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Toward a Moral System for World Society: A Reflection on Human Responsibilities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Mary Maxwell
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Extract

Twenty-four former presidents and prime ministers, representing five continents and calling themselves the InterAction Council, have produced a landmark proposal for global ethics. Reflecting this year's 50th anniversary of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, their document is called the Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities (a text of it is appended to this article). A key point of interest is that these ex-leaders of governments sought advice from a range of religious leaders and philosophers.

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 12 , March 1998 , pp. 179 - 199
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1998

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References

1 “Report on the Conclusions and Recommendations by a High-Level Expert Group Meeting, Vienna, Austria (20–22 April 1997), Chaired by Helmut Schmidt,” in “A Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities,” p. 9.

2 Malcolm Fraser, “The Responsible Course of Action: Rights and Responsibilities Must Match Up If the Human Race Is to Make Progress,”Australian, September 12, 1997, p. 13.

3 Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932). That is, the individual practices “group morality”; he has blind devotion to his own kind and can be ruthless to others. See Mary Maxwell, Morality Among Nations: An Evolutionary View (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990).

4 “Report on the Conclusions and Recommendations,” p. 9.

5 Max L. Stackhouse, personal communication. See also Ved P. Nanda, “International Law in Ancient Hindu India,” in the Influence of Religion on the Development of International Law, edited by Mark W. Janis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1991), pp. 51–60.

6 National Council of Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice for All (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Catholic Conference, 1986), in On Moral Business: Classical and Contemporary Resources for Ethics in Economic Life, edited by Max L. Stackhouse, Dennis P. McCann, and Shirley J. Roels with Preston N. Williams (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1995), p. 438.

7 Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, ed., Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives: A Quest for Consensus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), p. 428.

8 The wording is: “It is forbidden to sell to gentiles weapons of war nor may [one] sharpen swords and spears; … nor chains [to be put on the necks or feet of captives], nor lions nor bears nor anything that may be used to harm the public.” Cited in Meir Tamari, The Challenge of Wealth: A Jewish Perspective on Earning and Spending Money (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson Inc., 1995), pp. 41–42.

9 “Report on the Conclusions and Recommendations,” p. 10.

10 Malcolm Eraser, “The Responsible Course of Action,” p. 13.

11 Zakaria, Fareed, “Culture is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew,” Foreign Affairs 73 (March/April, 1994), p. 111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 John Stuart Mill, “Utilitarianism,” in The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, edited by Marshall Cohen (New York: Random House, 1996), pp. 362–70, cited in Arthur J. Dyck, Rethinking Rights and Responsibilities: The Moral Bonds of Community (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1994), p. 48.

13 Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 52–53.

14 “Report on the Conclusions and Recommendations,” p. 10. 15Ibid.

16 Philip Allott, Eunomia: New Order for a New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 288. 17Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: The Reinvention of American Society (New York: Touchstone, 1993).

18 Robert W. Cox, “Globalization, Multilateralism, and Democracy,” in Robert W. Cox and Timothy Sinclair, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 528.

19 Ralph Beddard, Human Rights and Europe, 3rd edition (Cambridge: Grotius Publications, Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 7.

20 For a sociobiological account of that fact, see my Morality among Nations, especially ch. 6.

21 Richard Alexander, The Biology of Moral Systems (Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1987).

22 Roscoe Pound, “My Philosophy of Law,” in Credos of Sixteen American Scholars (Boston: Boston Law Book Co., 1941), p. 251.

23 Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). See also Richard Wright, The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Pantheon, 1994).

24 For a very clear synopsis of the biology involved, see Johnson, Gary R., “The Architecture of Ethnic Identity,” Politics and the Life Sciences 16 (September 1997), pp. 257–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar and related articles in that volume. See also Mary Maxwell, ed., The Sociobiological Imagination (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991).