Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-42gr6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-18T16:41:16.240Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Dialogue of Global Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2012

Extract

The message of Michael Ignatieff's reflections on reimagining a global ethic is a comforting one for political philosophers. It is vital, he writes, for philosophers to keep doing what they have been doing: addressing the injustices of globalization from a perspective of strict impartiality that treats every human being as the object of equal moral concern. Philosophers should continue to elaborate this “one world” perspective against those partial perspectives arising from the claims of one's particular country or particular religious faith. But their aim should not be to replace the one with the other, but to prompt an ongoing critical dialogue in which more particularistic doctrines of country or faith are called to justify themselves before the one-world ethic's impartial standards—thus prompting the kind of critical self-reflection that is essential to moral change. And in so doing, the one-world ethic cannot be uncritical of itself, for there are different ways of conceiving a global ethic, each of which must answer to the others.

Type
Symposium: In Search of a Global Ethic
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1 See Michael Ignatieff, “Reimagining a Global Ethic,” in this issue.

2 Don Babwin and Tom Breen, “Remembering the First and Last of Iraq War Dead,” Associated Press, December 19, 2011.