GEC9 - Ethics

2nd Sem. SY2024-2025

FINAL PERIOD TOPICS
Transcibed from the Lectures of
sir PASTOR B. MENDEZ I

OUTLINE:
I. FRAMEWORKS AND PRINCIPLES BEHIND OUR MORAL DISPOSITION
a) Aristotle’s Ethics
b) St. Thomas Aquinas Ethics
II. UTILITARIANISM
a) Hedonistic Utilitarianism
b) Preference Utilitarianism
c) Act-Utilitarianism
d) Rule-Utilitarianism
e) Objections to Utilitarianism
f) Principle of Utility
III. KANT AND RIGHT
a) 3 Rational Principles behind “Righteous Laws”
b) The Good Will, Consequences, and Duties
c) Categorical Imperative
d) Maxim
IV. JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS
a) What is Justice?
b) What is Fairness?
c) Justice as Fairness
i. Basic Structure of Society
ii. Two Guiding Ideas and Principles of Justice as Fairness
d) The Conception of Citizens
e) The Conception of Society
f) The Original Position
g) Critiques Of Justice As Fairness
i. The Project Is False
ii. The Project Is Inadequate
iii. The Project Is Misguided
iv. The Project Is Doomed to Failure
V. GLOBALIZATION AND ITS ETHICAL CHALLENGES
a) The Real Crisis
b) Human Security
c) Democratic Values
d) Economic Justice
e) Trade And Aid
f) Military Spending
g) Arms Trade
h) Global Thinking
FRAMEWORKS AND PRINCIPLES BEHIND OUR MORAL DISPOSITION
Aristotle’s Ethics
Aristotle thought that work on virtue had a profoundly political aspect. According to Aristotle, our
capacity to perceive good and bad is inextricably linked to the complexities of our sociality, and it is hard
to imagine a sound reading of Aristotle (or any other good philosopher) on topics such as virtue and practical
reason that did not involve our capacity to distinguish good from bad.
Human beings, Aristotle thought, are at home in ordered communities, and our capacity to track practical
good and bad and right and wrong (even to engage in means- end reasoning, interestingly) are capacities
properly exercised in society: it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a
political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state is either a bad man or… he
is like the ‘Tribeless, lawless, heartless one,’ whom Homer denounces—the natural outcast…. Nature, as we
often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal who has the gift of speech. And whereas mere
voice is but an indication of pleasure and pain, and is therefore found in other animals…the power of speech is
intended to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and unjust. And it is a
characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the
association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state.
Further, according to Aristotle, individual human beings develop their understanding of good, bad, right,
and wrong by criticizing their fellows’ bad conduct in light of community standards. The polis is the natural
setting for virtuous activity in Aristotle, and even though there is no question that Aristotle sees virtuous citizens
as working for the good of the polis, it is not clear how far Aristotle’s understanding of virtue and sound
practical reason locates these excellencies as aimed, first and foremost, at the good of the community rather
than at the virtuous person’s own good (even if participation in ordered community life is required if individuals
are to thrive). It is one thing to hold that an individual human being’s good cannot be understood in
isolation from that individual’s participation in an ordered community.
As near as I can tell, Aristotle thought as much. It is quite another to treat the proper end of virtuous activity
as the common good understood very broadly—as extending, for example, beyond the boundaries of the polis,
of political friendships, of a community ordered by shared customs or rules, of humans who share a common
language, beyond, even the reach of norms enjoining hospitality. Notoriously, Aristotle has little to offer on the
question of how individuals who are in these respects strangers to one another are capable of doing right or
wrong by each other.
In short, Aristotle’s understanding of the point or target or end of virtuous activity certainly transcends the
apparent limits of love of self far enough to encompass love of neighbor. Aristotle’s insistence on the centrality
of communities ordered by shared customs and rules shows us this much. But the circle of those who will count
as my neighbors is rather narrower than contemporary ethicists might have hoped.

St. Thomas Aquinas Ethics

Aquinas understands virtue as directed to the common good in much more expansive terms. Aquinas
takes up Aristotle’s stress on our sociality, together with the thought that human beings are the only animals
who will develop an articulate sense of good and bad (if all goes as it should go in their lives). Aquinas also
moves arm-in- arm with Aristotle in focusing on the importance of an ordered community to an understanding
of the kind of common good at issue in the exercise of virtue. For all that, Aquinas’s account of the extent of the
ordered community served by virtuous activity, and the kind of order at issue in the community, grows beyond
any Aristotelian root.
Full discussion of the sort of order at issue in Aquinas’s account of the common good (for the sake of which
we cultivate and exercise acquired virtue) requires entering into the difficult territory of Aquinas’s undeniably
theological account of natural law. Discussion of Aquinas on the character of natural law is beyond the scope of
this essay. Suffice to say that the boundaries that delimit any distinct human community— the polis, say, or
nation, or state, or club, or group of people with shared customs, or religious group, or group of users of one or
more human languages—do not circumscribe virtue’s arena on Aquinas’s account. The kind of transcendence of
personal good at issue in Aquinas’s understanding outstrips the sort associated with the political and social
dimensions of virtue in Aristotle.
 The moral philosophy of St. Thomas (1225-1274) involves a merger of at least two apparently disparate
traditions: Aristotelian eudaimonism and Christian theology. On the one hand, Aquinas follows Aristotle in
thinking that an act is good or bad depending on whether it contributes to or deters us from our proper human
end— the telos or final goal at which all human actions aim. That telos is eudaimonia, or happiness, where
“happiness” is understood in terms of completion, perfection, or well-being. Achieving happiness, however,
requires a range of intellectual and moral virtues that enable us to understand the nature of happiness and
motivate us to seek it in a reliable and consistent way.
On the other hand, Aquinas believes that we can never achieve complete or final happiness in this life.
For him, final happiness consists in beatitude, or supernatural union with God. Such an end lies far beyond
what we through our natural human capacities can attain. For this reason, we not only need the virtues, we also
need God to transform our nature—to perfect or “deify” it—so that we might be suited to participate in divine
beatitude. Moreover, Aquinas believes that we inherited a propensity to sin from our first parent, Adam. While
our nature is not wholly corrupted by sin, it is nevertheless diminished by sin’s stain, as evidenced by the fact
that our wills are at enmity with God’s. Thus we need God’s help in order to restore the good of our nature and
bring us into conformity with his will. To this end, God imbues us with his grace which comes in the form of
divinely instantiated virtues and gifts.

When God created human beings He created them GOOD and BEAUTIFUL. But during the fall of the first
created human beings, they were stained by sin and that is why God (the creator) sent His Son to redeem and
clean the satin of sin in the heart of human beings in order that same human beings from the creation will return
to their creator who is the source of goodness and beauty. To receive that redemption, one must accept and do
his/her share in the plan of salvation by becoming VIRTUOUS.

UTILARIANISM
In this modern time people tend to compete with one another and even nations against nations. This
competition requires more ability to produce more even beyond the human capacity to produce. The
modernization process bring about prosperity to the life of the people and make even life easier than comparing
with that of before the modernity stage. But as we tend the overflowing needs of the people we need also to
look for a solution for the problem of the supply and demand. With this we are tend to give workers more labor
work and push them even beyond the limit of their human capacity.
Human being now in this modernize world become a machine in their race for the unending needs of the
people and society. But who benefits their hard labor? Only those capitalists earned much than those who are
actually working. In this lesson we will discover how utilitarian mentality play a big role in this modern society
that we are calling.
Utilitarianism states that actions are morally right if and only if they maximize the good (or,
alternatively, minimizes the bad). Classical utilitarian like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill (as well
as many contemporary utilitarian’s) take ‘the good’ to be pleasure or well-being. Thus, actions are morally right,
on this view, if and only if they maximize pleasure or well-being or minimize suffering. This approach is
sometimes called hedonistic utilitarianism. For hedonistic utilitarian’s, the rightness or our actions are
determined solely on the basis of consequences of pleasure or pain. Utilitarian theories may take other goods
into consideration. Preference utilitarianism, for example, takes into account not just pleasures, but the
satisfaction of any preference.

Utilitarianism can also be divided along other lines. Act-utilitarianism claims that we must apply a
utilitarian calculation to each and every individual action. By making this calculation, we can thereby
determine the moral rightness or wrongness of each action we plan to take. Rule-utilitarianism eases the
burden that act-utilitarianism places on practical reasoning by establishing moral rules that, when followed,
brings about the best consequences. Rule-utilitarianism can be illustrated by the rule “do not kill.” As a
general rule, we would be better off, that is, the best consequences, or state of affairs, would be brought about, if
we all followed the rule “do not kill.”

Objections to Utilitarianism
There are a number of objections to utilitarian theories, both in their act- formulations and in their rule-
formulations.
a) Act-utilitarianism, for example, seems to be impractical. To stop to calculate the possible outcomes of
every act we intend to make, as well as the outcomes of all of the possible alternatives to that act is
unrealistic. Moreover, it may hinder one’s ability to bring about the best consequences – for example, in
cases where a quick response is vital (as in responding to a car wreck).
b) Others have objected to utilitarianism on the grounds that we cannot always predict the outcomes of our
actions accurately. One course of action may seem like it will lead to the best outcome, but we may be
(and often are) mistaken. The best it seems we can do, then, is to guess at the short-term consequences of
our actions.
c) Objections to utilitarianism have also been made on the grounds that it is excessively demanding and
places too large a burden on individuals. Since utilitarianism says that acts are morally right if and only
if they maximize pleasure or well-being, it seems that leisure activities, such as watching television, may be
morally wrong because they do not maximize well- being. Any person watching television could, after all,
be doing something else. something that would maximize utility, like helping others or volunteering.
d) Finally, utilitarianism receives criticism because seemingly immoral acts and rules can be justified using
utilitarianism (this criticism is applicable both to act- and rule- utilitarianism). Genocides, torture, and
other evils may be justified on the grounds that they, ultimately, lead to the best outcome. Unjust rules – for
example, laws that legalize slavery or apartheid – might also be justified on utilitarian grounds.

Virtue theories encounter problems with moral dilemmas in which two (or more) virtues conflict. In other
words, the requirements of one virtue may be opposed, or contradictory, to the requirements of another. The
requirements of honesty, for example, require us to tell the truth, even if it is hurtful. The virtues of kindness or
compassion, on the other hand, point to remaining silent, or perhaps even lying, in order to avoid harm.
Bentham and Mill gave their points in understanding Utilitarianism highlighting the main points in this idea.

PRINCIPLE OF UTILITY
To Bentham To Mill

1) Recognize the fundamental role of pain and 1) It is not the quantity of pleasure but the quality of
pleasure in human life. happiness that is central to utilitarianism
2) Approves or disapproves of an action on the basis 2) The calculus is unreasonable- qualities are
of amount of pain and pleasure brought about. unquantifiable.
3) Equates good with pleasure and evil with pain.3) It seeks to promote the capability of achieving
4) Asserts that pleasure and pain are capable of happiness for the most amount of people.
quantification.
 KANT AND RIGHT
In this lesson let us explore more about our ways of living and how to improve our learning from each idea
that they would offer us. Kant will discuss more about the goal of the human beings in the society. He will
demonstrate to us on how to do well not only external but it should also be internal.
We will also encounter here that what we see as good from outside is the same of what the person is
thinking inside. Kant will change our perspective of the real good from that deceiving good. Because often we
are deceived by others through their so called external gesture of help but actually they are just taking advantage
of our situation.
Immanuel Kant looks at the development, creation and implementation of rights as primarily dependent
on the state and how the government within the state functions. Furthermore, Kant stresses that a society can
only function politically in relation to the state if fundamental rights, laws and entitlements are given and
enhanced by the state. He also examined the idea of human rights within politics in such a way that it “is only
a legitimate government that guarantees our natural right to freedom, and from this freedom we derive
other rights”.

As Kant teaches, these “righteous laws” are founded upon 3 rational principles:

1. The liberty of every member of the society as a man

2. The equality of every member of the society with every other, as a subject
3. The independence of every member of the commonwealth as a citizen.

The Good Will, Consequences, and Duties

The will, Kant says, is the faculty of acting according to a conception of law. When we act, whether or not
we achieve what we intend with our actions is often beyond our control, so the morality of our actions does the
action. That is, we can will to act according to one law rather than another. The morality of an action, therefore,
must be assessed in terms of the motivation behind it.
1. What is good in itself, for Kant? The only thing that is good in itself is a good will. What is the will?
It can be thought of as the faculty in one's mind for choosing a course of action.
2. How does a good will choose? A good will chooses an act for good reason(s) and because it is one’s
duty.
3. The good will, motives, and intentions. Having a good will is roughly equivalent to having good
intentions. Your behavior and other externalities are worthless without a good will. Two people can do
the same action, but depending on the principle/maxim they acted on, they are not acting ethically.
4. Reason vs. emotion, pleasure, or inclination. According to Kant, value and base our actions on
reason and duty, and not on emotion, pleasure, or inclination.
5. Getting pleasure from doing an action. Before, during or after that is fine, but pleasure cannot be the
main part of your motivation for doing the action. Paradigmatic Kantian situation: You get no pleasure,
you have no desire to help others, but you help others anyway from a sense of duty. You've acted
morally, according to Kant!
6. Consequences are irrelevant. Kant thinks consequences are irrelevant to determining what is moral or
not ("A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes, it is good through its willing
alone, that is, well in itself”).

The Categorical Imperative

The categorical imperative is the way in which you determine what your duties are, what you should and
should not do. It is categorical, because it applies (or is intended to apply) to everyone, without any exceptions,
and it is an imperative, since it is a command. So, it is a command that applies consistently, to everyone.
There are three formulations for our purposes:
 First Formulation: "Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should
become a universal law. “
 Second Formulation: "Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the
person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means
 Third Formulation: People have autonomy (Greek: auto-nomos – law unto ourselves) – we create laws
for ourselves, we determine our ends through practical reason. Autonomy is roughly equivalent to free will.

MAXIM - A description of action in Imperative form.

According to Kant, these are subjective rules that guide action.
 Relevant Act Description
 Sufficient Generality
All actions have Maxim, such as;
 Never lie to your friends.
 Never act in a way that would make your parents ashamed of you.

JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS
Many fundamental debates in political and ethical theory on the concept are now at the core of justice. In
this lesson, it should put into consideration the importance of justice as fair to all and being good. The topic
will focus primarily on the work of John Rawls. The analysis of the underlying logic of arguments based on the
notion that principles of justice can be the product of “reasonable agreement” among people who hold
conflicting conceptions of the good. The topics in the lesson consider the four primary criticisms of the
argument. These are the following: First, the project is a false one in that, while it purports to be neutral, it gives
primacy to a particular, liberal, individualistic conception of the good on which the project is grounded. Second,
the project is inadequate because its construction of the deliberation and decision-making process fails to take
account of important social factors. Third, the project is misguided in that it fails to take account of actual social
practices and, thus, fails to capture the complexity of the demands on a theory of justice. Fourth, the project is
destined to fail because the theory of justice cannot be constructed adequately to the challenges of modern
society in an abstract, thought-experiment way.

What is Justice?
Justice is a concept of moral rightness. The basis of its foundation is on ethics, rationality, law, natural law,
religion, equity and fairness. It includes fairness and administration of the law into account the inalienable and
inborn rights of all human beings and citizens. It further regards the right of all people and individuals to equal
protection before the law of their civil rights, without discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual
orientation, gender identity, national origin, color, ethnicity, religion, disability, age, wealth, or other
characteristics (ScienceDaily, 2020).
John Rawls, Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, author of the well-known and path breaking A
Theory of Justice (Harvard, 1971) and the work Political Liberalism (Columbia, 1996), claims that "Justice is
the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought."
The Role of Justice
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions. The same as truth is of systems of thought. A theory is
declined or revised if it is not true even if it is elegant and economical. Likewise, laws and institutions being
efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an
inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. Justice denies that
the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the
sacrifices imposed on a few are the more significant or greater sum of advantages enjoyed by many. In a just
society, the liberties of equal citizenship taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political
bargaining or the calculus of social interests. The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory
is the lack of a better one; analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even
greater injustice. Considering the first virtues of human activities, truth and justice are uncompromising. These
propositions seem to express our intuitive conviction of the superiority of justice.
The Subject of Justice
There are different kinds of things said to be just and unjust, not only laws, institutions, and social systems,
but also many kinds of actions, including decisions, judgments, and imputations. The attitudes and dispositions
of persons and persons themselves are morally right and unjust. The primary subject of justice is considered as
the basic structure of society, more definite, how the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and
duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation. It is because its effects are so profound
and present from the start. The intuitive notion is that this structure contains various social positions and that
men born into different levels have different expectations of life determined, in part, by the political system as
well as by economic and social circumstances.
In this way, the institutions of society favor certain starting places over others. These are deep inequalities.
Not only are they pervasive, but they affect men's initial chances in life, yet they cannot justify an appeal to the
notions of merit or desert. It is these inequalities, presumably inevitable in the basic structure of any society to
which the principles of social justice must first apply. These principles, then, regulate the choice of a political
constitution and the main elements of the economic and social system. The social scheme of justice depends
essentially on how fundamental rights and duties are assigned and on the economic opportunities and social
conditions in the various sectors of society.

What is Fairness?
Ketchell (2020) explained that in theory, the most influential concepts of justice are egalitarian, ones in
which the concept of equality plays a central role. In practice, however, research shows that people are not so
much concerned about equality, but about fairness. And while we often articulate fairness in terms of “just
deserts”, the concept of this metaphorical desert has been consigned by most theorists to the philosophical
scrap heap for being difficult to measure exactly.
Ketchell used an example of a cake to divide a birthday. Dividing it equally might be the fair distribution
but often end up with unequal, yet fair distributions of the cake. The same as that in a society in which
everybody gets the same, but not enough. This will not be valued more than a society with huge disparities,
where there is sufficient for all. Moreover, we usually react to being unfairly disadvantaged, rather than simply
to not getting the same. Hence, restricting distribution to equal shares or conditioning unequal shares on being
to the worst-offs benefit, irrespective of how hard we each work, does not seem just.
If what we want are fair opportunities without unfair disadvantage, then meritocracy cannot be the
answer. Intelligence is at least to a significant extent hereditary. The ability to work hard is partly hereditary and
the result of specific parental and social expectations. There are people always end up at the top and just to them.
Those at the bottom seem to be unfairly disadvantaged. The question about the justice of various aspects of
society is formulated in terms of what is “deserved”.
For example, we always criticize people who gets merits that really gets what they deserve. This particular
arrangement is fair since it is deserved. Fairness need not refer only to equal distribution. An unfair decision
in the courts is often challenged with the assertion that the victims have not had get what they deserve.The
problem with a theory of distribution centered on the notion of knowing exactly who deserves what – what is
the result of responsible actions, attributable to us rather than to natural endowments and social circumstances.
John Roemer’s work on fair opportunities and applied how to ascertain deserve. According to Roemer’s,
for one kind of achievement, the most relevant factors affecting performance are quality of education and IQ.
We can then group together those who are affected by the same factors. For instance, one group will be of those
with a better education, but lower IQ. We can evaluate performance within each of the four groups.
Comparisons across groups will tell us who are the most deserving. A person in the group of the better educated
with high IQ may perform better than a person in some other group. We conclude she is more deserving if the
latter ranks in a higher percentile than the former.
Some goods should be distributed this way…
To ascertain a just way, we need to rely on good empirical theories that identify the most relevant factors
affecting performance. Depending on how advanced such theories are, we may end up with inaccurate
conclusions.
There are goods which may fundamentally affect a person’s life such as healthcare resources. Allocating it
in the basis of need to avoid getting their distribution wrong. Even if we could ascertain a person deserve, there
are still instances where this type of distribution seems undesirable like in hiring processes. We usually aim to
appoint the best doctor, even if they cannot take credit completely for their talent and effort.
Fairness matters: systematic unfair discrimination increases conflict and tension in societies and
international community. Fairness is importantly linked to responsibility and accountability. So a theory of
distributive justice sensitive to desert is the way forward (Ketchell, 2020).

Justice as Fairness
In developing justice as fairness, the case of the two principles in serial order is necessary to examine. The
matter of priorities is recognized and an effort made to find ideas to deal with are the advantages of this
procedure. The concept of justice as fairness is Rawls's theory of justice for a liberal society. It provides a
framework for the legitimate use of political power. Though legitimacy is only the minimal standard of moral
acceptability, political order is considered legal without being just. Justice sets the maximal standard: the
arrangement of social institutions that is morally best.
Rawls’s constructs justice as fairness around specific interpretations of the ideas that citizens are free and
equal and that society should be fair. He sees it as resolving the tensions between the concept of freedom and
equality, which have been highlighted both by the socialist critique of liberal democracy and by the
conservative commentary of the modern welfare state. Rawls holds that justice as fairness is the most
egalitarian, and also the most plausible, interpretation of these fundamental concepts of liberalism. He also
argues that justice as fairness provides a superior understanding of justice to that of the dominant tradition in
modern political thought: utilitarianism.
The Basic Structure of Society
Justice as fairness aims to describe a just arrangement of the great political and social institutions of a
liberal society: the political constitution, the legal system, the economy, the family, and so on. Rawls calls the
arrangement of these institutions a society's basic structure. The basic structure is the location of justice because
these institutions distribute the main benefits and burdens of social life: who will receive social recognition,
who will have which fundamental rights, who will have opportunities to get what kind of work, what the
distribution of income and wealth will be, and so on.
The form of a society's basic structure will have profound effects on the lives of citizens. The basic
formation will influence not only their life prospects, but more deeply their goals, their attitudes, their
relationships, and their characters. Institutions that will have such pervasive influence on people's lives require
justification. Since leaving one's society is not a realistic option for most people, the rationale cannot be that
citizens have consented to a basic structure by staying in the country. And since the rules of any basic form will
be coercively enforced, often with grave penalties, the demand to justify the imposition of any particular set of
policies intensifies further.
In setting out justice as fairness, Rawls assumes that the liberal society in question is marked by reasonable
pluralism and also that it is under reasonably favorable conditions: that there are enough resources for it to be
possible for everyone's basic needs to meet. Rawls makes the simplifying assumption that society is
self-sufficient and closed so that citizens enter it only by birth and leave it only at death. He also confines his
attention mainly to ideal theory, putting aside questions such as those of criminal justice.
Two Guiding Ideas of Justice as Fairness
In some form, social cooperation is necessary for citizens to be able to lead decent lives. How the
benefits and burdens of cooperation split among citizens, they are not indifferent. Rawls's principles of justice
as fairness articulate the central liberal ideas that cooperation should be fair to all citizens regarded as free
and as equals. The distinctive interpretation of Rawls to these concepts seen as combining a negative and a
positive thesis.
The negative thesis starts with the idea that citizens do not deserve to be born into a rich or a needy
family, more or less gifted than others, female or male, members of a particular racial group, and so on. Since
these features of persons are morally arbitrary in this sense, citizens are not entitled to more of the benefits of
social cooperation simply because of them. For example, the fact that a citizen was born rich, white, and the
male provides no reason in itself for this citizen to be favored by social institutions.
 The negative thesis does not say how social goods are to distribute. It merely clears the decks. On the other
hand, the positive thesis is equality-based reciprocity. All social goods are to distribute equally unless an
unequal distribution would be to everyone's advantage. The guiding idea is that since citizens are
fundamentally equal, reasoning about justice should begin from a presumption that cooperatively-produced
goods should be equally divided. Justice then requires that any inequalities must benefit all citizens, and
specifically must benefit those who will have the least. Equality sets the baseline; from there, any lacking must
improve everyone's situation, and especially the circumstances of the worst-off. The hallmarks of Rawls's
theory of justice are the requirements of equality and common advantage.

The Two Principles of Justice as Fairness

The guiding ideas of justice as fairness are given institutional form by its two principles of justice:
 First Principle: Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic
liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all;
 Second Principle: Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions:
 They are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of
opportunity; and
 They are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (the difference
principle).
The first principle of equal basic liberties is to be embodied in the political constitution, while the second
principle applies primarily to economic institutions. Fulfilment of the first principle takes priority over
fulfilment of the second principle, and within the second principle fair equality of opportunity takes priority
over the difference principle.
The first principle affirms that all citizens should have the familiar fundamental rights and liberties: liberty
of conscience and freedom of association, freedom of speech and freedom of the person, the rights to vote, to
hold public office, to be treated under the rule of law, and so on. The first principle accords these rights and
liberties to all citizens equally. Unequal rights would not benefit those who would get a lesser share of the rights,
so justice requires equal rights for all, in all normal circumstances.
According to Rawls, the first principle confirms widespread convictions about the importance of equal
fundamental rights and liberties. Two other features that make this principle distinctive. First is its priority. The
fundamental rights and freedom are not to trade-off against other social goods. The first principle disallows, for
instance, a policy that would give draft exemptions to college students because educated civilians will increase
economic productivity. The draft is a drastic infringement on fundamental liberties. There is an implementation
of the draft if all can serve then must be equally subject to it, even if this means slower growth. The equal
liberty of the citizens must have priority over economic policy.
The second distinctive feature of the first principle of Rawls is that it requires the fair value of political
liberties. Political liberties are a subset of fundamental freedom, concerned with the right to hold public office,
the right to affect the outcome of national elections, and so on. For these liberties, Rawls requires that citizens
should be not only formally but also substantively equal.
That is, citizens who are similarly endowed and motivated should have similar opportunities to hold office,
to influence elections, and so on regardless of how rich or poor they are. This fair value proviso has substantial
implications for how elections should be funded and run. The second principle of justice of Rawls has two
parts. The first part, fair equality of opportunity, requires that citizens with the same talents and willingness to
use them have the same educational and economic opportunities regardless of whether they were born rich or
poor. In all parts of society, there are to be roughly the same prospects of culture and achievement for those
similarly motivated and endowed.
For example, it should find that roughly one-quarter of people in that occupation was born into the top 25%
of the income distribution. Another one-quarter was born into the second-highest 25% of the income
distribution. One quarter was born into the second-lowest 25%. One-quarter were born into the lowest 25% if
we assume that natural endowments and the willingness to use them are distributed equally across children born
into different social classes. The class of origin is a morally arbitrary fact about citizens. Justice does not allow
the cradle to turn into unequal opportunities for education or meaningful work.
 The second part of the second principle is the difference principle, which regulates the distribution of
wealth and income. Allowing inequalities of wealth and income can lead to a larger social product: higher
wages can cover the costs of training and education, for example, and can provide incentives to fill jobs that are
more in demand. The difference principle allows inequalities of wealth and income, so long as these will be to
everyone's advantage, specifically to those who will be worst off. The difference principle requires that any
economic inequalities be to the substantial benefit of those who are advantaged least.
Knight (1998) illustrate Rawls’s four hypothetical economic structures A-D, and the lifetime-average levels
of income that these different economic structures would result in for representative members of three groups:

Economy Least-Advantaged Group Middle Group Most-Advantaged Group

A 10,000 10,000 10,000

B 12,000 30,000 80,000

C 30,000 90,000 150,000

D 20,000 100,000 500,000

Here the difference principle selects Economy C because it contains the distribution where the
least-advantaged group does best. Inequalities in C are an advantage to everyone relative to a completely equal
distribution (Economy A) and equality more than the distribution (Economy B). But the difference principle
does not allow the rich to get richer at the expense of the less fortunate (Economy D). The difference principle
embodies equality-based reciprocity. From an egalitarian baseline, it requires that any inequalities are for all,
and especially for the worst-off.
The difference principle is based partly on the negative thesis that the distribution of natural assets is
undeserved. A citizen does not merit more of the social product simply because she was lucky enough to be
born with the potential to develop skills that are currently in high demand. Yet this does not mean that everyone
must get the same shares. The fact that citizens have different talents and abilities makes everyone better off. In
a society governed by the difference principle, citizens regard the distribution of natural endowments as an
ordinary asset that can benefit all. Those better endowed are welcome to use their gifts to make themselves
better off, so long as their doing so also contributes to the good of those less well-endowed.
The difference principle thus expresses a positive ideal, an ideal of immeasurable social unity. In a
society that satisfies the difference principle, citizens know that their economy works to the benefit of everyone
and that those who were lucky enough to be born with higher natural potential are not getting richer at the
expense of those who were less fortunate. Rawls says that justice as fairness men agree to share fate the fate of
another.

The Conception of Citizens

According to Rawls, citizens are free in that each sees herself as being entitled to make claims on social
institutions in her own right—citizens are not slaves or serfs, dependent on their social status on others. Citizens
are also free in that they see their public identities as independent of any particular comprehensive doctrine: a
citizen who converts to Islam, or who recants her faith, will expect, for example, to retain all her political rights
and liberties throughout the transition. Finally, citizens are free in being able to take responsibility for planning
their own lives, given the opportunities and resources that they can reasonably expect.
Citizens are equal, Rawls says, in virtue of having the capacities to participate in social cooperation over a
complete life. Citizens may have greater or lesser skills, talents, and powers above the line that partnership
requires, but differences above this line have no bearing on citizens' equal political status.
Rawlsian citizens are not only free and equal, but they are also reasonable and rational. The idea of
reasonableness is familiar with political liberalism. The citizens can abide by fair terms of cooperation if he
reasons out, even at the expense of their interests, provided that others are also willing to do so. In the concept
of justice as fairness, Rawls calls this reasonableness the capacity for a sense of justice. Citizens are also
rational: they can pursue and revise their view of what is valuable in human life. Rawls calls this the capacity
for a conception of the good. Together these capacities are called the two moral powers.
Like every theory of justice (for example, those of Locke, Rousseau, and Mill), justice as fairness requires
an account of citizens' fundamental interests: what citizens need qua citizens. Rawls derives primary goods from
the conception of the citizen as free and equal, reasonable, and rational. The fundamental goods are essential for
developing and exercising the two moral powers and are useful for pursuing a wide range of specific
conceptions of the good life.
Primary goods are:
1. The basic rights and liberties;
2. Freedom of movement, and free choice among a wide range of occupations;
3. The powers of offices and positions of responsibility;
4. Income and wealth;
5. The social bases of self-respect: the recognition by social institutions that give citizens a sense of
self-worth and the confidence to carry out their plans.
All citizens are assumed to have fundamental interests in getting more of these primary goods, and political
institutions are to evaluate how well citizens are doing according to what goods they have. It is equalities and
inequalities of these goods that, Rawls claims, are of the highest political significance.

The Conception of Society

The conception of Rawls of society meant fairness. The social institutions are to be fair to all cooperating
members of society regardless of their race, gender, religion, class of origin, natural talents, a reasonable
conception of the good life, and so on.
Rawls also emphasizes publicity as an aspect of fairness. In what he calls a well-ordered society all
citizens accept the principles of justice and know that their fellow citizens make it also. All citizens recognize
that the basic structure is just. The full philosophical justifications for the principles of justice are also knowable
by and acceptable to all reasonable citizens.
The idea behind publicity is base on the principles for the basic structure will be coercively enforced on
free citizens. The publicity condition requires that operative of the society on the principles of justice not be too
esoteric, and not to screen for deeper power relations. Fairness requires that, in “public political life, nothing
needs to hide. There is no need for the illusions and delusions of ideology for society to work properly and
for citizens to accept it willingly.”

The Original Position

The conceptions of Rawls of citizens and society are still quite abstract, and some might think innocuous.
The original position aims to move from these abstract conceptions to determinate principles of social justice.
It does so by translating the question: "What are fair terms of social cooperation for free and equal citizens?”
into the question “What terms of cooperation would free and equal citizens agree to under fair conditions?”
The move to the agreement among citizens is what places the justice as the fairness of Rawls within the social
contract tradition of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.
The strategy of the original position is to construct a method of reasoning that models abstract ideas about
justice to focus their power together onto the choice of principles. The conceptions of citizens and society of
Rawls built into the design of the original position itself. Rawls intends that readers will see the outcome of the
original position as justified because they will see how it embodies plausible understandings of citizens and
society, and also because this outcome confirms many of their considered convictions about justice on specific
issues.
The original position is a thought experiment: an imaginary situation in which each real citizen has a
representative, and all of these representatives come to an agreement on which principles of justice should order
the political institutions of the real citizens. This thought experiment is better than trying to get all real citizens
actually to assemble in person to try to agree to principles of justice for their society. The bargaining among real
citizens influenced by all sorts of factors irrelevant to justice could threaten most the other people, or who could
hold out for longest.
All such irrelevant factors abstract the original position. Each citizen represents only a free and equal
citizen. Each representative wants what free and equal citizen’s desire. Each tries to agree to principles for the
basic structure while situated fairly for the other representatives. The design of the original position thus models
the ideas of freedom, equality, and fairness. For example, fairness and equality are modeled in the original
position by making the parties who represent real citizens symmetrically situated. No representative of the
citizens can threaten any other representative or to hold out longer for a better deal.
The most striking feature of the original position is the veil of ignorance, which prevents arbitrary facts
about citizens from influencing the agreement among their representatives. As we have seen, Rawls holds that
the fact that a citizen is of a certain race, class, and gender is no reason for social institutions to favor or disfavor
her. Each representative in the original position deprives knowledge of the race, class, and gender of the real
citizen that they represent. The veil of ignorance deprives the parties of all facts about citizens that are irrelevant
to the choice of principles of justice: not only facts about their race, class, and gender but also facts about their
age, natural endowments, and more. Moreover, to get a clearer view of the permanent features of a just social
system, the veil of ignorance also screens out specific information about what society is like right now.
The informational situation of the parties that represent real citizens, behind the veil of ignorance is as follows:
 Parties do not know:
 The race, ethnicity, gender, age, income, wealth, natural endowments, comprehensive doctrine, etc. Of
any of the citizens in society, or to which generation in the history of the society these citizens belong.
 The political system of the society, its class structure, economic system, or level of economic
development.
 Parties do know:
 That citizens in the society have different comprehensive doctrines and plans of life; that all citizens
have interests in more primary goods.
 That the society is under conditions of moderate scarcity: there is enough to go around, but not enough
for everyone to get what they want;
 General facts and common sense about human social life; general conclusions of science (including
economics and psychology) that are uncontroversial.
The veil of ignorance situates the representatives of free and equal citizens fairly concerning one another.
No party can press for agreement on principles that will arbitrarily favor the particular citizen they represent,
because no party knows the specific attributes of the citizen they represent. The situation of the parties thus
embodies reasonable control, within which the parties can make a rational agreement. Each party tries to agree
to principles that will be best for the citizen they represent (i.e., that will maximize that share of primary goods
of the citizens). Since the parties are fairly situated, the agreement they reach will be fair to all actual citizens.
The design of the original position also models other aspects of Rawls's conceptions of citizens and society.
For example, the fact that the parties must choose among principles that can be publicly endorsed by all citizens
models by the publicity of a well-ordered society. Some assumptions make the hypothetical agreement
determinate and decisive: the parties are not motivated by envy (i.e., by how much citizens besides their end up
with); the parties are not assumed to be either risk- seeking or risk-averse, and; the parties must make a final
agreement on principles for the basic structure: there are no do-overs after the veil of ignorance is lifted. The
parties learn which real citizen they represent.

Critiques of Justice as Fairness

There are various critiques have been developed on Rawls’s project. Some familiar criticisms illustrate the
challenges to the more general project of which Rawls is the most prominent exemplar—the derivation of
principles of justice, neutral among substantive conceptions of the good, by means of an abstract process of
analytical reasoning. These are the primary criticisms:
a) The project is a false one in that, while it purports to be neutral, it in fact gives primacy to a particular,
 liberal, individualistic conception of the good on which the project is grounded;
b) The project is inadequate because its construction of the deliberation and decision- making process
fails to take account of important social factors;
c) The project is misguided in that it fails to take account of actual social practices and, thus, fails to
capture the complexity of the demands on a theory of justice; and
d) The project is destined to fail because a theory of justice adequate to the challenges of modern
society cannot be constructed by means of an abstract thought experiment.
The Project is a False
One of the most persistent criticisms of the project of Rawls has been the claim that he misrepresents its
pretensions of neutrality. MacIntyre (1981, 1988) and Williams (1985) are the leading critics who present this
challenge. Their basic thrust is that the conception of justice is not neutral among conceptions of the good and
that in fact it privileges some version of liberal individualism. MacIntyre (1986) claims that Rawls' conception
is actually an institutional version of utilitarianism. Rawls claims embedded a utilitarian conception of the good
in justice as fairness.
The differences between Rawls' conception and that of mutual advantage suggest that Rawls's project is not
merely utilitarian in orientation. But the more general challenge concerning a liberal-individualist conception of
the good is more complicated. The real issue here relates to the basis for accepting the need for neutrality
among substantive conceptions of the good.
MacIntyre (1986) argue that the only way of getting to the neutrality conclusion inherent in justice as
fairness is by starting with a liberal-individualist conception of the good. Barry (1995) counters the claim of
MacIntyre by arguing that the neutrality conclusion can be reached from more than one starting point. Barry
rests his argument against MacIntyre on the idea that an alternative argument for neutrality will support this
conception of justice. Barry posits that people will almost always be at least a little uncertain about the truth of
their beliefs. This uncertainty leads to skepticism about whether reasonable people could reject one's own
conception of the good. Barry combines this skepticism with the assumption that people have a “commitment to
finding reasonable terms of agreement” in order to generate neutrality. Barry argues that scepticism supplies the
premise that is needed to get from the desire for agreement on reasonable terms to the conclusion that no
conception of the good should be built into the constitution or the principles of justice. Barry also maintain that
it is the only one that can.
The Project is Inadequate
The primary thrust of the “inadequacy” criticism relates to the formulation of the original position in the
first stage of the justification. Rawls argues that the appropriate model of the conditions of reasonable
agreement significantly constrains the information available to the representatives. Most importantly, the
representatives are precluded from knowing their own set of skills and capacities as well as their actual place in
the social, economic, and political environment. Rawls sees this constraint as a way of guaranteeing that only
morally relevant factors will influence the construction of the principles of justice.
But critics have focused on this information constraint as a sign of the unrealistic nature of the entire
project. Sandel (1982) argues that the “veil of ignorance” abstracts the representatives from both their sense of
identity and their communal bonds with other social actors, two factors that are fundamental to any assessment
of conceptions of justice. In this critique, given the sterile nature of the decision-making process, the principles
of justice derived in the original position will fail to articulate an adequate conception of justice for any actual
society. Because much of this criticism was directed at the account Rawls offered in A Theory of Justice, which
he reformulated in Political Liberalism, it is not clear how much force this criticism has on the version
presented here. But it remains true that the original formulation of the principles occurs without this knowledge,
with the test of the implications of this knowledge left to the assessment stage of the process.
Barry elaborates an account developed by Scanlon (1982, 1988). It attempts to inject greater realism into
the Rawlsian project. Barry interprets Scanlon's argument as “an alternative original position to that of
Rawls—one in which well-informed people in a situation of equal power (guaranteed by each having a veto)
seek to reach agreement with others who are similarly motivated on terms that cannot reasonably be rejected”.
Here the important difference between the Rawls and Scanlon positions is that in the Scanlon framework the
parties know their real identities and thus are aware of their actual preferences and beliefs about the good. The
test of the principles of justice in Barry's account is “whether a principle could reasonably be rejected (for
application in our imperfect world) by parties who, in addition to their own personal aims, were moved by a
desire to find principles that others similarly motivated could also accept”. The primary implication of this
alternative formulation is that the Scanlon-Barry approach produces the principles of justice in one stage instead
of two.
In order to maintain the conditions of fairness and equality, this approach provides each of the individuals a
veto over any proposed principle. The veto is justified by the assumption that the individuals “desire to live in a
society whose members all freely accept its rules of justice and its major institutions. Given the existence of that
desire, the reason for observing the constraints of impartial justice is that it sets out the only terms upon which
there is any hope of reaching agreement”; for an illuminating discussion of the agreement motive. Thus, the
implication of Barry's response to the Sandel challenge is clear: Even if we allow individuals to possess the
types of information that are denied to them by the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, they would agree to a
conception of justice quite similar to Rawls's. Barry contends that under his formulation, “fair procedures would
be endorsed not only because of their tendency to bring about just decisions but also because, where the justice
of the decision is disputable (as may well quite often be the case), the fairness of the process leading to the
decision will make it more acceptable”.
The Project is Misguided
Walzer (1983) criticized the project of Rawl for failing to take account of actual social practices offers one
of the most sustained arguments in support of this criticism. He argues that criteria of justice should be
discerned by analyses of how social goods are actually distributed, not by some abstract reasoning process. He
further argues that if we adopted this approach, we would see that the goods that are the objects of questions of
justice are specific to particular spheres of social life. From this, he concludes that our conceptions of justice
should not be general theories like those proposed by Rawls; they should be particularistic and crafted relative
to the specific aspects of the relevant sphere of social life. The essential points here are that goods are social,
that they are tied to particular meanings which are shared by the members of a society, and that the resulting
distributional criterion is dictated by the nature of that meaning. “Social goods have social meanings, and we
find our way to distributive justice through an interpretation of those meanings. We search for principles
internal to each distributive sphere”.
One might partially defend Rawls from this criticism by noting that he no longer conceives of justice as a
comprehensive moral theory but now treats it as a political conception. In this revised interpretation, the
conception serves to establish the basic structure of a just society, leaving to subsequent discussion the details of
interest to Walzer. But even if we accept this defense, Walzer's appeal to actual social practices raises important
questions about the relevance of the basic project of deriving theories of justice in the ways proposed by Rawls
and others. Put bluntly, what good are analytically constructed theories of justice if they have no relationship to
actual social practices? At the very least, this question highlights the importance of demonstrating that an
analytically derived conception of justice will provide principles with which people will actually comply. More
fundamentally, this question challenges the relevance of the general project insofar as that relevance depends on
the appropriateness of addressing questions of justice through hypothetical thought experiments. Nonetheless,
the Walzer critique has its own significant weakness. Why should actual social practices, which are, as Rawls
reminds us, the product of “contingent advantages and accidental influences from the past”, be given any
normative priority in our considerations of justice?6To the extent that actual social practices are the product of
asymmetries of power and other morally irrelevant factors, these practices will not instantiate the ideas that we
have commonly come to associate with justice. Sen 1992 notes that every contemporary theory of justice is
grounded in the idea that individuals must be treated equally in some important way.
Barry offers a proposal that might salvage the relevance of the Rawlsian project in the face of this criticism.
He attempts to accommodate this concern with actual social practice while rectifying some of the problems in
the Walzer account. This feature of his argument, which he calls the “empirical method,” is based on the idea of
guaranteeing the circumstances of impartiality. “[I]t is possible to set out procedures of a kind familiar within
many liberal democratic political systems that will produce an empirical approximation of a Scanlonian original
position by making it harder for rules that can be rejected to be adopted…. We should…ask what can be said
about the kinds of environment within which the weighing of reasons tends to displace the counting of noses,
and then ask how constitutional rules can contribute towards the creation and fostering of these desirable kinds
of environment”. The empirical approach requires us to take account of both “the rules of justice that a society
has, and the extent to which the conditions of society approximate those of the Scanlonian original position”.
This concern about the empirical manifestation of the circumstances of impartiality enters Barry's argument
in two ways. First, in a manner more relevant to Walzer's project, it allows us to use the analytically derived
conception as a vantage point from which to critically assess existing social practices. “The more the actual
conditions in a society approximate those of the Scanlonian construction, the more reason we have to regard the
rules that are established and maintained in it as prima facie just”.
Second, in a manner more relevant to Rawls's project, it uses empirical evidence of actual social practices
to assess the relevance of the analytically derived conception. “We want to know what people would agree to
under certain hypothetical conditions. The closer that actual conditions approximate to those stipulated by
Scanlon, the more we can call upon them as evidence of what would be agreed upon ideal conditions”. In this
way, “the a priori method [the original position and reasonable- agreement thought experiment] and the
empirical method provide a check on one another”.
Barry's use of the Scanlonian construction offers important insights about the conditions under which social
practices should be given weight in normative arguments. Unless some connection can be sustained between
equality and fairness on the one hand and the actual methods by which a society resolves questions of
distributive justice on the other, there is no reason to give normative priority to existing practices. The critical
vantage point proposed by Barry provides one way of addressing the weaknesses in the Walzer approach. But it
remains the case that Barry justifies this vantage point by the logic of hypothetical reasoning. This logic of
reasoning itself is the subject of the fourth line of criticism.
The Project Is Doomed to Failure
This final criticism is the most telling and the most troubling for advocates of the Rawlsian project. The
basic thrust of the criticism is that the general project of deriving principles of justice through abstract analytical
reasoning fails to take account of politics, fails to adequately address the necessarily political nature of
questions of justice. For those who think of justice as a concept that embodies a particular substantive
conception of the good, the reference to politics will seem beside the point.
Shapiro criticize the idea that what is just in the distribution of social goods can be reasoned about
independently of how such justice might practically be achieved rests, at bottom, on inappropriate expectations
from philosophy”. He argues that although adherents to the reasonable agreement project “proceed as if what is
just in the distribution of social goods and harms can be settled independently of what democracy requires,”
they, in fact, embed democratic convictions in their justifications of the relevant principles of justice. But when
they do so, they overemphasize the role of consensus in the democratic process. “Theorists who appeal to
consent either wish disagreement away or pursue minimalist strategies of deriving principles of social justice
from the lowest common denominator of what they claim we agree on or can be brought to agree on, at least in
principle…. In contrast to such ventures my claim is that the reality of absence of consensus in social life should
play a central role in our thinking about ordering social practices justly”. Shapiro concludes that our efforts to
answer questions about justice should take greater account of the actual relationship between justice and
democratic politics, including most specifically issues of institutional design and implementation.
Shapiro (1996) emphasizes three such areas, which he identifies as metric, principle, and method. The first,
metric, relates to the basic measure of value used to construct and apply the principles of justice. He argues that
“in real life there is bound to be conflict and disagreement both over what the appropriate metrics of justice
within different domains of social life are and over how to draw the lines that divide them.” The choice of the
proper metric is controversial, as evidenced by the spirited debate over measures of equality.
The second area concerns the principles of justice themselves. That they are the subject of a collective
decision-making process that has features of democratic deliberation is not an issue for the advocates of the
Rawlsian program. The fundamental challenge rests on the unlikelihood that such a process would produce the
kind of consensus envisioned by Rawls and others. Shapiro suggests that the persistence of an absence of
consensus calls such expectations into question.
The third area, method, highlights the importance of institutional design and implementation. The issue of
how we might actually institutionalize principles of justice receives scant attention in the literature; Barry's
(1995) concern with the “empirical method” is a notable exception. Shapiro (1996) argues that conceptions of
justice must provide an explanation for the means by which principles of justice will be instantiated in social
and political institutions. From his perspective, justice requires that the method of implementation be consistent
with democratic commitments.
In place of analytically derived conceptions of justice, Shapiro offers only a few general ideas about how
commitments might affect our efforts to work out a more realistic conception of justice. Two ideas are worth
noting. First, Shapiro argues that his view treats democracy as a “subordinate foundational good”, by which he
means that although democracy is necessary for guaranteeing justice in social life, we should not conclude from
this that democracy is the only important good and that it is the only appropriate way to organize social
relationships. Second, Shapiro interprets his democratic conception of justice as a “semicontextualist” concept;
“it engenders certain constraints on and possibilities for human interaction, but these work themselves out
differently in different domains of social life depending on people's beliefs and aspirations, the causal impact of
activities in one domain on others, the availability of resources within domains, and other contingent factors”.
In this sense he shares Walzer's sentiments about the complexity of the demands we place on conceptions of
justice.

GLOBALIZATION AND ITS ETHICAL CHALLENGES

In this lesson, let us consider the words of Dr. Oscar Arias, President of Costa Rica from 1986 to 1990. He
was the 1987 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and founder of the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human
Progress, in his speech at York University in Toronto on 8 April 1999 share facts to convey a sense of the
momentous possibilities for progress considering the moral challenges of globalization.
Dr. Arias pointed out eight (8) dimensions to consider the importance of moral challenges of globalization.
In the words of Dr. Arias, he said that human advances do not come when we wait to see if others will act.
Human security will not be guaranteed if we always hope that someone else will step forward. Instead, progress
begins when each of us starts to think globally, and when each of us contributes to ending poverty and
inequality. The struggle can only begin with a personal commitment from each of us. But it will not end there.
The whispered resolve of the individual becomes the roar of collective action. Its righteous sound reverberates
in the structures and institutions of a new society. Its voice is steady and its message is clear: we can act with
compassion; we can be more humane; we can live in peace.

The Moral Challenge of Globalization

Dr. Oscar Arias delivered a speech on the moral challenge of globalization at York University in Toronto on
8 April 1999. He was the President of Costa Rica from 1986 to 1990. He was the 1987 recipient of the Nobel
Peace Prize and founder of the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress.
Dr. Arias discussed some of the recent changes in our political economy that have greatly affected our
struggle for peace and human development. He said that few terms are as important today as “globalization.”
Because technological advances and the emergence of sophisticated markets have increased the affinity between
different global societies, allowing for rapid transportation of people and information.
Dr. Arias considered globalization as a Janus-faced beast, offering unimaginable prosperity to the most
well-educated and well-born, while doling out only misery and despair to the world’s poor. He said that the
frantic quest for quick riches has created a hollow, speculative economy, unattached to human labor and
unaccountable to human need. Investments are not made over the long term, designed to help small businesses
get started and help people improve the infrastructure of their communities. Instead, bankers pit foreign
currencies against one another, investing for days or even just a few hours. They create immense profits for the
most privileged, but leave a devastating trail of destabilization and misery in their wake.
Dr. Arias mentioned that the global economic order is subject to panic and rapid fluctuation. As wealthy
financiers lost money in weakened East Asian economies, in Indonesia, or in Brazil, pundits and bank officials
began to speak of a “crisis.” Only months after traumatic devaluations have begun, there seems to be a
consensus that this downturn was only a small setback in a well-functioning system.
Dr. Arias pointed out dimensions to consider in the moral challenges of globalization. Here are as follows:
1) The Real Crisis
This is much deeper crisis underlying the financial panic, one that this consensus of experts overlooks. It is
an economic crisis when nearly a billion and a half people have no access to clean water, and a billion live in
miserably substandard housing. It is a leadership crisis when we allow wealth to be concentrated in fewer and
fewer hands, so that the world’s three richest individuals have assets that exceed the combined gross domestic
product of the poorest forty-eight countries. It is a spiritual crisis when S as Gandhi said S many people are so
poor that they can only see God in the form of bread, and when other individuals seem only to have faith in a
capricious God whose “invisible hand” guides the free market. It is a moral crisis when 40,000 children die each
day from malnutrition and disease. And it is a democratic crisis when 1.3 billion people live on incomes of less
than one dollar a day, and in their unrelenting poverty are totally excluded from public decision-making.

2) Human security
The first step toward global thinking requires that we adopt a definition of peace that goes beyond the
short-sighted demands of national security. To this end, the United Nations Human Development Program
stresses the need for us instead to think of peace in terms of human security. This distinction bears frequent
repetition. Human security is not just a concern with weapons S it is a concern with human life and dignity. The
martyred Salvadoran Archbishop, Oscar Romero, eloquently expressed this idea. He told his people that “the
only peace that God wants is a peace based in justice.”

3) Democratic values
The second step in global thinking is to expand our understanding of democracy. Too often, democracy is
discussed only in its most formal mode. People are satisfied that democracy has a place in the constitution of the
state, but make no room for democracy in the constitution of their own soul. They do not let it affect their daily
interactions, their personal relationships, or their professional ambitions. Some of our greatest leaders have
called for profound change in our values. But a democratic revolution is not merely sentimental and
individualistic. Yes, it demands changes in the way we live and the way we understand ourselves, but it also
promises to change the structures that govern our society. For, at its core, democracy is a radical philosophy of
civic participation. It is the faith that through public dialogue and inclusive deliberation, ordinary individuals
can build ever better systems for living together. Democracy rests on the need for all citizens, not only the most
powerful, to be able to influence meaningfully the political and economic institutions that affect their lives.

4) Economic justice
True democracy is not merely the distribution of political power, but also the distribution of economic
power. Sadly, in this age of huge corporate mergers this fact is too often overlooked. It is overlooked by many
policy makers and business people who quietly solidify a global economic order based on cynicism and
individual profit. But for many poor and working people throughout the world, it is an obvious fact. What
makes the economic exploitation and hardship of our day more insídious is the fact that it exists alongside
tremendous wealth and abundance. To change these unacceptable trends, our society must begin viewing global
systems from the perspective of society’s most downtrodden populations: the culturally subjugated and the
economically dispossessed. In our democratic faith we must reject condescending or trickle-down solutions to
world problems, and instead highlight movements that allow ignored and depreciated populations to become
political actors.

5) Trade and aid

The richest and most powerful nations have a special responsibility to promote trade and aid policies that truly
empower the developing world. Unfortunately, many developed countries have shied away from this
responsibility. Previous debt relief efforts have been slow and ineffective. Too often, they have made adoption
of restrictive financial measures prerequisites of receiving aid. And too often, these punitive conditions have
favored wealthy investors, rather than impoverished citizens. To end these ineffective restraints, but to ensure
also that forgiven debt money is not spent on more deadly weaponry, a reinvigorated debt relief effort should
reward countries that reduce their military spending and devote funds to human development.

6) Military spending
We must also focus our efforts on controlling a world military-industrial complex removed from democratic
restraint and humanitarian standards. Without a doubt, military spending represents the single most significant
perversion of worldwide priorities known today
In order to understand the true human cost of militarism, as well as the true impact of unregulated arms
sales in the world today, we must understand that war is not just an evil act of destruction, it is a missed
opportunity for humanitarian investment. It is a crime against every child who calls out for food rather than for
guns, and against every mother who demands simple vaccinations rather than million-dollar fighters. World
leaders must stop viewing militaristic investment as a measure of national well-being. And they must embrace
multilateral efforts that recognize the complex and politicized nature of contemporary security questions.

7) Arms trade
The sale of arms is big business. As a whole, military spending in industrialized nations is down from its
peak of 10 years ago. But weapons contractors in these countries have continued to produce billions of dollars’
worth of armaments, and in fact have increased their weapons sales abroad. Their new clients are the
impoverished countries of the developing world, places where the majority of conflicts now take place. In
pursuing true solutions to contemporary defense concerns, and in creating policies that will allow us to focus on
human security, we urgently need to work together as an international community to limit the availability and
spread of deadly weaponry. The international community needs to carry the success of the landmine’s initiatives
through to other, more comprehensive arms control initiatives. It is important to advocate an International Code
of Conduct to control all conventional arms transfers. This agreement demands that any decision to export arms
should take into account several characteristics pertaining to the country of final destination.
The recipient country must endorse democracy, defined in terms of free and fair elections, the rule of law,
civilian control over the military forces, and abide by accepted conventions on torture, civil rights, and
international aggression. In addition, all nations would be required to report their arms purchases to the United
Nations.
The International Code of Conduct on Arms Transfers builds on local efforts to regulate sales. Though much
work remains, the activists have made genuine progress. While these steps give reason to hope, activists must
persevere to see that strong international measures are enacted and enforced. We know that lobbyists in the arms
industry will do their best to see that codes of conduct on arms transfers will be weak and full of loopholes.
Thus, those here, and many others like you, must generate the kind of popular pressure that will force elected
representatives to strong and resolute action.

8) Global thinking
Voltaire wrote Candide over 200 years ago, he was acutely aware of the moral obligations created by an
integrating world. In this book, Candide meets a slave from the Americas who is missing both a hand and a leg.
The slave’s hand was cut off by dangerous machinery in a sugarcane mill; his leg was cut off by cruel masters to
prevent him from escaping. As Candide looks on, the miserable slave tells him, “This is the true price of the
sugar you eat in Europe.
If ethics required global thinking in Voltaire’s time, think of how relevant this powerful anecdote is in the
age of globalization. What is more, the new global era offers unique potentials for human unity. Thinking
globally, we are able to draw from the best of the world’s ethical and religious insights S to emerge with a
thoroughgoing defence of the importance of human rights, the sacredness of the Earth’s ecosystems, and the
dignity of meaningful work. A program for human development must recognize the opportunity that this
globalization brings; it must draw strength and inspiration from the ethical victories of the day.
For while the last decade has witnessed distressing levels of poverty, militarism, and consumption, it has
also provided us with some exemplary scenes of human integrity S we have seen women rally for their rights in
Beijing; we have seen a new era of peace come to Central America; and we have seen Nelson Mandela lead the
South African people away from the horror of apartheid. Rather than allowing globalization to be defined by
rampant speculation and persistent inequality, humanists demand that these victories, and the moral victories yet
to come, must characterize our current era.