Dr. John Young                                                                                                          11/23/08

Unitarian Universalist Church of Jacksonville

Global Ethics

            Ethics are the standards of acceptable behavior with others. Usually people only tried to be ethical with their tribe [Athenians or Americans] or chosen circle [Southern white men or liberal upper-middle class women] but that circle is now increasingly grown to include the entire human race, and even the whole environment of our planet. We are evolving towards global ethics, whole Earth standards of moral behavior, universal standards of right and wrong.

            I am a Fellow at the Ethics Center at the University of North Florida, and just now teaching a new course on spiritual practices and their ethical implications. In the spring, I will be teaching my oft-repeated course on religious non-violence one last time. One of the assigned books in my course this fall was Peter Singer’s One World: the Ethics of Globalization. As we embark on a new era in America’s political history, considering Singer’s conclusions may provide a useful foundation.

            Peter Singer was born in 1946 in Melbourne, Australia. His parents were Viennese Jews who had fled to Australia in 1938. His father imported tea and coffee and his mother practiced medicine. His grandparents were killed in the Holocaust. Peter Singer got his undergraduate degree at Melbourne and his advanced degrees at Oxford University. His thesis on civil disobedience became a book. He lectured at New York University and at Oxford before becoming a professor of applied ethics at the University of Melbourne. In 1996, he was an unsuccessful candidate from the Green Party for the Australian Senate. In 1999, he became a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. He was recognized as humanist of the year in Australia in 2004 and is widely considered one of the foremost ethicists in the world today.

            He is a utilitarian, favoring ethics on the basis of ‘the greatest good for the greatest number,’ but he argues that different interests warrant different treatment, depending upon diminishing marginal utility. For instance, a starving person’s interest in food is appropriately weighed differently than someone who is only slightly hungry, a poor person has more need for $100 than a wealthy person. He believes the Golden Rule is an appropriate foundation for human ethics, and argues that it gives the same weight to others’ interests as your own, universalizing ethical admonitions. So, he argues a person needs to weight up all the interests in a situation and then maximize the legitimate interests of those affected.

            His breakthrough book was Animal Liberation which argued that any being capable of suffering was worthy of ethical consideration. He believes that you have to have the capacity to suffer in order to have preferences and so abortion up to 18 weeks is moral since only the mother has the capacity for preference. He would provide people the right to choose their death in consultation with their intimate circle. Knowing his mother’s preferences, Singer would have ended her life earlier than happened naturally after she faced advanced Alzheimer’s, if he had been the sole person deciding her fate. He believes that most people have often been ethical ever since they lived in groups, using their reason as a way to make decisions for the greatest good they understood. He believes people are naturally self-interested and competitive, but also have substantial capacity for cooperation, empathy and willingness to make sacrifices for the good of others, if society provides the right conditions.

            His book, One World, argues that given humanity’s globalization that we need to take a larger perspective than national self-interest. If we believe in democracy and justice for all citizens: how can we believe our society to be fundamentally superior to other societies, how can we justify 5% of the world’s population, the United States, dominating the other 95% of the world’s people, or how can we justify some people living in abundance while others starve? He proposes that these positions are morally indefensible given our principles. We need to look after the entire Earth and not just American industry. If we want to extend the reach of law universally then we need to be willing to live by those laws ourselves. Since, as Thomas Friedman argues, “the basic truth about globalization is that no one is in charge,” we will need to move beyond national sovereignty to international laws, cooperation, regulation, and limitations.

His first chapter deals with climate change. He reminds us that the world quickly dealt with the CFC crisis with the 1985 Montreal Protocol which banned refrigerants that were piercing the Earth’s ozone layer and the problem had disappeared by 1999. Our present crisis will take more dramatic changes and greater sacrifices, but we could and need to transform the world’s economy from a carbon, dirty, depleting fuel economy into a renewable, suitable economy in the next 20 years. He would give all nations binding quotas, based on their per capita share of designated total emissions. This would provide poor nations resources by selling their excess carbon credits to industrialized nations and individual industries within nations. Then, we would need to see that the money earned really went to help the needy and solve the problems. The average American now has an atmospheric consumption 15 times the average citizen of India. These policies would be based on egalitarian- polluter-pays ethical principles with marginal utility going to the needy.

At present, the World Trade Organization [the WTO] runs the global economy. It has turned power from nations over to international corporations, put private profits ahead of individual rights and environmental sustainability, is anti-democratic, and has increased the world’s inequity. It has created what Thomas Friedman calls the “golden strait-jacket: incentives to free the private sector, shrink regulation and government control, keep inflation low and free foreign trade are hurting most people and ruining the global environment.” At present, nearly half of the world lives on less than $2 a day. While in 1820 the wealthiest nations were three times as rich as the poorest nations, today the proportion is 74 times. The three richest individuals in the world have more wealth than the combined 600 million people in the least developed nations. What needs to change? Global authorities need to set minimum standards for environmental protection, worker safety, union rights, and animal rights. Rich nations need to cut their tariffs, particularly their agricultural tariffs more than poor nations. Presently rich nations subsidize their agriculture producers at 6 times the rate of poor countries. This policy is stealing food out of the mouths of the poorest. America’s addiction to oil and other carbon energy commodities is keeping dictatorships and corrupt corporations in the seats of power.

His next chapter deals with international law. Singer reminds us that there were genocides even in the Bible. In the book of Numbers, chapter 31, the Hebrews carried out genocide against the Midianites. What have changed are the weapons, organization and communication to kill more people faster. Since WWII, the world has been moving toward more effective actions against genocide and crimes against humanity. In 1984 there was a convention against torture. There is an international criminal court, and 60 countries have ratified international criminal law. Singer argues for a much stronger United Nations and a significant increase of international cooperation and action. He would realistically expand the United Nation’s Security Council and take away the veto. He would transform the United Nation’s General Assembly by making representation according to population. He would require super majorities for most divisive and troubling issues. He would reframe from the right to intervene to the global responsibility to protect the vulnerable and needy, and would give the international bodies and organizations the means in money, military and power to do what is needed.

The last chapter in One World has to do with global charity and service and foreign aid. Although Americans regularly think in opinion polls that we give 15% or even more away to poor countries in development aid and charity, the realities are starkly different. In fact, the United States gives the lowest proportion of its Gross National Product to developmental foreign aid of any developed nation, 1/10 of 1%, and most of it targeted politically, only ¼ of that tiny percentage going to the poorest nations. The United States does give more than non-governmental aid than many other nations, but adding both the government and private donations only gets America up to 1/8 of 1% of our GNP. At the Millennium Summit, those present proposed that the world cut in half the number of people suffering from hunger, who live on less than $1 a day [20% of the world today], double primary education, reduce the under 5 mortality and those without safe drinking water by half. If each individual American gave $100 for each of the next 15 years, these millennial goals would be met, less than 1 cent of every $2 the average American presently earns. Singers argues that everyone in the developed nations increase this to 1% of their annual income, and global poverty and related problems could be solved in the next generation.

Peter Singer’s One World provides the facts and a realistic set of utilitarian ethical proposals for making it happen. I am a strong advocate for our becoming world citizens. If the world adopted the Islamic standard of putting aside 2.5% of its annual wealth for the neediest of the world, and developed the international organizations and agreements with the power to see that these funds were actually collected and effectively used, we could cope with our global problems. The questions are whether we are actually prepared to live by the values and standards that we espouse, considering all people spiritually and politically worthy of equal justice, demanding personal responsibility and the rule of law, and truly democratic practices on a global scale? I hope so for the world’s sake and our human future.