Criteria Tablet[Beating Heart Ethic Type 2: Global Ethic]

[solidarity]

http://www.johnhick.org.uk/ethic.pdf Is there a Global Ethic?
© John Hick 2007 p 1 of 16
GLOBAL ETHIC?
(The Center for the Study of Global Ethics, University of
Birmingham UK, in February 2007)
The Global Ethic Foundation has published a Declaration which
according to Professor Leonard Swidler of Philadelphia- 9 Middle
Principles.


1. we should all respect the eco-sphere on which we depend.

The survival and flourishing of the human family requires
at this
point in history the articulation of at least a basic ethical outlook,
and if possible a setof ethical principles, on which all the major
streams of human culture concur andwhich can be used to influence
their behaviour. We need to uncover and cultivate theground of human
unity beneath the multiplicity of nations, cultures, social systems,
religions and ideologies among which and between which conflicts
occur.

. As Desmond Tutu explains it, ‘It is to say “My humanity is caught
up, is inextricably bound up, in yours”. We belong in a bundle of
life. We say, A
person is a person through other persons . . . .
A person with ubuntu . . . has a proper
self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a
greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or
diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if
they were less than they are.’ (No Future Without Forgiveness,

This outlook, which is not based on duties and obligations, is not
only concerned with the relations between individuals, but had huge
political significance because it lay behind Nelson Mandela’s policy
of reconciliation rather than revenge, and was expressed in the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission when apartheid had ended. This ubuntu
is , the same outlook lay behind Mahatma Gandhi’s principle of
nonviolence. He accepted the traditional Hindu belief that the atman,
or soul, in each of us isultimately one. To injure someone else is to
injure part of oneself. ‘To be true to such religion’, he said, ‘one
has to lose oneself in continuous and continuing service of all
life’.


2. ‘because humans are thinking, andtherefore essentially free-
deciding beings, all have the right to freedom of thought,speech,
conscience and religion or belief’. And there is the rider, ‘At the
same time,all humans should exercise [this right] in ways that will
respect themselves and all others and strive to produce maximum
benefits, broadly understood, for both themselves and their fellow
human beings’. Again, the general principle seems right,but it does
not help us to decide particular cases, such as the Danish cartoons
showing the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, associating
him with today’s
suicide bombers, or the protests against a play in the Birmingham Rep.
about Sikhs.

3.In the private arena of family and neighbourhood life, is it always
best to tell the truth – for example, to spread the knowledge of some
scandal or misbehaviour? But there is certainly an important message
here for the press and other media. If they always tried to ‘learn the
truth and express it honestly’, without headline exaggerations,
without spin andbias, society would undoubtedly be in a better state.

4. ‘Because human beings are free-deciding beings, all adults have the
right to a voice, direct or indirect, in all decisions that affect
them, including a meaningful participation in choosing their leaders
and holding them accountable, as well as access to all leadership
positions for which their talents qualify them’

5. ‘Because women and men are inherently equal and all men and all
women have an equal right to the full development of all their talents
as well as freedom to marry, with equal rights for all women and men
in dissolving marriage or living outside marriage’.
6. ‘Because humans are free, bodily and social in nature, all
individual humans and communities have the right to own property of
various sorts’
7. ‘All humans should normally have both meaningful work and
recreative leisure’. By way of comment, there is at present a lot of
work that is necessary but that is not otherwise meaningful, but dull,
repetitive and uninteresting. Is it possible for everyone everywhere
to have what they regard as meaningful work? How many today have such
work? Leisure is easier to legislate for. A case could be made for
saying that the less meaningful the work, the greater
the leisure time that should be available.

8. ‘Because peace as both the absence of violence and the presence of
justice for all humans is the necessary condition for the complete
development of the full humanity of all humans, all should strive to
further the growth of peace on all levels’. And the proviso which the
document adds is that ‘violence is
to be vigorously avoided, being resorted to only when its absence
would cause a greater harm.

9. ‘Because all human beings have an inherent equal dignity, all
should be treated equally before the law and provided with its equal
protection’




As agreed by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948 in its
Declaration of UniversalHuman Rights- the term – global ethic- used -
as universal human rights, implies at least an element within a
global ethic.


The term global ethic as introduced by Hans Kung - meant an ethic
which is
common to the different civilizations, cultures and religions of
world. This connects with the Preamble to the United Nations
Declaration, which says, ‘Disregard and contempt for human rights
have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of
mankind’. Tony Blair and Kofi Annan were other speakers.

Is there any universal, or near universal, human ethic? We have to
distinguish
various levels of moral principles. Do not treat others as you would
not wish them to treat you As amother cares for her son, all her days,
so towards all living things a man’s mindshould be all-
embracing’ (Sutta Nipata); and for Buddhism the key virtues arekaruna,
compassion, and metta, usually translated as loving-kindness. Moving
toChina, Confucius taught ‘Do not do to others what you would not like
yourself’, and in a Taoist scripture (Tai Shang) we read that the good
man will ‘regard [others’] gains as if they were his own, and their
losses in the same way’. In ancient Persia(including today’s Iran) a
Zoroastrian scripture declares, ‘That nature only is goodwhen it shall
not do to another whatever is not good for its own self’. Jesus
taught, ‘As ye would that men shall do to you, do ye also to them
likewise’ (Luke 6:31). In the Jewish Talmud, ‘What is hateful to
yourself do not do to your fellow man. That isthe whole of the Torah’.
And in the Hadith of Islam we read the Prophet Muhammad’s words, ‘No
man is a true believer unless he desires for his brother that which he
desires for himself’. So this general principle of benevolence is
enshrined in the teachings that have shaped all civilizations since
the axial age around the midfirst
millennium BCE.

The Golden Rule seems to rest on a basic human
moral sense which is presupposed by all ethical theories. This is the
‘conscience of mankind’ referred to in the preamble to the United
Nations’ Declaration of Universal Human Rights The Confucian teacher
Mencius in the fourth and third centuries BCE expressed this basic
insight: ‘I say that every man has a heart that pities others, for the
heart of every man is moved by fear or horror, tenderness and mercy,
if he sees a child about to fall into a well. And this is not because
he wishes to make friends with the child’s father and mother or to win
praise from his countryfolk and friends, nor because the child’s
cries hurt him. This shows that no man . . . is without a heart for
right and wrong’. There are in fact some who lack this heart, who are
gratuitously cruel and who take pleasure in causing pain and distress,
and they usually end up in prison or in an institution for the insane.
Either such psychopaths have always lacked the capacity for
consideration of others, or have been so circumstanced from birth that
this
capacity has never been developed, my guess being the latter.
the Golden Rule is, in Hamlet’s phrase,
more honoured in the breach than the observance
we are also well
aware of the all-too-familiar psychological conditions which run
counter to the
Golden Rule, selfishness, greed, lust, envy, and so on.
.
Richard Dawkins, in his widely read book The God Delusion speaks of
‘our
feelings of morality, decency, empathy and pity . . the wrenching
compassion we feel
when we see an orphaned child weeping, an old widow in despair from
loneliness, or
an animal whimpering in pain’ and ‘the powerful urge to send an
anonymous gift of
money or clothes to tsunami victims on the other side of the world
whom we shall
never meet’ (215); and he has his own biological explanation of this.
He lists four
Darwinian sources of morality. One depends on what he calls ‘the
selfish gene’. He
says that ‘a gene that programs individual organisms to favour their
genetic kin is
statistically likely to benefit copies of itself. Such a gene
frequency can increase in
the gene pool to the point where kin altruism becomes the norm’ (216).
Hence, he
thinks, parents’ care for their children, both in humans and other
animals. This care is
undoubtedly the case. But whether an individual ‘selfish gene’ wants
to benefit itself
by making unconscious statistical calculations about how best to do
this, seems to me
to be suspiciously like an anthropomorphic fairy tale. And indeed how
does it benefit
an individual gene that there exist many copies or near copies of
itself? The second
Darwinian source of morality, according to Dawkins, is reciprocal
altruism: ‘you
scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’. This occurs not only within
but between
species. ‘The bee needs nectar and the flower needs pollinating.
Flowers can’t fly so
they pay bees, in the currency of nectar, for the hire of their
wings’ (216-7). This is
the basis of all barter, and ultimately of the invention of money.
So, according to Dawkins, ‘kinship and reciprocation’ are ‘the twin
pillars of
altruism in a Darwinian world’ (218). Secondary sources are
reputation, including a
reputation for kindness and generosity, which may motivate altruistic
behaviour; and
Is there a Global Ethic?
© John Hick 2007 p 6 of 16
as another secondary source, generosity as ‘an advertisement of
dominance or
superiority’ (218). Dawkins points out that in the early days of
humanity our
ancestors lived in small villages or roving bands. In these
circumstances many of
your group would be relatives, and others would be people you met
frequently. If
relatives, kin altruism would operate. If non-kin but familiar
acquaintances, the
principle of reciprocity would operate. And in a small group there
would be ample
scope for the motivations of reputation and superiority-advertisement.
All this, he
thinks, evolved in us a general rule of thumb: be nice to people you
have to do with.
‘What natural selection favours’, he says, ‘is rules of thumb, which
work in practice
to promote the genes that built them’ (220). And today, when so many
live in towns
and cities, this rule of thumb continues to operate as the Golden Rule
long after the
original conditions which produced it have ended. The Golden Rule is
thus a byproduct
or, as Dawkins says, a misfiring of an originally biologically useful
rule of
thumb. Birds have a rule of thumb to feed the young in their nest.
‘Could it be’,
Dawkins asks, ‘that our Good Samaritan urges are misfirings, analogous
to a reed
warbler’s parental instinct when it works itself to the bone for a
young cuckoo?’ ‘An
even closer analogy’, he adds, ‘is the human urge to adopt a
child’ (220-1).
To summarise Dawkins’ theory, the moral sense embodied in the Golden
Rule
is a left-over by-product of a biologically useful rule of thumb
developed in the
earliest period when life was lived in small closed communities
Where does this innate sense come from?
Pre-axial peoples generally lived in small village communities in
which the
members thought of themselves as cells in the social organism, rather
than as fully
autonomous individuals. But during the axial period cities developed,
specialised
production and exchange of goods, and the development of writing, and
in the
relatively peaceful environments of large empires the dawning sense of
individual
personality emerged from the communal consciousness of the tribe,
spreading beyond
kings, emperors and high priests to ordinary people. This meant that
whereas
previously the gods were the god of a particular place or group, the
great axial sages
and prophets could speak to the individual with a message that was
potentially of
universal significance, not confined to any one particular area or
community. And it was in this new situation that the Golden Rule was
taught.