, lawyer, teacher, parent, and so on. However, as Goodin suggests, and I will later argue, not all roles are conventionally defined; there are some moral obligations that are brought into being between moral patients and moral agents because of the Vulnerability Relation itself -- that is, because of their special vulnerability and your special ability to help. It is possible to think of these sorts of moral obligations as </span><i style="font-family: verdana;" id="iipr">natural duties</i><span style="font-family:verdana;">, where the term "natural" here should be understood as opposed to "conventional." The responsibility to protect the vulnerable, in cases where one has the ability to forestall an actual threat to their survival, well-being, or freedom, is an example of such a natural duty.<br /><br />If there is such a natural duty to protect the vulnerable, then the vulnerable have the basis of a moral claim to social protection, that is, they have a right to it. In this way, natural rights (or entitlements) can be derived from natural duties. The VP and the Vulnerability Relation, then, might plausibly provide an account of rights that does not depend on seeing them as either transcendental "God-given" moral properties, nor as mere social conventions. Natural rights, on this view, are derived from the natural responsibility of the able to protect the vulnerable.<br /><br />The notion of a natural duty here is meant to indicate that the Vulnerability Relation and the Vulnerability Principle express a kind of theoretically primitive notion of moral obligation, primitive in the sense that it is not derived from any other moral fundamental moral notions or principles. It expresses a moral axiom that can be used as the basis for developing an ethics of global responsibility.</span>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-80643171058844776282008-02-19T09:14:00.000-05:002008-05-06T09:21:54.680-04:00The Ethics of Care<p id="slb43" style="font-family: Tahoma;" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst">Virginia Held is one of several feminist philosophers who have elaborated an “ethics of care” as a promising alternative to traditional ethical theories such as deontology, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics. As she presents it, “the ethics of care stresses the moral force of the responsibility to respond to the needs of the dependent” (2006, 10). Care is understood as both a value and a practice. It values moral emotions such as “sympathy, empathy, sensitivity, and responsiveness,” and even “anger may be a component of the moral indignation that should be felt when people are treated unjustly or inhumanely.”<br /></p><p id="slb43" style="font-family: Tahoma;" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst"><br />But the ethics of care does not rely on transient emotions alone to guide moral judgment and behavior, rather, it emphasizes that caring involves practices through which the caregiver responds to the claims of actual individuals with whom she shares an actual relationship. For Held, “care is a practice involving the work of care-giving and the standards by which the practices of care can be evaluated” (36). <span id="slb44"> </span>Traditional ethical theories tend to be individualistic, the ethics of care, like that ethics of responsibility, “sees persons as relational and interdependent, morally and epistemologically” (13); Held understands care primarily not in terms of emotions but as “caring relations” (36).<br /></p><p id="slb43" style="font-family: Tahoma;" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst">Thus, like the ethics of vulnerability, the care ethic is fundamental relational rather than individualistic. Individualism “obscures the innumerable ways persons and groups are interdependent in the modern world”, while the ethics of care is “hospitable to the relatedness of persons,” and it sees “our responsibilities as not freely entered into but presented to us by the accidents of our embeddedness in familial and social and historical contexts” (2006, 14). <span id="slb45"> </span><span id="slb46"><br /></span></p> <p id="slb47" style="font-family: Tahoma;" class="NormalindentCxSpLast">There is little question that the ethics of care has a great deal to say about moral relationships in what is generally regarded as the private sphere of family and personal friends. The interesting theoretical question is whether this approach to ethics can also be used to understand moral relationships in the public sphere, that is, among individuals who are essentially strangers to one another and who may not have any kind of direct personal relationship.<br /></p><p id="slb47" style="font-family: Tahoma;" class="NormalindentCxSpLast">Like some other theorists working in feminist ethics. I think that it can. Joan Tronto has argued that care should play a role not only in private, but also in public ethics, and that considerations of care and vulnerability are involved in assessments of moral responsibility in the social and political realms as well as in the private realm of the family (Tronto, 1993). Fiona Robinson has argued that care ethics is relevant to the global context:</p><blockquote id="r0zs1"><p id="slb47" style="font-family: Tahoma;" class="NormalindentCxSpLast">We can use the ethics of care as the basis for rethinking the normative priorities of our societies and our world. Care must be seen not simply as a moral orientation, but as the basis for the political achievement of a good society, or, I would add, a morally decent world. By using the ethics of care as a starting point, we can fundamentally revise our understandings of the nature of our moral relations with others in the global context. ("The Limits of a Rights-based Approach to Global Ethics." In Tony Evans (Ed.). <span id="r2qp0" style="font-style: italic;">Human Rights Fifty Years On: A Reappraisal</span>. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998, p. 69.)<br /></p></blockquote><p id="slb47" style="font-family: Tahoma;" class="NormalindentCxSpLast">The ethics of care offers a distinct approach to ethical theory, one that complements an ethics of justice that emphasizes the concepts of fairness and rights, but does not reduce to it. In Held’s view an “adequate, comprehensive moral theory will have to include the insights of both the ethics of care and the ethics of justice, among other insights….Equitable caring is not necessarily better caring, it is fairer caring. And humane justice is not necessarily better justice, it is more caring justice” (16). Her suggestion for integrating the two ethics is to “keep these concepts conceptually distinct and to delineate the domains in which they should have priority.” This approach agrees with my own preference for moral pluralism in normative ethics, that is, for the idea that there are several distinct fundamental ethical principles that are needed in order to provide a descriptively and explanatorily adequate account of the moral realm.<br /></p> <p id="slb48" style="font-family: Tahoma;" class="Blockquote">In the realm of law, for instance, the notions of justice and rights have traditionally held priority, although considerations of care are also relevant, as I will later argue. In the realm of the family and among friends, priority has generally been given to considerations of care, though the basic requirements of justice surely should also be met -- this is obvious to anyone who, like me, has had more than one child. As Held says, "these are the clearest cases; others will contain moral combine moral urgencies. Universal human rights (including the social and economic ones as well as the political and civil) should certainly be respected, but promoting care across continents may be a more promising way to achieve this than mere rational recognition (2006, 17).</p> <p id="slb49" style="font-family: Tahoma;" class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">My own view is that certain fundamental features of the concept of universal human rights can be grounded in the ethics of care and the concept of social responsibility. Human rights, on my view, have been socially constructed in order to give concrete expression to the social responsibility to protect people against oppression. I will develop this argument in later sections, as a part of the cosmopolitan dimension of my global ethics. Held’s view and mine are not that far apart since I agree with her that “care is probably the most deeply fundamental value” (17), and also that “social relations of persons caring enough about one another to respect them as fellow members of a community are normatively prior to individuals being valued as holders of individual rights, or to citizenship in a liberal state, and the like” (102).<span id="slb410"> </span><br /></p><p id="slb49" style="font-family: Tahoma;" class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">The social responsibility to care for the vulnerable and the oppressed is one ethical root of human rights. Rights, including human rights, are moral constructs which serve to focus social responsibilities on certain classes of beneficiaries and to ascribe responsibilities to protect them in various ways to certain classes of moral agents. The specification of the classes of beneficiaries and the bearers of the specific responsibilities to care for and protect them are socially negotiated and legitimated. So in order to understand how rights grow from responsibilities to protect the vulnerable, we must join the ethics of care and vulnerability to a discourse ethics of the kind developed by J<span id="slb411">ü</span>rgen Habermas. <br /></p><p id="slb49" style="font-family: Tahoma;" class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">As Held notes, this is kind of theoretical alliance is quite possible since “the ethics of care is hospitable to the methods of discourse ethics, though with an emphasis on actual dialogue that empowers its participants to express themselves rather than on discourse so ideal that actual differences of viewpoint fall away” (20). The historical and cultural embeddedness of this kind of discourse ethics presents a contrast to the idealized social bargaining of Rawls’ conception of the original position in which the parties negotiate behind a veil of ignorance that denies them knowledge of their particular stations and roles in society. Since concrete knowledge of one’s particular social relationships, and the actual distribution of powers and vulnerabilities is crucial to the vulnerability-care approach to ethics, this idealized decision-making procedure cannot explain how the specific rights and responsibilities which human moral agents have developed.<span id="slb412"> </span>As Held writes, “differences of actual power are inevitable in public as well as personal contexts, and we do well to recognize them rather than mask them behind liberal fictions of equality,” but when we focus on social relations, “we can come to see how to shape good caring relations so that differences in power will not be pernicious and so that the vulnerable are empowered” (56).<span id="slb413"> <br /></span></p><p id="slb49" style="font-family: Tahoma;" class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst"><span id="slb413"></span>Rights functions as means for empowering those who are vulnerable to being oppressed; they provide a platform from which to advance moral and legal claims that society protect them from forces that would harm them or deny them secure access to goods and liberties necessary for a decent and dignified human existence. Human rights, in particular, function as a means of restraining the powerful from abusing the vulnerable, and for mobilizing social resources to protect the vulnerable against forces that would harm them. While human rights begin as moral responses to historically experienced forms of oppression, in order to become operational they must be developed into institutional mechanisms that function effectively to mobilize social resources to protect the vulnerable. <span id="slb414">The ethics of care, thus, forms one of the principal bases of the ethics of human rights. </span></p>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-85942143493171433632008-02-17T10:52:00.001-05:002008-05-06T10:56:14.332-04:00Vulnerability vs. Voluntarism<span style="font-family:verdana;">Goodin begins his account of the Vulnerability Principle by asserting that many of our special role-related moral responsibilities are shaped and governed by the particular kinds of vulnerability that pertain to the parties to a social relationship (10).</span><span style="font-family: verdana;" id="qf0_3"> </span><span style="font-family:verdana;">He applies the VP to a set of standard kinds of special relationships, such as, those found within the family, business relationships, professional relationships, and to cases involving promises and contracts, where the special moral responsibilities involved are normally understood to be voluntarily assumed on the model of promises and contracts. </span> <p class="NormalindentCxSpFirst" id="qf0_2" style="font-family: verdana;"> </p> <p class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle" id="qf0_4" style="font-family: Verdana;"> The main rival to the vulnerability model, its theoretical foil, is the voluntaristic notion of special responsibilities according to which, "special responsibilities derive their moral force from the fact that they have been voluntarily self‑assumed" (13). If voluntarism is the correct account of the origin and basis of special moral responsibilities, then a moral agent's voluntary and uncoerced consent is a necessary condition for the acquisition of such responsibilities, and, therefore, individual moral agents cannot have any special moral responsibilities without first giving their consent to undertake them. According to the voluntaristic model, it is the agent’s consent, rather than vulnerability and dependency of the moral patients to the moral agents that gives moral force to these special moral responsibilities. </p> <p class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle" id="qf0_4" style="font-family: Verdana;"> </p> <p class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle" id="qf0_4" style="font-family: Verdana;"> The vulnerability model, on the other hand, assumes that at least some special responsibilities can arise without the agent's consent, and that consent even in cases where it is present does not explain the content nor the moral force of these obligations. As Goodin explains it, “If one party is in a position of particular vulnerability to or dependency on another, the other has strong responsibilities to protect the dependent party. These responsibilities both precede and constrain any bargain between the parties over what rights and duties they may voluntarily assume. Thus, it is vulnerability rather than some voluntary act of will which gives rise to special responsibilities of the most basic kind” (39). </p> <p class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle" id="qf0_5" face="Verdana"> </p> <p class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle" id="qf0_5" style="font-family: Verdana;"> The voluntaristic model assimilates special responsibilities to promises and contracts by assuming that the source of the moral obligations associated with these responsibilities is the agent's voluntary consent. Goodin argues that "it is wrong to suppose that all special responsibilities are necessarily self‑assumed" (30). The voluntaristic model does not adequately explain many types of special responsibilities which we commonly acknowledge in which the voluntary consent of the agent is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the creation nor ascription of these special responsibilities.<span id="qf0_6"> </span> </p> <p class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle" id="qf0_5" style="font-family: Verdana;"> </p> <p class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle" id="qf0_5" style="font-family: Verdana;"> As Goodin notes, by explaining all special responsibilities as deriving from promises and similar forms of self‑assumed obligations, the voluntaristic model gives both too strong and too weak an account of special responsibilities. It is too strong since: "[d]ischarging our special responsibilities, especially insofar as these responsibilities are seen to have been voluntarily self‑assumed, is ordinarily regarded as a matter of justice" (16). If I promise to do a thing for you, then I have established an obligation which entails a reciprocal right of the promisee to demand the fulfillment of my obligation. Promises, like other types of consensual obligations between moral agents, entail correlative rights which create moral claims or entitlements. As H. L.A. Hart has put it, "By promising to do or not to do something, we voluntarily incur obligations and create or confer rights on those to whom we promise; we alter the existing moral independence of the parties' freedom of choice in relation to some action and create of moral relationship between them" [quoted by Goodin 1985, 30‑31]. </p> <p class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle" id="qf0_5" style="font-family: Verdana;"> </p> <p class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle" id="qf0_5" style="font-family: Verdana;"> However many special responsibilities do not create correlative rights on the part of their beneficiaries; only those in which both the object and the addressee of the responsibility is a moral agent or person do so. Thus the voluntaristic model is too strong in this respect. On the vulnerability model, B can have a moral responsibility towards A without it being the case that A has a right against B, in cases where B is a moral patient for whose own sake one is acting, or where B is a moral agent who is the object or beneficiary of a responsibility, but not also its addressee. The vulnerability model predicts that moral agents can acquire special moral responsibilities even in cases where the moral patients concerned do not have the status of right-holders, and indeed, may not even be the sorts of things to which it is possible to ascribe rights. </p> <p class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle" id="qf0_5" style="font-family: Verdana;"> </p> <p class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle" id="qf0_7" style="font-family: Verdana;"> </p> <p class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle" id="qf0_7" style="font-family: Verdana;"> The voluntaristic model, on the other hand, assumes that special obligations can only arise once the agent has volunteered to undertake them, and have given their consent to other moral agents to whom these responsibilities are owed. Since can only meaningfully give one’s consent to other moral agents, the voluntaristic model is too weak to explain our moral intuitions about many kinds of special moral responsibilities, for instance, those for the welfare of nonhuman animals. While I believe that Goodin is correct in denying Hart's thesis that all special duties arise from previous voluntary actions, it does not follow from this that none do. In fact, many special responsibilities contain voluntaristic aspects and well as other aspects, such as vulnerability and reciprocity which are needed to explain the precise character of these special moral relationships. It is important in analyzing real cases to distinguish between the specific content of the obligations that flow from the responsibility, for instance, what sort of benefits are to be bestowed, from the grounds for ascribing the responsibility to a particular bearer, on the one hand, and directing it towards particular objects or beneficiaries, on the other. Different ethical principles may be involved in each of these separate conditions: the vulnerability model, might account only for the direction of a particular substantive responsibility upon a certain class of beneficiaries, but not also for its being directed towards a specific individual member of that class, nor for its being ascribed to a particular member of the class of potential benefactors. </p> <p class="NormalindentCxSpLast" id="qf0_8" style="font-family: Verdana;"> </p> <p class="NormalindentCxSpLast" id="qf0_8" style="font-family: Verdana;"> Thus, perhaps Goodin overstates his case by suggesting that the vulnerability model alone can provide a single, coherent account for all special responsibilities, any more than the voluntaristic model can provide such an account. Rather it may be that the precise character of special moral responsibilities in various contexts of moral action can only be accounted for by a "mixed" or pluralistic account of the origins and scope of these responsibilities, and that only one of the elements of such mixed accounts derives from considerations of vulnerability. In ethics, as in many other domains of inquiry into human action, there may be no single explanatory principle which will account for all of the relevant features of the data. But before we conclude that this is the case, we should examine some examples of special moral responsibilities in various domains and show how Goodin develops the vulnerability model for each of them, and how this approach helps to explain their characteristics. </p>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-82455121590199957402008-02-16T11:15:00.000-05:002008-05-06T11:17:55.260-04:00Parental Responsibility<p style="font-family: verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst" id="vlue0"> Undoubtedly, the paradigm case for the vulnerability model is parental responsibility towards infants and young children. The human child is dependent upon its parent(s) (or other adult caregivers) for all of the most basic necessities for survival, such as food, clothing, shelter, safety, etc.: "Indeed, biologists remark that the most salient feature of the human infant is its severe and protracted vulnerability. Man is more helpless for more of his life than virtually any other species. Somebody must be assigned the special responsibility of looking after the young. Who that is will, of course, be a matter for social determination; typically it will be the biological parents, at least in the first instance; but sometime it will not. </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst" id="vlue0"> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst" id="vlue0"> Whoever is picked out, however, the more basic point remains that those special responsibilities flow fundamentally from the child's special vulnerabilities" (Goodin 1985, 33). Here, the idea of vulnerability seems to be extremely appealing, both in terms of the generation of moral responsibilities on the part of parents towards their children as well as the specific contents of the moral duties that follow from them. Human infants and young children, as a particular class of moral patients, are particularly vulnerable to various kinds of neglect and abuse. They can be harmed by the failure of caregivers to provide them with adequate nourishment, shelter, and protection from various sorts of risks and threats, which is why responsible parents "child-proof" their homes. </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst" id="vlue0"> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst" id="vlue0"> Young children can also be improved in various ways, for instance, by providing them with educational opportunities, training, and privileges of various kinds through which they can develop their capacities and talents. Their parental or other caregivers are normally believed to have strong moral responsibilities to protect them from harm and to do many things which directly or indirectly benefit those children who are under their care. In this respect it is important to note that the ethics of care extends Goodin's VP by adding to it duties to benefit or improve the subjects of care, rather than only to protect them from harm. The VCP differs from the VP in this important respect. Under the VCP the responsible parties to the vulnerability-care relationship have specific moral duties to benefit the objects of their responsibilities in specific ways. The VCP combines what are commonly thought of duties of beneficence with those of nonmalefience, where both sorts of duties are understood as applying to both acts and omissions. </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" id="yexm1"> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" id="yexm3"> Duties of <span id="yexm4"> </span>nonmaleficence are often thought of as stronger<span id="yexm5"> </span>than duties of beneficence, and duties to avoid directly causing others to be at risk of harm are generally thought to be stronger than duties to prevent risks and threats that one did not directly cause. It is a curious fact that the English language seems to lack a specific term that corresponds to "vulnerable" but which means susceptibility to be benefited or made better off than one is. </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" id="yexm3"> One might suggest that the term whose meaning is closest to this sense is "corrigible"; to be corrigible is to be susceptible to improvement or benefit, or at least, that is the sense in which I shall employ that term here. So we can also posit a parallel moral relationship of corrigibility: </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" id="yexm6"> <span id="yexm7"><span id="yexm8"> </span></span> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" id="yexm6"> <span id="yexm7"><b id="yexm9">The Corrigibility Relation:</b> <i id="yexm10">A is corrigible to B with respect to C because of D.</i></span> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" id="yexm12"> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" id="yexm12"> The notion of corrigibility will be useful for discussing what are commonly thought of as duties of beneficence. Given this these terminological stipulations, we can describe in general terms four classes of moral responsibilities to avoid or prevent harm to the vulnerable or to help the corrigible that moral agents can have: </p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" id="yexm13" style="margin-left: 0.5in; font-family: verdana;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" id="yexm13" style="margin-left: 0.5in; font-family: verdana;"> (I) <span id="yexm14"> </span>Responsibilities to avoid harming others. </p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" id="yexm15" style="margin-left: 0.5in; font-family: verdana;"> (II) Responsibilities to prevent harm coming to others. </p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" id="yexm16" style="margin-left: 0.5in; font-family: verdana;"> (III) Responsibilities to benefit others. </p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpLast" id="yexm17" style="margin-left: 0.5in; font-family: verdana;"> (IV) Responsibilities to avoid preventing benefits coming to others. </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="Normalindent" id="yexm18"> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="Normalindent" id="yexm18"> In (I) if B acts in certain ways B would make some moral patient A worse off than they would otherwise have been. <span id="yexm19"> </span>In (II) if B refrains from acting in certain ways A would be made worse off than if B had acted in those ways. In (III), by acting B makes A better off than he would have been had B not acted, and in (IV) B would make some moral patient better off than they would otherwise be by not acting. It is also worth noting that in (I) and (III) the agent is the direct cause of the harm or benefit in question, while in (II) and (IV) they are the intervening or indirect cause of the benefit or harm. </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst" id="vlue0"> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst" id="vlue0"> Parental responsibilities being the paradigm case for the ethics of care and vulnerability combine all of these kinds of special duties. Parents, can of course, delegate or assign some of their responsibilities to care for their young children to others, e.g. teachers, family members, or day-care workers. It is important to note that responsibilities can in general be delegated or reassigned in this way, which is one reason why I prefer to use the term 'moral responsibility' rather than 'duty'. When a parent delegates or reassigns his or her parental responsibilities, say to a baby-sitter or teacher, the parent or primary caregiver retains a supervisory responsibility to see to it that her designees are capable of adequately discharging the kinds of responsibilities appropriate for those placed under their care. </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpLast" id="vlue1"> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpLast" id="vlue1"> That the vulnerability of human infants should play a role in shaping the ethical responsibilities of parents or other caregivers carries strong intuitive appeal. The Christian icon of the mother and child is universally understood as representing the special moral relationship of care and vulnerability that exists between mothers and their children. The VCP has a dominant role in understanding and explaining the sorts of special moral responsibilities that mothers and fathers, and perhaps other family members, have toward a certain class of moral patients, infants and young children, who because of their immaturity are specially vulnerable and dependent on others for their care and protection. </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpLast" id="vlue1"> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpLast" id="vlue1"> But perhaps this not so clear when we consider other types of family relationships. Goodin argues it is implausible to analyze parental responsibilities on the model of promises and contracts where the agent comes to acquire a particular responsibility as the result of his or her own voluntary choices. One generally does not choose ones children in the way one chooses friends, business associates, or others we deal with on a daily basis. But, of course, this does happen sometimes when children are adopted. Other cases in family relations, however, are far from obviously associated with the vulnerability-care model. So let's examine some more of Goodin's arguments for extending the VCP to other kinds of special moral relationships. </p>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-17386149099137469162008-02-15T11:38:00.000-05:002008-05-06T11:47:05.659-04:00Marital Responsibilities<p></p><p style="font-family: verdana;font-family:verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpLast" id="kb304"> Marriage seems at first to be a counterexample to the VP and a clear case in which the associated role-related moral responsibilities are voluntarily assumed . But when we look more closely we see evidence to the contrary. When we try to describe marriage merely in terms of a contract, we encounter difficulties; provisions, penalties, terms and many other aspects of a contract are either completely absent or not strictly defined. While it is true that a marriage often looks like, can be acted out as, and can be terminated like, a contract, what must be acknowledged are the mutual dependencies that characterize marriages, whether they are officially recognized by means of marriage licenses or not. <span id="kb305"> </span> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;font-family:verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpLast" id="kb304"> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" face="verdana" class="NormalindentCxSpLast" id="kb304"> Of course, Goodin says, one should not overlook that, usually, such relations are voluntarily assumed but this more accurately points to how special obligations arise in marriage, and not what their specific content is. Many of the responsibilities which cohabiting partners have towards one another seem to reflect more the fact that they have placed themselves in one another's power emotionally, financially, and physically. Cohabiting spouses, whether they have been legally married or not, have made themselves vulnerable to each other by extending trust to their partners, and it is this mutual vulnerability <span id="kb306"> </span>that accounts for the moral responsibilities and special obligations between spousal partners, rather than any explicit contractual agreements they may have made. </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpLast" id="kb304"> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpLast" id="kb304"> The marriage ceremony and the marriage license, the exchanging of matrimonial vows, only ratify and publicize an interpersonal relationship characterized by intimacy and trust between two persons in which each is made vulnerable in numerous ways to the actions and decisions of their partner. Cohabiting spouses have strong moral responsibilities to care for one another due to these pre-existing relationships of dependency and vulnerability whether or not they have explicitly agreed to abide by a marriage contract or performed a public ceremony of some kind in which they have explicitly exchanged marriage vows. </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpLast" id="kb304"> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;font-family:verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst" id="kb300" > <span id="kb301">In a marriage, or other close intimate relationship, the parties to the relationship are mutually vulnerable to one another in many specific ways, and each is depending on the other not to betray their trust. In this sense, marriage partners are specially vulnerable to one another in ways in which they are not vulnerable to other people with whom they have no intimate relationship. To have a relationship based on trust and intimacy is to give another person a certain kind of power over you, a power that they can deploy responsibly or not. Not all aspects of this kind of moral responsibility can be delegated to others; it is often important that one's own partner be the one who cares and not anyone else. </span> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;font-family:verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst" id="kb300"> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" face="verdana" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst" id="kb300"> Using parental responsibilities and marital responsibilities as paradigm cases, Goodin attempts to generalize the VP to other kinds of interpersonal relationships: "What seems true for children in particular also seems true for other kin, neighbors, countrymen, and contractors. To some greater or lesser extent, they are all dependent on you to do something for them; and your varying responsibilities toward each of them seem roughly proportional to the degree to which they are, in fact, dependent upon you (and you alone) to perform certain services" (33-34).The moral intuitions upon which this argument rests are strengthened considerably by the qualification inserted parenthetically, that the bearers of the responsibility in question is uniquely able to assume and discharge the responsibility in question towards the beneficiary. This is not always the case, and we must broaden Goodin's account to include shared and collective responsibilities of various kinds. But, as Goodin points out, "[w]hat the vulnerability model emphasizes is not just their special need, however, but also your special ability to help. That is the crucial factor in imposing the duty upon you in particular" (34). </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" face="verdana" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst" id="kb300"> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" face="verdana" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst" id="kb300"> I will take up this suggestion in greater detail at a later stage in the argument, and discuss the forms of power, knowledge, special competences or skills, resources, and positional considerations, which need to be taken into account in order to account for the ascription of special moral responsibilities to particular agents. But for the moment suffice it to note that the existence of a special responsibilities of care generated by a relationship of vulnerability depends both upon the characteristics of the subjects or bearers of those responsibilities as well as those of the beneficiaries or objects of those responsibilities, the C and D arguments in the vulnerability and corrigibility relationships. <span id="kb302"> </span><span id="kb303"> </span> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst" id="kb300"> <span id="kb303"> </span> </p><span style="font-family: verdana;font-family:verdana;" > In some other kinds of familial relationships we find that individuals have entered roles which they might not have, or at least only partially, chosen. Where this is the case, the inherent responsibilities of that role being voluntarily assumed might be a slightly inaccurate characterization. As was indicated above, where such roles have been self-assumed, it seems that the voluntary nature of assuming such responsibilities answers the specific question as to why we have certain responsibilities to family members, but not, necessarily what these responsibilities include. In such cases, Goodin asserts the vulnerability model as superior in terms of both explaining why we have such responsibilities and what they those responsibilities are and entail. One of the bits of evidence for this assertion is that actions in accordance with self-assumed contractual obligations have the character of narrow reciprocity. Debts are incurred and discharged after which, the parties stand again in the same relation as before the debt was incurred (89). But such a characterization for the special moral relationships that exist among family members, he notes, seems to be "out of place in family relationships" (90). But let's test this by looking at some other familial relationships.</span>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-74937331859744462732008-02-15T08:55:00.000-05:002008-05-06T12:00:04.325-04:00Filial Responsibilities<p style="font-family: verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpLast" id="kb304"></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="Normalindent">One might have a filial responsibility derived from one's role as adult child to care for one's aged and infirm parents, and to do things for them like help them do their shopping. Such filial responsibilities create moral obligations which exist whether or not the agent has explicitly made a promise to the parent to, say, take her shopping on a particular day. These sorts of special responsibilities, filial obligations, are associated with the role occupied by the agent, being someone’s adult child, and one does not choose to enter this role.<br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana;" class="Normalindent"><span style="line-height: 200%;">An</span><span style="line-height: 200%;"> </span>adult child with an aged and vulnerable mother may, of course, also explicitly promise to take their morther shopping on such and such a day. Here in the act of making a promise one has both explicitly acknowledged one's special moral responsibility, which pre‑existed the act of promising, and creates a right on the part of the parent under which she can demand that you fulfill what you have promised to do. The act of promising, in this case, also functions as an ascription of responsibility to a particular agent at a particular time, and this might be needed, for instance, in cases where there is more than one child who shares a filial responsibility towards the parent. The voluntaristic aspect in such cases concerns only the ascription of responsibility (i.e. volunteering to assume a shared responsibility on a particular occasion), and the creation of a correlative right. However, the content of the responsibility itself, the filial obligation to render assistance and care to aged parent who is in need of it, derives not from the promise, but from the vulnerability of the parent and the child's capacity to satisfy her needs, and perhaps also in this case from the notion of gratitude and reciprocity, (one can legitimately question whether an adult who was abused by his parent as a child owes that parent any special filial obligations).<br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana;" class="Normalindent">The moral claim of the parent on the child's assistance pre‑exists the act of promising, so that act does not create the obligation, but only acknowledges and specifies it. If I make a promise to my mother to take her shopping, then if I fail to do so, I have both wronged her and have acted wrongly. However, I may still act wrongly if I fail to do this for her, even though I have not explicitly promised her that I would. I may act wrongly towards her if I understand that she is vulnerable to being stranded in her apartment because she is fearful of going out alone, and that she has no one else to turn to who will escort her to the department store. Under such circumstances, the adult child of an aged and infirm parent would have a filial responsibility towards her mother, even when she does not explicitly consent to it. The act of explicitly making a promise discursively legitimizes the underlying moral responsibility, but it does not create it. </p>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-27910113868956281212008-02-14T12:13:00.000-05:002008-05-06T12:15:35.720-04:00Promises and Contracts<p style="font-family: verdana;" class="NormalindentCxSpLast" id="kb304"></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" id="n7fb0" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst">Promises and contracts and other types of explicit agreements provide the paradigm cases for the voluntaristic model of self-assumed moral obligations. Promissory obligations arise exclusively from voluntary acts of consent, as can be seen from the fact that coerced contracts are almost universally unenforceable (43). But, against the dominant view, Goodin argues that promises are nothing more than a way to coordinate behavior by reducing the uncertainty that would prevail in the realm of human action without them. Promises are made so as to allow others to make firm plans of their own by being able to anticipate what it is that a particular agent is going to do. <br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana;" id="n7fb0" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst">By making a promise the promisor allows the promisee to behave and plan accordingly; “What makes promises special is not so much that they represent a voluntary act of will on your part, but rather that the expectations about your behavior thereby engendered form crucial components in the plans of others” (44). By inducing such expectations, however, one also makes the other party vulnerable to betrayal. After the words “I promise” are uttered, the promisee is now depending on the promisor to do what has been promised, and when that expectation is not fulfilled he has been betrayed and his trust violated. <br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana;" id="n7fb0" class="NormalindentCxSpFirst">In other words, Goodin is arguing that the moral force of special obligations deriving from promises and contracts depends less on the volitional aspect of the act of promise-making than the vulnerability it engenders in the promisee by his reliance on the promisor’s<span id="n7fb1" style=""> </span>intention to do what had been promised. As Goodin writes, “Special obligations do arise out of our voluntary [self-assumed] commitments. But what makes those obligations morally binding, I argue, is the vulnerabilities that those commitments engender; and those vulnerabilities are only one of many forms of vulnerability to which we should morally respond. Thus, the vulnerability model is a more general one, capable of subsuming and transcending the model of self-assumed obligations” (36).<span id="n7fb2" style=""></span></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" id="n7fb3" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle"><span id="n7fb2" style=""></span>Although volitional acts of promise-making are often the catalyst in generating such obligations, the vulnerability engendered in promises and contracts is far more important in terms of deriving the content and force of these obligations. Goodin argues for the primacy of the vulnerability concern in our conventional thinking about contracts by making reference to the legal notion of reliance. There can be obligations in the sphere of promises and contracts that are based merely upon one’s reliance (without an explicit contract or promise) upon another. Here Goodin notes that, “When one realizes that another is or may come under a misapprehension as to the authority of his agent or the ownership of his property - a misapprehension for which he is not at fault his duty to give information is a duty of care.”<br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana;" id="n7fb3" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle">That reasonable reliance on the intentions of another creates an implied obligation reinforces the idea that what is of primary importance concerning contracts and promises is the fact that an agent has rendered himself vulnerable to the actions of another by forming the conviction that that agent will make good on his expressed intentions.</p><p style="font-family: verdana;" id="n7fb3" class="NormalindentCxSpMiddle"> Most often, this is the result of a specific promise or contract. But, it can also result from expressed intentions, intentions that induce others to act upon them where the agent has made no effort to qualify his intentions (i.e. asserting that it is very likely that he will not do what he has indicated in passing, etc.)<span id="n7fb4" style=""> </span>We can see in such instances that the voluntaristic model cannot account for this common sense notion of moral responsibility, unless one relies on some notion like that of a tacit promise. Clearly, we generally ascribe a type of responsibility to a moral agent B who allows another moral agent A to believe and plan according to intentions that have been expressed by B.<span id="n7fb5" style=""> </span>On the self-assumed voluntaristic model such considerations can be defended only with some difficulty due to the fact that there seems to have been no voluntarily assumed obligation on the agent’s part, yet B is responsible to A nonetheless because A is vulnerable and is depending on B to do that which he is relying on him to do.</p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" id="n7fb6" class="NormalindentCxSpLast">The idea of contracts as fundamental elements of ethical and political theories should be familiar to most of us. The Enlightenment philosophers thought of government as being founded on a “social contract” and contractarianism is still an important feature of contemporary accounts of justice, such as that of John Rawls. Contracts are also regarded as the very foundation of business relationships, and some authors even think of corporations and other nonhuman social and economic agents as nothing more than an “nexus of contracts.” <br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana;" id="n7fb6" class="NormalindentCxSpLast">But, Goodin argues that when we look beneath the surface we can see that there are a number of constraints placed upon contractual dealings that reveal that they depend upon the notion of vulnerability. For instance, in business relationships the legal codes that express duties of employers to employees reflects the relative vulnerability of employees in these relationships. We can see the same considerations within the law constraining the relationship between businesses and their customers. Although no explicit contractual obligations exist between business organizations and consumer, the law does place a heavy burden on business to protect certain interests of vulnerable stakeholders such as consumers. One such example is the special liability of a seller of products for the physical harm to users or customers. Sellers of goods to the public have special responsibilities towards consumers of their products to take reasonable steps to ensure that those products are safe and will not harm the health of their customers. Business enterprises, and those who work for them, have a variety of other kinds of social responsibilities which are not derived from contractual relationships nor imposed by legal requirements. This is a topic which we will explore in some detail when we discuss the notion of corporate social responsibility. <br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana;" id="n7fb6" class="NormalindentCxSpLast">If Goodin's account of the moral force of promises and contracts is correct, or at least partly so, then it represents a major insight about the nature of moral responsibilities. It implies that many of the sorts of moral obligations which we normally understand to be based on contractual arrangements are in fact really based on the vulnerability-care relationship. If this is true, then the VCP begins to emerge as a plausible candidate for the status of a fundamental principle of normative ethics, one capable of bridging the private realm of the family and friends, with the public realm of social and political relationships among strangers. <br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana;" id="n7fb6" class="NormalindentCxSpLast"><br /></p>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-73464503608961579732008-02-13T13:19:00.000-05:002008-05-06T13:21:49.012-04:00Professional Responsibilities<p style="font-family: verdana;" class="Normalindent" id="kamu0"> Goodin also defends the vulnerability model in the case of those special responsibilities found in professional relationships. We can look at the relationships between professionals, e.g., doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc., and their clients as being shaped by the relative vulnerability of those clients to the actions and choices of the persons occupying the professional role. </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="Normalindent" id="kamu0"> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="Normalindent" id="kamu0"> Professionals generally speaking have strong duties to protect the interests of their clients, and these responsibilities often entail both duties of nonmaleficence and duties of beneficence. There are three factors Goodin sees as pointing to the fact that the specific duties of this type of special relationship are governed by vulnerability. First, if the relationship were merely contractual, it could not fully explain the fact that contracts drawn between the two parties are fixed to standard form. There is very little permission to negotiate terms between the involved parties themselves alone. Second, while professionals are free to serve whomever they choose, they must respond to any request for assistance in an emergency. Third, terminating a contract is more difficult for a professional; for instance, in a therapeutic relationship significant notice must be given to client, no neglect can occur, and extended time must be given for the client to secure an alternative. </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="Normalindent" id="kamu0"> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="Normalindent" id="kamu0"> These factors point directly to the unequal relationship between professional and client. This inequality, Goodin claims, stems from the high degree of specialized knowledge possessed by the professional, and the fact that the client is attempting to secure a basic need (health, legal status, education, etc.) whereas the professional is not, Further, it is usually easier for a professional to find other clients whereas the same may not be true for the client in finding other professionals. Goodin states it most clearly in saying that "clients are and must necessarily be relying upon professionals to protect them in crucial ways" (66). This, once again, points to the vulnerability model's ability to better explain such responsibilities. Goodin states that it is trust rather than mere contract that shapes these kinds of relationships (67). In essence, the client, who is usually the weaker party to the relationship, depends upon the professional in ways that the latter does not depend on the former. The patient must trust her doctor to do what his professional responsibilities require whether or not he has <span id="kamu1"> </span>given her an explicit promise to do so.<span id="kamu2"> </span> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="Normalindent" id="kamu0"> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="Normalindent" id="kamu0"> <span id="kamu2">Relationships between professionals of various kinds and their patients or clients exhibit the general characteristics of the vulnerability-care relationship: they are asymmetrical in that the parties to these relationships are unequal in power to affect one another's interests; one party has special knowledge or skills that can affect the well-being of the more vulnerable party for good or for ill; and the vulnerable party is in some way specially dependent on the professionals' exercise of responsible care in order to secure some aspect of his or her interest or well-being that she cannot secure by self-help alone. In cases such as these, the VCP predicts that the dominant or stronger party to the relationship has special moral responsibilities to protect the interests of those who are vulnerable and are depending upon them for their care. This kind of moral responsibility arises because of the name of the relationship between the parties, and does not depend upon there being explicit or assumed consent. </span> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="Normalindent" id="kamu0"> <span id="kamu2"> </span> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="Normalindent" id="kamu0"> <span id="kamu2"> </span> </p>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-20949200016652977272008-02-12T13:18:00.000-05:002008-05-06T13:25:33.844-04:00The Stranger Ethic<p style="font-family: verdana;" class="Normalindent" id="lshg0"> It might be objected at this point that in all of the examples given thus far there has been some kind of pre-existing interpersonal relationship among the parties to the vulnerability relationship. But what about strangers? Does the VP help us to understand the kinds of special moral responsibilities involved in helping strangers who are urgently in need of assistance, with whom we are in no special pre-existing social relationship? </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="Normalindent" id="lshg0"> </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="Normalindent" id="lshg0"> Goodin considers the case suggested by Flathman (1972, 214) in which "the seriously injured A instructs B (a perfect stranger, but the only person about) to call an ambulance for him; neither the legitimacy of A's request nor B's obligation to comply with it depends on B's consent" (34). Goodin argues that "under such conditions, B has special responsibilities to which he did not consent and which are not self-assumed in any sense of that term….It is dependency and vulnerability rather than voluntary acts of will which give rise to these, our most fundamental moral duties." </p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="Normalindent" id="lshg0"> </p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> He also notes that the moral responsibility that arises for B on account of A's vulnerability and dependence depends upon conditions generally assumed to be the case within the particular moral community to which they both belong. In many ancient societies, there arose a "stranger ethic" that attached particular moral importance to hospitality; the Bible, for instance, instructs us not to oppress the strangers among us.<br /><br />Goodin explain this as deriving from the fact that in ancient times travel was a very dangerous activity and there were not then in existence rest stops, restaurants, and motels that catered to the needs of the traveler by extending hospitality to them for a price. Rather, travelers were by and large dependent on the hospitality of strangers. But that has changed and "traveler are now less vulnerable to the ravages of nature and less dependent upon random hosts for shelter" (35). As a result, we no longer feel it is so important to extend our hospitality to traveling strangers, although in some cases, that older ethos can be revived when travelers are stranded or in some special conditions of need of vulnerability as in the case of the injured party in Flathman's example, or in the case of refugees who are fleeing their homes to avoid violent conflict or natural disasters. The Good Samaritan helps those in need of assistance who are depending on them without there being any prior act of voluntary consent, because he or she understands that doing so derives from their social responsibility as members of a moral community. This insight provide the beginnings of an account of how social responsibilities to protect the vulnerable can be understood within the vulnerability-care framework.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Although Goodin goes on to analyze the moral responsibilities involved in other kinds of special relationships, such as those of friendship, as being better accounted for by the vulnerability model of responsibility, I will suspend further discussion of his examples and arguments at this time. I trust that this preliminary discussion has served the end of making the VCP at least plausible as an account of the origin and basis of many special moral responsibilities.<br /><br />The VCP is subject to a variety of potent criticisms which I have not yet discussed. For instance, it can, it seems, lead to a overly paternalistic or patronizing attitude towards certain social relationships. Moreover, it is not at all clear how considerations of vulnerability relate to questions of justice. Neither is it obvious how the VP can help us decide among conflicting moral obligations. I want to postpone consideration of these and other objections to a later stage in the argument.</span>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6467710103443312776.post-81238234589782715542008-02-11T13:51:00.000-05:002008-05-06T13:57:45.428-04:00Theoretical Significance of the VCP<span style="font-family: verdana;"> Before moving on I would like to briefly discuss the potential philosophical significance of the vulnerability-care model as presented thus far. The ethics of vulnerability and care and the VCP is theoretically attractive because it suggest that many of our commonly-held beliefs about special moral obligations in the spheres of the family, regarding contracts/promises, and business and professional relationships can be viewed as derived from considerations of the vulnerability and dependence of the objects of these responsibilities, and the practice and value of care on the parts of their bearers. In other words, many types of special moral responsibilities that we commonly accept and act in accordance with on a daily basis can be explained at least in part by the fact that there is a moral patient is vulnerable and is dependent on others for their care. If this insight is correct it seems that we can posit stronger evaluative reasons, if not motivational ones as well, for elevating the importance of the social responsibilities we might have regarding ill, impoverished, or persecuted people living in other countries, future persons who are temporally distant from us, and threatened nonhuman species and the ecosystems on which their survival and well-being depends. <br /><br />The VCP might, for instance, help to explain and justify the widely held moral intuition behind the project of global humanitarian relief. Is it appropriate to believe that people living relatively comfortable, affluent, and secure lives have special moral responsibilities to come to the aid of other people, far away, whose homes and livelihoods have been suddenly destroyed by a cyclone, an earthquake, flood, or tsunami? Many people do in fact respond morally to such natural catastrophes with generosity and compassion. Why should they? They have made no promises or entered into any voluntary agreements to aid those in need. Rather, they respond conscientiously because they feel the pull of a social responsibility to protect the vulnerable and understand that while they are not uniquely placed to help those in need, they can contribute something of value to ameliorate and remedy a situation of helplessness and vulnerability which they did not create. This moral response, the caring response, is a fundamental feature of the moral life, and is rightly considered a moral virtue which should be cultivated as supported. Caring, in this context, is part of an emerging cosmopolitan ethic in which national borders, ethnic, religious, or linguistic differences among individuals do not matter. What does matter is that we regard all living human beings on the planet as members of a single moral community. <br /><br />In light of the vulnerability-care model, we might also view it as wrong to appropriate the world's nonrenewable resources for our exclusive use knowing that future generations will be disadvantaged if we do so. Morally speaking, many people believe we should not take advantage of the fact that future generations cannot voice objections to any of our current practices because they do not yet exist and cannot know that we are making their position disadvantageous. Future persons are vulnerable to us in ways in which we are not vulnerable to them. We might see it as morally wrong to be aware of the fact that, without our moral concern, future generations will suffer various sorts of harms, such as for instance are predicted to result from global warming, and fail to prevent them (even though we are the only ones in a position to do so), even when the cost to us would not be grave. The vulnerability-care principle would seem to indicate that we can have in such cases a social responsibility to protect those who are particularly vulnerable and dependent on our choices and actions, even when they cannot reciprocate. In this case, distance in time, not only in space, appears to make no difference in the nature of our moral responsibilities towards future generations. We the living can have moral responsibilities towards those who will come after us, not because we agreed to accept them, or because we have a social contract between us and persons who do not now (and may never) exist, but because, whomever comes after us is now in a position of relative vulnerability to us since they cannot affect our well-being while we can affect theirs. <br /><br />Vulnerability seems to be one of those ethical principles which carries both justificatory weight as well as motivational strength. However, the most significant problem with this sort of motivation as applied to concern for future generations is the difficulty in assessing how and to what extent future generations are vulnerable to our present actions. Truly, there can be little argument that they depend upon us for the world that they will inherit, but the question remains is how far can such a motivation go in terms of distance into the future and perceived need of those living in it, as well as the extent to which members of the current generation should sacrifice their own well-being in light of such considerations.<br /><br />But if we think that we, as member of society, do have some special moral responsibilities towards members of future generations of human beings, these responsibilities cannot it seems be accounted for on the voluntaristic model. Future people, because they do not yet exist, cannot be parties to a contract or a promise. If we owe them anything, morally speaking, it must be for some other reason. <br /><br />Similar considerations arise with respect to the relationship between human beings and other biological organisms. Because of our technological prowess we humans have become the masters of the earth, and to a significant extent, the well-being and survival of other living species now depends upon our choices and actions. That other species are vulnerable to us and dependent on our choices and actions, might provide a moral reason for our taking steps to ensure that their habitats are protected, and that they can continue to flourish in whatever ways are appropriate to their natures. According to the vulnerability principle we can acquire special moral responsibilities towards non-human species to protect their interests and well-being, even though, like infants, the mentally impaired and infirm, and members of future generations, they cannot function as parties to contractual agreements. Contracts and promises can be made between moral agents who enjoy equal moral status and they engender rights and reciprocal responsibilities.<br /><br />But some moral responsibilities arise as well between moral agents and moral patients who are unequal in moral status and in which the moral responsibilities generated are asymmetrical and non-reciprocal. If we are to provide an account for the intuitions that many people have that such moral responsibilities do exist, then the vulnerability-care principle provides at least a plausible theory of how we can think about these kinds of moral responsibilities. <br /><br /></span>Morton Winstonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07877693880198083573noreply@blogger.com0