Future global ethics: environmental change, embedded ethics, evolving human identity

Abstract

Work on global ethics looks at ethical connections on a global scale. It should link closely to environmental ethics, recognizing that we live in unified social-ecological systems, and to development ethics, attending systematically to the lives and interests of contemporary and future poor, marginal and vulnerable persons and groups within these systems and to the effects on them of forces around the globe. Fulfilling these tasks requires awareness of work outside academic ethics alone, in other disciplines and across disciplines, in public debates and private agendas. A relevant ethics enterprise must engage in systematic description and understanding of the ethical stances that are expressed or hidden in the work of influential stakeholders and analysts, and seek to influence and participate, indeed embed itself, in the expressed and hidden choice-making involved in designing and conducting scientific research and in policy analysis and preparation; it will contribute in value-critical and interpretive policy analysis. It will explore how the allocation of attention and of concern in research and policy depend on perceptions of identity and of degrees of interconnection, and are influenced by the choice or avoidance of humanistic interpretive methodologies. The paper illustrates these themes with reference to the study of climate change.

Keywords:

• descriptive ethics
• climate change
• human security
• value-critical policy analysis
• responsible science

Acknowledgements

This piece draws on ideas explored in a public lecture at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague (Gasper 2010) and taken further in presentations at UNESCO meetings in Paris (September 2013) and Hanoi (December 2013), as well as in ongoing cooperation with Thanh-Dam Truong on human security and Asuncion Lera St.Clair on critical policy studies and environmental change. Eric Palmer gave valuable advice on exposition.

Notes on contributor

Des Gasper is Professor of Human Development, Development Ethics and Public Policy at the International Institute of Social Studies (The Hague), a graduate school of Erasmus University Rotterdam. He has worked on the nature of value-choices and use of ethical ideas in public policy, including with reference to themes of human development and human security and to international migration and global environmental change. Publications include: The Ethics of Development (Edinburgh University Press, 2004); Cosmopolitanisms and the Frontiers of Justice, edited section in Development and Change (2006, 37(6): 1227–1334); Development Ethics (co-editor A.L. St.Clair; Ashgate Library of Essays in Public and Professional Ethics, 2010) and Good Practices in Addressing Human Security through National Human Development Reports (co-authors: O.A. Gomez, Y. Mine; New York: UNDP, http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/good_practices.pdf, 2013).

Notes

1 Parts of this section are based on an unpublished lecture: Gasper (2010).