Some reflections on global justice from one who was both a manager and an academic

ABSTRACT

A retired manager and university teacher reflects on global ethics, on the purpose of life, and on the challenges facing global ethics in a contemporary world where there is no certainty about shared belief or shared values. The future lies, he concludes, with process and with a deeper understanding of one another.

KEYWORDS:

• Justice
• ethics
• trade
• economics
• Pacific

I taught global ethics and justice in a business school in Australia and online, for some twenty years; I also taught global ethics and justice in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. I have never worked in explicitly development settings, although I did spend ten years as an expatriate manager in Fiji’s sugar industry. Much of this management and teaching experience was in the second half of the twentieth century; it was the time of ‘economic development’, of strong (even rampant) commitment to a rules-based world order. It was a time of international agreements with names like ‘world multi-fibre agreement’ (MFA) where what were once called ‘first world’ countries provided outlets and markets for the products, such as cotton and clothing, of ‘third world’ or ‘developing’ countries, when the nations of the (then) European Economic Community under the Lomé Convention provided markets for the sugar and other agricultural production of former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and Pacific (ACP). Fiji also had a share, an access ‘quota’, in the US sugar market, which was part of the quota which had been allocated to pre-Revolution Cuba. It was the age of ‘systems thinking’, of Peters & Waterman’s In Search of Excellence (1984) and of the ‘learning organization’ promoted by Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline (1990). The textbooks of the time, with In Search of Excellence and The Fifth Discipline no exceptions, put financial success first. ‘Compound asset growth’ is the first measure of ‘long term superiority’ according to Peters and Waterman (1984, 22). In that period ‘most development texts [were] prepared to address the concerns of the policy makers and corporate interests’ (Porter, Allen, and Thompson 2012, vi).

As I recall it, ‘trickle down’ economics predominated, meaning the belief that if a nation received income, then all residents in that nation would eventually benefit as the economic value trickled down through the economy in terms of employment, wages, and purchasing power. (I was for a time both a student at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, and a senior officer in the sugar industry.) Oskar (O.H.K.) Spate wrote at the time (1970, viii) of ‘the mystical belief that if only GNP or … some other monetary index carries on rising, then all is well and all things shall be added.’ E. F. Schumacher seems to have held a similar view of then current thinking (1973, ch.2). The ‘trickle down’ view persisted at least till 2023 when The Economist in the issue dated 3 August 2023 wrote, ‘as prosperity spreads, life expectancy rises, fertility rates fall, and education expands’.

This predominant focus on economics may have been especially strong in Fiji, while for example the themes of human rights, including the rights of the child and the rights of women, were the subject of a series of global conferences and conventions and consequent streams of activity (UN 2024). But whatever the success of those streams, impact on the ground, at least in Fiji, was limited – there, in contrast, the Lomé Convention and US Department of Agriculture rules provided ‘third world’ sugar producers with guaranteed outlets and guaranteed prices, and the MFA did the same for cotton. Producers had guaranteed, if limited, access to developed (‘first world’) markets. Development was understood as about economics, about a straight-line model that required industrialisation. As E.K. Fisk wrote in 1970, ‘economic growth as we understand it is only possible in a monetised economy’ (1970, 46). Regarding the 5-year development plan in operation when Fiji became independent in 1970, Fisk devoted a chapter to it (1970, ch.5), writing of ‘the present planned path of development with its emphasis on “the promotion of growth in commercial agriculture, industry and tourism”’ (1970, 56) thus re-affirming the economic focus of then-current planning. In 1996, the former Secretary for Finance, Rodney Cole, wrote that the early Independence goals had been met (1996, 85). It was, he said, ‘steady as she goes’ (1996, 85), and Cole felt ‘a sense of déjà vu’ reading the Minister’s 1996 speech with its emphasis on agriculture and tourism as key elements of economic development, and the need for a ‘stable environment’ for growth (1996, 87). Mention of people, justice and dignity were seldom to be found apart from their inclusion in the preambles to constitutions drafted by expatriate colonial powers, as for instance in the 1970 Fiji constitution (Fiji Independence Order 1970), that former British colony’s first post-independence constitution. (For a further discussion of the place of dignity in constitutions see Pless, Maak, and Howard Harris 2017.)

Yet by the time of conferences in 2017 I was talking about fractures in society. That was only two decades after Rodney Cole’s assessment of ‘steady as she goes’ (1996, 85), and about the same length of time after Fukuyama wrote of the end of history, a view predicated on a belief in an emerging dominance for the West. I was talking about how an end had come to what had been the consistency of belief in Western values, be they economic, religious, governmental, or social. That academics were now talking about a fracture is an indication of arrival of wider societal awareness of this, rather than of newness; thus when that paper was published (Harris 2018) thirteen of my references were not from academic journals or academic publishers but from books and magazines one might buy at an airport. Three years later Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks could publish a book about ‘divided times’ (Sacks 2021), and few nation-states would still believe Christianity to be dominant, or women to be inferior, or identity to be rooted in God rather than in personal individuality (see A. C. Grayling 2020, 454).

Was I a slow learner, had I come late in my career to some realisation that the world had changed? Whilst specific disciplines may take a distinctive view of the world and its issues – and business ethics is no different here, nor perhaps is global studies – it may be that any academic discipline whether ethics or chemical engineering has a distorted view of the world. What I read as a manager and as a teacher of ethics in a business school seldom included a broad view of the world. Perhaps Aristotle, Plato, Gilgamesh, Homer and Shakespeare have more to teach us than we understand. Lehrer tells us, similarly, that French author Marcel Proust was a neuroscientist (2008) and recounts how many literary authors and artists were ahead of their time in interpretation of the world.

So what are the challenges that the global ethics discipline faces? The editors ask also for reflection on ‘the relevance of this journal and of the work that is pursued within its pages’ (Palmer et al. 2023, 105).

What challenges does global ethics face, as governments in what we are now inclined to call ‘advanced democracies’ move away from two-party debate within agreed and accepted frameworks toward multi-party arrangements and fraught coalitions? Even though my dictionary says that political coalitions are temporary, and for a limited period (OED 1944, sv coalition), Italy, an ‘advanced democracy’, a founding member of both NATO and what was to become the EU, seems to have had a coalition government since the beginning of the Italian Republic in 1948 (SBS 1996, 349). As Charles Taylor said toward the end of the last century, the ‘lines of battle are … bewildering’ (1989, 495).

The greatest challenge I believe is the challenge of felt certainty. It manifests in many ways, in religious fundamentalism, in the expectation that ‘government’ can fix the difficult problems of housing, refugees and emergency relief, in the hoped for agreed answer to climate change. Life will be hard for many so long as there is an expectation of a single, finite, easily understood and simply conveyed answer to the complex problems of a world in which people from many backgrounds experience inequality at first hand (directly or electronically). The danger and impossibility of certainty is discussed, for instance, in Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979).

Some of these aspects of a perceived certainty – regarding religious fundamentalism, the role of government, and the prevalence of complex or wicked problems – are discussed more extensively below. First to religious fundamentalism. The ‘rise of fundamentalism ranks among the most significant developments in recent world history’ (Golo 2011, 173), whatever definition is used for fundamentalism. According to some it is an ‘anti-capitalist and anti-secular ideology’ (Mårtensson et al. 2011, 2). The rise in fundamentalism is perhaps borne out by the most recent round of the long-running World Values Study which shows how ‘[m]ost countries are now aligned along a diagonal that starts in the bottom left, with strong traditional and collective values, and rises towards the top right, with more secular values and individualism. In 2023 there is a clear “best fit” line. In 1998, there was not’ (The Economist 2023). Whilst there is a line-of-best-fit, the nature of the values held by nation-states or regional groupings does vary. Religious fundamentalism can include the fundamentalism and inexorable certainty of literalist Christian scriptural exposition, fundamentalist Islam and activism for various causes. Sacks notes that religion and ethics become ‘more important in a world … [marked by] the unregulated chaos of online information, misinformation and disinformation’ (2021, xiv). That should be seen as a call for greater emphasis on ethics both in teaching and in global development.

On government, Francis Fukuyama argues that weak or failed states are a source of many of the world’s most serious problems, from poverty to AIDS to drugs to terrorism (2004, ix). Not only are weak or failed states sources of danger for the remaining strong states, the strong state also faces dangers from its own citizens. We have ‘outsourced’ morality to the state (Sacks 2021, 84 and ch.1). As individualism has increased (as the World Values Study, The Economist article and Sacks show) there is a greater demand from many citizens for government action on issues that affect personal liberty or personal economic advancement. Yet ‘well-functioning public institutions … operate in complex ways that resist being moved’ (Fukuyama 2004, ix). There is a conflict or at least a dilemma here as nation-states either wither as they become absorbed into a global economy or strengthen so as to foster innovation and (economic) growth. As Fukuyama notes non-state actors have the opportunity for great influence, and the ability of governments to act in humanitarian, human rights, and security issues is limited, while a global order discourages intervention across state borders (see Fukuyama 2004, 126 & part 4). As noted above, many democracies now have coalition governments while non-state actors often have increased power and mobilisation, thereby increasing the number of individuals and groups to be committed to any government action. Bligh Grant and his colleagues note that it ‘would be difficult to overstate the salience of commissions and inquiries in Australian public life’ (Grant, Ryan, and Lawrie 2015, 20) for where complex issues are involved governments often employ the device of a Royal Commission or some similar form of public inquiry as an extension of parliamentary democracy – see, for instance, lawyers Kenneth Hayne kc (2019) and Dominique Hogan-Doran sc (2019), and on the role of the public inquiry in data management and government more generally see Harris (2022).

Many contemporary problems are ‘wicked’. According to the description by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber (1973) wicked problems have no obvious answer, no way of telling when a solution has been achieved, no reliable way to seek an answer by trial-and-error or by ‘muddling through’ (Lindblom 1959). Toward the end of the twentieth century Senge wrote that ‘[i]t’s just not possible any longer to “figure it out”’ (1990, 4). He attributes to competing ‘sides’ ‘a linear view’ (78) or ‘a simple linear description’ (79). This applies as much to global development as it does to problems in politics, economics and technology as Bryan Watters shows in his account of leadership in Bosnia (2019); Watters explicitly writes of politics. As there is no way of telling when a social need has been met (Sen 2009, xviii) it could be argued that all problems in global ethics are ‘wicked problems’.

Porter and his colleagues in their review of the ambitious multi-year Magarini project in Kenya suggest a shift: ‘more diversity for more certainty’ (2012, ch.7). We should fear the certainties of ‘cargo cults’ – whether they are in fashion, human development or religion. (On fashion and fads in business management see Ghemawat (2002) and Shapiro (1995).

Despite the persistence/growth of religious fundamentalism, escalating demands on governments, climate change (United Nations 2023), and wicked problems (United Nations 2024), I remain hopeful and optimistic. The core question of ethics, ‘How should one live?’ will remain important, as Sacks (2021, xiv) suggests. Katalin Illes and Howard Harris (2014) show how narrative has been widely and fruitfully employed in moral inquiry. There is an important link between the preceding discussion about (un)certainty and the following discussion about narratives, as I elaborate on later. Illes and I include instances of the effectiveness of stories and narrative in exploring organisational processes, noting that ‘narrative is the study of the ways humans experience the world’ ‘because story-tellers have an interest in the social world and how it functions’ (2004, 170). Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, and Confucius told stories. Gilgamesh, the Psalms of David and the Dreamtime of the Australian Aborigines are stories because reality is complex. As Stephen Mitchell says in his introduction to Gilgamesh, it is not character but stories that are important (Anon 2004, 26). I have come late to this, in a retirement begun with a desire to see great movies. I have read more; perhaps I have learnt at last to listen. Indigenous people have much to teach us. I learnt from a student in a development ethics class, a (non-indigenous) student recently returned from a large refugee camp, asking how learning ethical theory would help a worker determine to whom the next bag of rice should go. It is time for the deep understanding that comes with good case studies and discussions (O'Donovan 2002, 8), not for surface learning.

In overcoming the danger of (over-)certainty, perhaps the answer lies in process, in developing amongst practitioners, teachers and administrators the skills of reflection, in the life-changing way envisaged by Juergen Habermas (1966) or, as Oliver O’Donovan suggests, as a means of improving or sustaining ourselves for the future (2002, 14). The author and novelist Michael Carmichael confirms the importance of complexity and extolls the virtue of narrative, noting that ‘novels are about people’ (2024, 3.40). Another example, from the Indian Army, can be found in Lyndall Urwick’s early text The Elements of Administration (1947, 52) where the Deputy Quartermaster-General of India describes through a narrative the changes in decision making that followed his promotion to QMG. For an indication of how this self-discovery might be done in practice see the account of reflection in the teaching of ethics described by Howard Harris and Sukhbir Sandhu (2017). Another case study of over-certainty and the need for reflection comes in the book by Porter and others covering the Magarini Settlement Project in Kenya. As that book’s publishers write,

[t]he project is typical of many large ‘Third World’ rural development projects of recent years, and the book, first published in 1991 as Development in Practice, examines the reasons for this project’s failure, and looks at the lessons to be learned from this experience for development in general. Challenging many assumptions and approaches, its provocative conclusions will generate much interest amongst development practitioners.

(Porter, Allen, and Thompson 1991/2012, my quote marks around Third World).

When I call for the development of reflection though I do not mean reflection in the manner of reviewing an activity so as to determine what ought to have been done nor to discover its key aspects as in Porter et al.’s book. Worthwhile though that learning can be for policy makers and corporate interests it is not yet the critical reflection envisaged by Habermas (1966) which involves a review of the nature of self. Without that there can be no development, no dignity, and no justice.

Acknowledgements

I thank the authors of the cited material, especially my co-authors Katalin Illes and Sukhbir Sandhu. I thank the journal and the reviewers who read and commented on earlier versions. I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the inclusion of wicked problems.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Howard Harris

Howard Harris taught ethics in a business school for two decades. He taught in Malaysia, Singapore Australia and online. He taught development students in a masters degree program at RMIT University in Melbourne. As a chemical engineer he worked in the Pacific Islands for 10 years. He has a PhD in applied philosophy. His interests are in ethics, justice and liturgy.