Global Leadership: The Dilemmas Of Global Ethics And Leadership

Global Ethics and Leadership

With a world even more connected than ever before we cannot look the other way and forget about what is going on in the rest of the world. Global ethics has become more of a priority when events that are going on in the world can be brought into our living rooms during the evening news. With new social networks, the internet, and advance telephones it becomes so easy to share and communicate with anyone from around the world in a matter of seconds. As global problems such as poverty, war, environmental issues, and human rights arise we all have a role in addressing problems of global governance. “How we resolve (or fail to resolve) the dilemmas of global ethics will determine the framework of future global governance.

“If you do not believe that at least some values are shared globally, or at least that moral frameworks are globally comprehensible and intelligible to those from different backgrounds, then global ethics will be not only difficult to formulate but also meaningless” (Widdows). Universalism is assumed in all areas of global governance; for example, international law relies on some common understandings of justice. Today we have specific practical issues of global ethics from poverty, through war, bioethics the environment, and women’s rights. In fact, we have universal codes or guidelines that protect those for example subjects in medical research. There are also regulations about protection of prisoners of war and prohibitions on torture. A universalist will claim that there is some shared moral framework and it does not require that in practice it is universally

Cultural relativist would disagree that we can have global ethics because not everyone can share the same values; instead they tolerate each other. The challenge of cultural relativism is that different cultures have different moral codes seems like the key to understanding morality. There are no universal moral truths, they say, the customs of different societies are all that exist. “Cultural relativist may think there is no such thing as universal truth in ethics; there are only the various culture codes, and nothing more. Cultural relativism challenges beliers in the objectify and university of moral truth. Cultural relativists believe that values are culturally dependent: in other words, that values like moral values are just the customs and norms of a particular society. A key argument often given to support the cultural-relativist argument is the argument from difference, established by J. L. Mackie (1977). Even with these challenges I still believe that we can agree that all humans have basic needs and to obtain them there are laws that can be established that everyone can agree