The Ethics of Globalization
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Despite two world wars, a host of small and midsize wars, and the persistence of cultural and ideological disputes and geopolitical rivalries, the 20th century was in significant part marked by an internationalism consistent with the coordination of foreign trade and the rule of international law (law of nations), i.e., "the body of legal rules that apply between sovereign states and such other entities as have . . . status acknowledged by the international community" (Schwarzenberger & Cheng, 2001). Periodically renegotiated and expanded in meetings known as "rounds" since World War II, the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade, or GATT, fostered the cross-national principle of trade without discrimination for signatories. Under that principle, member nations opened their markets equally and unconditionally to one another and agreed to deploy tariffs systematically (GATT). In the mid-1990s, at the conclusion of the Uruguay Round, signatories agreed to be bound by trade rules dealing with "foreign investment in manufacturing, trade and investment in services and protections for intellectual property (patents, copyrights and trademarks), and . . . so-called technical barriers to trade, which include consumer, environmental and workplace safety regulations" (Weissman 31). It was after the Uruguay Round, too, that GATT was subsumed by the World Trade Organization. Ostensibly a mechanism of mutually beneficial international cooperation, the WTO nevertheless became
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eminded last week that Third World delegates to the WTO don't want developed nations to force them to allow union organizing. Cheap labor is their competitive advantage. Environmentalists who want the WTO to keep its hands off U.S. laws that protect endangered species would happily force Venezuela--against its sovereign will--to clean up its gasoline exports (Lacayo 36).
Thus do parochial concerns tend to trump the big picture. Claims of competing constituencies either prevent or retard problem solving.
If Kant's categorical imperative is a problematic ethical fit with the dynamics of globalization, it may be that another ethical construct would be more useful. As articulated by John Stuart Mill, utilitarianism is moral and social philosophy, meaning that the morality of individual actions impinges on society at large. Sher summarizes Utilitarianism as the view that "we should always perform that act, of those available, which will bring the most happiness, or least unhappiness, to the greatest number of people" (vii). That is morality as society, morality as participation in civil society, and in a broad sense morality as very civilization. Social input to and consequences of behavior that is moral cannot be ignored;
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Approximate Word count = 1911
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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