Does globalization create new ethical questions?

The thesis put forth here is both easy to state and difficult to contemplate.   It is that globalization as it is defining itself in our time is creating for humanity a new set of ethical challenges for which we have not yet discovered either the intellectual or spiritual resources to address.   Indeed the more firmly settled we find ourselves in the global village the less we recognize our need for a moral compass.

Globalization is an economic and political phenomenon profoundly affecting the choices --and the consequences of choices-- of even the most locally determined institutions and individuals.   Globalization is not an option we can choose but rather an imperative we cannot ignore.   However, rather than being an imperative that directly imposes duties, on the contrary it challenges one to discover how moral duty and ethical responsibility are still possible under the influence of these new global forces.

As Klaus Schwab, who founded the World Economic Forum 30 years ago when he was a young professor of business management at the University of Geneva put it recently in an interview with Newsweek :

“The mega mergers of the past months, the global ramifications of the events in East Asia, Russia and Brazil, the fact that national boundaries have often become irrelevant, are just some of the signs that we live in a new reality where globalization is no longer a process but a condition. Second, why responsible globality? In a world which is becoming borderless, we have to create new global boundaries; we have to create procedural, legal and institutional mechanisms to avoid the malignant outbursts of a revolution which is irreversible. This, like the Industrial Revolution at the end of the last century, holds the key for better fulfillment by lifting millions of people out of poverty and providing them with adequate health care and education.” [1]

Globalization is driven by technological advances in communications and transportation and motivated by the desire for free markets.   The virtue claimed for free markets, whenever voices of opposition are raised, is that they produce more wealth more efficiently and indeed uniquely produce the greatest wealth for the greatest number.   Imbalances in the distribution of wealth may occur in the course of development, but over time these will level out on the principle that a rising tide raises all ships.  

Thus, despite the acknowledged need for new legal and institutional mechanisms, globalization is defended as good on straightforward utilitarian grounds. Importantly, it is generally not suggested that any fundamental rethinking of ethics is needed; just care that the more abundant goods now available are distributed justly.   It is claimed that the degree of wealth and the diversity of commodities, products and services, made possible by the unfettered globalization of free markets could by other means never be achieved. Utilitarians such as Bentham and Mill did not think the greatest good would benefit all equally, although an equitable distribution was required.   What counted as good was not itself derived from the utilitarian calculus, but was thought to be a matter of fairly easy consensus.   Likewise it was not claimed that every individual or household would become wealthy or even own any share of the wealth directly; yet, it is argued, the benefits of living in a wealthy society would touch everyone.   It is better, if one is poor, to be so where a generally high level of wealth insures high standards for housing, medicine, education and so on.

This claim can only make sense, of course, if appropriate rights, entitlements as they are called, are guaranteed to all and are likewise enforced globally.   The tensions which explode occasionally (as they did in Seattle) clearly articulate the twin and competing poles of globalization: a laissez faire free market economy where rational choice allegedly produces the most desirable and complete distribution of unlimited wealth (utilitarianism) versus the need to declare and enforce wide sweeping conventions of human rights with regard to environment, safety, reproduction, child labor, speech, and many more (natural rights theory).   These two ethical approaches together define the nature of the problems associated with globalization.

An important question is whether utilitarianism of the sort implied by global free market economies can justify the set of human rights seen as essential to realizing the kind of general good globalization itself aims at.   Other questions that deserve reflection suggest themselves.   Is wealth itself a human good?   What obligations or duties are required or merely tolerated, and which are impossible, under whatever system of guaranteed rights emerges from the global economy?   There is also the issue of whether globalization will produce more choices or fewer, and what sort of choices these will be.

Certainly the basis for making informed choices will be different. One of the most transforming features of globalization is how the radical transfer of power from states to multi-national corporations works to force acquiescence to the values concretized in the market place. The global economy can work, sometimes almost overnight, to undermine the stability and authority of sovereign nations, especially those dependent on subsistence agriculture.

Thomas Friedman, one of the most optimistic voices favoring globalization in the United States, imagines a response to the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad’s 1997 diatribe against the “Great Powers” in terms of a very informal conversation, with no words minced, as follows:

“ …excuse me, Mahathir, but what planet are you living on?   You talk about participating in globalization as if it were a choice you had.   Globalization isn’t a choice.   It’s a reality.   There is just one global market today, and the only way you can grow at the speed your people want to grow is by tapping into the global stock and bond markets, by seeking out multinationals to invest in your country and by selling into the global trading system what your factories produce.   And the most basic truth about globalization is this:   No one is in charge – not George Soros, not [the] “Great Powers”… [2]

There is a paradox involved here.   Globalization is the ultimate realization of free markets.   A pure free market economy rests on laissez faire principles which themselves cannot justify any rights other than those which allow for the pursuit of economic ends.   Competition is the means that guarantees the free pursuit of economic ends.   Yet there is no reason to believe that competition will raise all boats on all of the world’s seas equally. Indeed competition will surely sink some of them. The paradox is that we want our competitors to sail the high seas because they are also our customers.   We in the United States want a wealthy China free of protective trade barriers because then we will have a large new market for our products.   But China cannot compete with the United States on its terms.   In order for China to become wealthy it must sell its produced goods and services abroad.   And it must succeed at this to a degree sufficient to create the ability to purchase American goods and services.   Yet this requires labor practices that violate declared principles of guaranteed basic human rights.   So it seems that for free market economies, rights are justified only subordinate to their impact on the production of wealth.   

This brings us to the fundamental question posed by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics : “Is wealth a human good in itself?”    If we conclude, along with Aristotle, that it is not and that wealth is only instrumental to some other, higher end, then the unavoidable question asks what defines this higher end.   It is quite clear, even more emphatically when considered globally, that the answers to this question are many.   It is also the case that not all of the most frequently given answers are logically compatible with each other. Some, through universalistic or exclusivist claims, are violently opposed to some others. Can the increase in wealth be said to serve such a plurality of goods?   And if it could, although surely not with equal importance, are the means by which wealth is produced always acceptable?   The questions are, first “is globalization consistent with a world that sustains a plurality of highest goods?” and if so (unlikely) are, secondly,   “the means of laissez faire economics consistent with these many desired ends?”   (Again unlikely).

Aristotle also teaches that politics and definitely not economics should be that which guides and ultimately directs us to make choices that bring about the goods we desire.

“Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.   … there are many actions, arts and sciences, their ends … are many; the end of … economics [is] wealth.” [3]  

“If … there is some end … which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this) … clearly this must be the good and the chief good. … we must try   … to determine what it is and to which of the sciences or capacities it is the object.   It … belong[s] to the most authoritative art … and politics [is that art.] [4]    

There are those who argue, Amartya Sen prominent among them, that wealth establishes the material basis for freedom.   Freedom in turn allows the pursuit of whatever higher ends one chooses.   Thus, according to Sen, in contrast to Aristotle, the production of wealth makes freedom actual and thereby is the essential prerequisite for the pursuit of all other human goods.   Moreover, according to Sen, wealth should be a matter of global interest in order to prohibit a world where only a few wealthy nations have exclusively the conditions that make possible genuine freedom of choice.   It is wealth that permits the development of freedom and freedom is the only condition under which a meaningful choice of other ends is possible.   Sen agrees with Aristotle that wealth is not a human end in itself.   However, without wealth, at least wealthy societies, the possibility of choosing among a full range of other desirable ends is neither real nor actual. [5]

What Sen seems to under estimate is how variously wealth and the means to produce wealth are regarded among the different constituencies in a pluralistic society.   Although the process of globalization may exert a leveling influence such that much of the world’s axiological diversity is muted, this cannot be what Sen has in mind as desirable.   Such a leveling process would only limit meaningful choice of higher ends and thereby radically devalue the freedom which wealth permitted to develop. The purported answer to this dilemma most frequently elocuted by the advocates of global free markets is that these markets both encourage and represent democracy.   The meaning of democracy here implied is rather thin.   Leaving that aside it is certainly the case, as John Rawls has pointed out, that pluralistic societies present very serious challenges to democracy, especially when some constituent elements assert universalistic or exclusivist claims. Again the question of whether the form of utilitarianism expressed in terms of global free markets has the power to mediate justly among the various conflicting claims of constituent interest groups, with different traditional value systems, within the global society must be examined. Sometimes, as in the case with many world religions, traditional constituencies assert explicit obligations and duties as part of their value set or ethical teachings.   These duties derive from teleological principles, which, although they aspire to universal status, may retain local or parochial values.   The obligation to make pilgrimages, which from an economic standpoint probably produces a negative utility, for example, illustrates this. Funerary practices, usury standards, gender roles, educational priorities, status of children and the elderly, healthcare norms, and many other culture-specific values are also examples.   Cultural traditions may impose duties that have no status or a negative one in a global value system.

John Rawls has suggested a model that perhaps can be adapted to the global context. He proposes a redefinition of a “well-ordered society.”   According to Rawls it is no longer likely that a modern society can be unified around basic moral beliefs.   Rawls rather sees order being built around a political conception of justice, a conception found at the focal point of an overlapping consensus of reasonable and comprehensive doctrines.  

What Rawls has in mind is how citizens understand their freedom.   According to Rawls:

  "… citizens think of themselves as free in three respects: fist, as having the moral power to form, to revise, and rationally to pursue a conception of the good; second, as being self-authenticating sources of valid claims; and third, as capable of taking responsibility for their ends." [6]

The question is how feasible this conception is on a global scale. Do "citizens of the world," however substantial the material basis for their action might be, regard themselves as free in senses mentioned by Rawls?

  Multi-culturalism and global justice

The advocates of global free market economics extol the virtues of competition.   Consumers, the category of citizen is not appropriate, are best served on this view by the opportunity to choose among various providers of goods and services.   In order for such choices to be made consumers must be informed of their options. If a consumer can discern meaningful differences this makes sense.   Otherwise it merely introduces inefficiency.    Apart from price differences that result from lower costs of production and distribution (often achieved when competitors merge) those differences of importance to consumers are those of perceived quality.   Perceived quality may accurately reflect objectively measurable features, but it may also be a matter of reputation.   Many individuals, for example, will consistently refuse to accept generic drugs even when the formula and quality control is exactly the same as for the branded version.   Quality in some cases may be entirely a matter of preference for a brand name.   For the competition to succeed it must build a reputation for its own brand which in many cases can be best done by undermining the belief in the leading brand.   The leading brand, of course, does its best to short circuit the credibility of competing brands. This is simply to say that competition is often in part a matter of manipulating the reputations attached to various products and services without doing much to change the material basis of those reputations.   Since in advanced markets this is generally well known, advertising tends there to use irony to undermine consumer demands for genuine differences in quality.

Reflecting on this process as it could occur in an unfettered global free market economy it is easy to see how the issues of identity politics are applicable.   Charles Taylor begins his discussion of   “The Politics of Recognition” pointing to the history whereby white European societies achieved global dominance in part by characterizing non-white civilizations as inferior.   The efficiency with which the more powerful economic societies were able to perpetrate this view led in no small measure to the assimilation and acceptance of those negative judgments by the majority of those living in the non-white world. [7]   Successful products are so likewise because they define themselves as expressive of a highly desirable good. A well known example was the marketing by Nestle of powdered baby formula in developing countries where water supplies were often impure and anyway such packaged formula was a costly and socially disruptive alternative to breast feeding. The marketing strategy was successful only because the powdered product was perceived to be modern and Western.   Whether the product is entertainment, home appliances, automobiles, fast food, soft drinks, fashions, literature or in general lifestyle, the message is that to partake of this product is to realize a benefit of self-improvement.   The allure of Western modernity consists in the belief that it is the equivalent of freedom.     It is a curious belief, frequently articulated by Chinese students in Beijing in 1989 and now a commonplace, that the free market mechanism that makes available such goods and services is itself the essence of democracy.    Today Wal-Mart and McDonalds are part of the Chinese landscape.

What is happening under the influence of the global economy is that traditional cultural preferences are being subjugated to the goals of the market place.   Traditional options are being rapidly replaced by whatever floods the market.   If culture can be understood as a complex aggregation of beliefs and values preserved within a generally accepted historical narrative and expressed in traditional genre forms of literature, music, fine and folk art, then it is clear that the process of globalization is effectively suppressing the ongoing vitality of much culture.     Global economic forces quickly establish a hegemony that subjugates other value systems through a process not unlike that of colonization in the past.

On the view being presented here the emphasis is the impact of the persuasive strategies to market consumer goods within the competitive global free marketplace.   Since, as argued above, what is being sold is modernity and Western lifestyle, the persuasive strategies can very well be compared to the role played by Western literature, particularly the novel that powerfully thematized a vision of the good life, in the age of imperialism.   As Edward Said has put it:

"The novel is an incorporative, quasi-encyclopedic cultural form.   Packed into it are both a highly regulated plot mechanism and an entire system of social reference that depends on the existing institutions of bourgeois society, their authority and power." [8]

On Said’s account Western literature displaced non-Western constructions of social reality (e.g., the idea of the hero) and helped to create the acceptance of the negative self-perceptions essential to the success of imperialism.   The current situation finds the marketing language of the most powerful and dominant corporate interests to have the same influence.   International or global language expresses precisely global interests, such as security interests, ecological concerns and issues having to do with the management of communicable diseases, but overwhelmingly honors commercial interests.   Since the major commercial interest is to promote to the widest possible market place goods, services and other consumables, international language is –in contrast to the rich and intrinsically probing language of the novels examined by Said—the limited marketing language of commerce.   It is this language that is filling the space left by the languages that express local, traditional cultures.   This is the mechanism that allows global economic forces to establish such powerful hegemonies over generations-long traditional value systems.   Since Rawls’ conception of political justice grants that a multi-cultural consensus of moral values is highly unlikely if not completely impossible, it is clear that this kind of justice does nothing to sustain a venue where ethical and moral decisions can be deliberated and acted upon. Rawls and Sen alike anticipate a system of justice that protects equity and other economic interests but which, unlike many traditional notions of justice, is not linked to other ethical standards.

Globalization and the Imperative of Responsibility: Hans Jonas and the problem of non-reciprocity

One of the most prescient philosophers of recent times, Han Jonas, has identified as the central ethical problem facing humanity in the age of globalization the altered nature of human action due to the impact of modern technology.   

"…man is evermore the maker of what he has made and the doer of what he can do, and most of all the preparer of what he will be able to do next. But who is 'he'? Not you or I: it is the aggregate, not the individual doer or deed that matters here; and the indefinite future, rather than the contemporary context of the action, constitutes the relevant horizon of responsibility. This requires imperatives of a new sort. If the realm of making has invaded the space of essential action, then morality must invade the realm of making, from which it has formerly stayed aloof, and must do so in the form of public policy. Public policy has never had to deal before with issues of such inclusiveness and such lengths of anticipation. In fact, the changed nature of human action changes the very nature of politics." [9]

Technology changes the nature of human action by altering its range and extent.   This itself creates the further problem that the consequences of human action may now rest in an indeterminate future where it is impossible for those who initiate the action to calculate the ratio of benefit to harm. Under these conditions the applicability of utilitarian ethical strategies entirely disappears.  

Challenged by this apprehension it may be valuable to examine the key elements of Jonas's position with particular reference to that most ubiquitous and perhaps most powerful of contemporary technologies, media technology, and in respect to the instruments of public policy, especially the law. What are the imperatives of responsibility in an era of media technology and the rule of law? It should be noted that for Jonas the rule of law is itself a moral imperative. But in his view the rule of law is not now nor ever has been sufficient to guarantee responsible action. The current debates over regulation of the emerging medical and information technologies do not, for the most part, address the crucial questions of the responsible practice of these technologies, except within limited contexts.   What can be said of the law in national contexts can be said a fortiori in the global setting.  

Jonas has singled out media technology as one of the major phenomena separating the possibilities of 20th century humanity from those available to the Greeks.

"Immortal fame is thus public honor in perpetuity, as the body politic is human life in perpetuity. Now, already Aristotle pointed out that honor is worth just as much as the judgment of those who bestow it. But then, the desire for it, and a fortiori the desire for its extension into posthumous fame, and ultimately the estimation of this form of immortality in principle, are justified only by the trust we can reasonably place in the integrity of its trustee and master, namely, public opinion: in its enlightenment now, its faithfulness in the future -- and, of course, in its own unceasing continuity, that is the indefinite survival of the commonwealth. Now on all these counts the modern temper cannot permit itself the innocent confidence of the Greeks. The selectiveness as such of this "immortality": that it admits few and excludes most, we might accept if only we could believe in the justice of the selection. But for that we know too much of how reputations are made, how fame is fabricated, public opinion engineered, the record of history remade, and even premade, to the order of interest and power. In the age of the party line, and, for that matter, of Madison avenue, in the age of the universal corruption of the word, we are sadly aware that speech, the vehicle of this immortality, is the medium of lies as well as of truth, and more often the former than the latter in the public sphere -- with a busily fostered growth between them of unmeaningness, not even fit for either, eating away into both; and the older suspicion whether we are not dealing with a tale told by an idiot is overshadowed by the worse that it might be a tale concocted by knaves." [10]  

What Jonas here refers to as the engineering of public opinion and the source of the universal corruption of the word is, in his view, invidious because it produces a specious form of immortal fame by debasing the primary vehicle of human action, i.e., speech. Both Pericles and Herodotus see speech and its preservation in history as ennobling.   Pericles' lofty view in his Funeral Oration -- "They received, each for his own memory, praise that will never die, and with it the grandest of all sepulchers, not that in which their mortal bones are laid, but a home in the minds of men, where their glory remains fresh to stir to speech or action as the occasion comes by." -- sets the standard of an abiding praise of the realization of the good in human life and experience. This ideal celebrated by Pericles has not disappeared in our day. Jonas for example cites the self-declared motivation of an astronaut speaking in a TV interview to be nothing other than immortal fame; but such immortality as we know it today has been mass produced by media technology. Andy Warhol's prescient fifteen minutes of fame is now daily produced across all social strata by such technicians as Rikki Lake (hip), Jenny Jones (suburban), and Montel Williams (urban grit).

If we allow that one version of this corruption of the word is the reduction of language in the global sphere to the marketing language of commercial interest then the dilemma becomes all the more actual.

In this context we should recall how Norbert Wiener defined for us the modern notion of information . Information, according to Jonas, forms together with teleology and mind the three-legged stool of cybernetics, that technology which claims most to grasp and emulate human behavior. Wiener said, "Information is a name used to designate the continuity of that which is exchanged with the exterior world to the degree that we adapt ourselves there, and apply to ourselves the result of that adaptation. ... To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus communication and regulation concern the essential part of the inner life of man, even as they concern his life in society. Although Jonas generally finds the claims of cybernetics "spurious and mainly verbal" he would agree with Wiener in this assessment of the formative power of technologically managed information on both the inner and public life of man.

The philosophical/political issue posed by Pericles in his oration upon the Athenian dead is the problem of law and justice as taken up in Plato's Republic . In a different vein than Jonas Karl Popper found incipient social engineering in Plato's approach to justice. For Popper, this kind of technology is to be feared because it denies basic liberties and foreshadows totalitarianism. Its mistake, Popper argues, is a specious account of natural and historical law. Popper is one with Jonas in the view that we cannot ordain the future, even for the sake of the good, and also in utter distrust of any form of utopianism. But Popper's recommendation of "piecemeal" engineering, while certainly an antidote to scientism and historicism, is for Jonas inadequate in that does nothing to insure that the legacy we thereby leave to the future is responsibly drafted. Indeed it would do nothing to overthrow the narrowness and shortsightedness of Thrasymachean egoism.

Glaucon's interpretation of the Thrasymachean account of justice is supplemented by Adeimantus who sees the issue more explicitly in terms of opinion, which is of course formed by rhetoric (the art of Thrasymachos.) What most troubles Adeimantos is that justice is generally not praised for its own sake, but for its rewards. If justice itself is not good or pleasant, as Adeimantos allows the poetic tradition as well as the laws teach, then what incentive is there for one to strive for justice?

More to the point for Jonas is the reward structure itself. If justice is only praised for its rewards, then it can only be praised in terms of benefits understood and appreciated in the present. But just as children often do not appreciate the same rewards as their parents, the justice of today if it is based on rewards may have no bearing or a negative one on the future.   The promise of global free markets, viz., more abundant goods and services, will be perceived as a just improvement if and only if the marketing of these goods has been persuasive.  

When Adeimantos objects to the conception of justice held by Thrasymachos, it is largely because he fears that Periclean like rewards and praise can be easily meted out without regard for true virtue. This is similar to the apprehensions of Jonas. The Socratic solution in the Republic is utopian; Jonas fears that the assent of technology takes utopianism beyond the status of philosophical dream to where it "appears to be capable of turning into a task, and Marxism has seized on this novel chance to give its political gospel eschatological exaltation and pragmatic credibility at the same time."

What Jonas fears in the historical example of Marxism is no less an aspect of the totalizing features of global capitalism.   As Jonas sees it technology, and especially media or information technology, facilitates the rise of utopianism by simultaneously undermining the meaning of praise, distorting memory, and reconfiguring the rule of law to conform with highly temporized intentionalities. The antidote to this situation is the moral virtue he calls responsibility, but it is precisely this virtue that he laments is so profoundly ill defined for the present age.

Under such circumstances the development of moral virtues is confounded. The Aristotelian expectations of the reliability of doxic exchange and the function of the law as educator are both rendered false by the omnipresent engineering of public opinion by the forces of global free markets.

Conclusion

The conclusion reached is only an enumeration of some of the ethical challenges posed by globalization.  

Local and regional cultures as defined by historical narratives, traditionally the wellspring of moral and ethical value, are being subjugated to the hegemony of global economic ends.

The politics of recognition, in a global setting, lead various social groups to value themselves positively or negatively according to how well they measure up on scales of commercial value.   Traditions that are less successful commercially tend to regard themselves as inferior.

The most common means of economic valuation, utilitarianism, is rendered ineffectual as a result of the range technology gives to human action.

The remaking of language for purely commercial purposes, and the ubiquitous success of this language in an “information age,” creates a profound discontinuity between past and future.   Under these circumstances fundamental value terms such as "good" are understood to have meaning only as a function of a specific and limited (and usually commercial) end.

What is suggested is that the optimism of Sen, and the rational program of Rawls are both, individually or together, inadequate to sustain the liberal tradition of autonomous free choice with regard to moral and ethical conflicts in the era of a fully developed global free market economy.   The incomplete search for an ethics for the technological age proposed by Hans Jonas clearly identifies philosophical issues that must be resolved before the global marketplace can be an arena for ethical decision making.

[1] Interview with Klaus Schwab, Newsweek International , Feb. 1, 1999.

[2] Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization , p. 93.

[3] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (tr., Jonathan Barnes), I, 1.

[4] Ibid. , I, 2.

[5] Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom , passim

.

[6] John Rawls, Political Liberalism , p. 72.

[8] Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism , p. 71.

[9] Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age , p. 9.

[10] Hans Jonas, Immortality and the Modern Temper , in The Phenomenon of Life, pp. 264 – 265.