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Constructing Universal Values? A Practical Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2020

Anthony F. Lang Jr.
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Abstract

This essay explores the possibility of universal values. Universal values do not exist as Platonic ideals nor do they exist in clearly defined lists of rules or laws. Rather, universal ethical claims are constructed through the actions of individual political leaders, scholars, and activists. This essay explores how such normative constructions take place. It uses an initiative undertaken by the UN Office of Drugs and Crime to further education around corruption as an example of how such universal values come into existence. The initiative focused on developing teaching materials for higher education. The essay focuses on two particular modules, both their content and the process by which they were written.

Keywords

universal valuesUnited Nations Office of Drugs and CrimeUNODCAristotleMenciusanticorruptiontolerancepluralism
Type
Essay
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 34 , Special Issue 3: The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward , Fall 2020 , pp. 267 - 277
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

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Footnotes

*

Thanks to Chris Brown, Sigall Horovitz, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, James Lang, Nicholas Onuf, Antje Wiener, and Theodore Wilkins-Lang for providing feedback on an earlier draft of this essay.

References

NOTES

1 The quote comes from Morgenthau's, Hans J.Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), p. 249Google Scholar. Morgenthau is a more complicated figure on the question of ethics than this quote would allow, but it does capture a sentiment shared among many scholars of international relations.

2 Myers, Robert J., “Introducing Ethics and International Affairs,” Ethics & International Affairs 1 (March 1987), p. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Harbour, Frances V., “Basic Moral Values: A Shared Core,” Ethics & International Affairs 9, no. 1 (March 1995), pp. 155–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Thanks to Patrick T. Jackson for forcing me to clarify these points.

5 Caney, Simon, chap. 2 in Justice beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Rawls, John, “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7, no. 1 (Spring 1987), pp. 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Caney, Justice beyond Borders, pp. 35–36.

8 Walzer, Michael, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983)Google Scholar; and Walzer, Michael, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Caney, Justice beyond Borders, p. 42.

10 Donnelly, Jack, “The Relative Universality of Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 29, no. 2 (May 2007), pp. 281–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 For a description of how the UDHR came into existence on the basis of an effort to bring together a range of different traditions of thought, see Morsink, Johannes, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, Intent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Parts of this section are drawn from a forthcoming chapter, “Practical Constitutionalism: Reflections on Friedrich Kratochwil's Praxis: On Acting and Knowing,” in Gunter Helmann and Jens Steffek, eds., Praxis as a Perspective on International Relations and Law: Friedrich Kratochwil and His Critics (unpublished manuscript).

13 United Nations Office on Drug and Crime, Doha Declaration: On Integrating Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice into the Wider United Nations Agenda to Address Social and Economic Challenges and to Promote the Rule of Law at the National and International Levels, and Public Participation (paper adopted at the Thirteenth UN Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, Doha, April 12–19, 2015; New York: United Nations, 2015), www.unodc.org/documents/congress//Declaration/V1504151_English.pdf.

14 The project is ongoing, and so not all nine topics emerged at the initial meeting in 2017.

15 The full list of modules is as follows: “Introduction”; “Ethics and Universal Values”; “Ethics and Society”; “Ethics and Leadership”; “Ethics, Diversity and Pluralism”; “Challenges to Ethical Living”; “Strategies for Ethical Action”; “Behavioural Ethics”; “Gender Dimensions of Ethics”; “Media Integrity and Ethics”; “Business Integrity and Ethics”; “Integrity, Ethics and Law”; “Public Integrity and Ethics”; and “Professional Ethics.”

16 “University Module Series: Integrity and Ethics; Module Series: Overview,” The Doha Declaration: Promoting a Culture of Lawfulness, UNODC, n.d., www.unodc.org/e4j/en/tertiary/integrity-ethics.html.

17 “University Module Series: Integrity and Ethics; Module 2: Ethics and Universal Values,” The Doha Declaration: Promoting a Culture of Lawfulness, UNODC, n.d., www.unodc.org/e4j/en/integrity-ethics/module-2/index.html.

18 “University Module Series: Integrity and Ethics; Module 2: Ethics and Universal Values; Key Issues,” The Doha Declaration: Promoting a Culture of Lawfulness, UNODC, n.d., www.unodc.org/e4j/en/integrity-ethics/module-2/key-issues.html.

19 Ibid.

20 “University Module Series: Integrity and Ethics; Module 2: Ethics and Universal Values,” The Doha Declaration.

21 Ackerly, Brooke, “Interpreting the Political Theory in the Practice of Human Rights,” Law and Philosophy 36, no. 2 (January 2017), pp. 135–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 For defenses of pluralism in a deep sense, see Connolly, William E., Pluralism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Flathman, Richard E., Pluralism and Liberal Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005)Google Scholar. For a discussion of how these two theorists can be seen as contributing to an ethos of pluralism at the international level, see Lang, Anthony F. Jr., International Political Theory: An Introduction (London: Palgrave, 2014), pp. 180–97Google Scholar.

23 Admittedly, African countries are not the only place where such matters of identity are questioned; the United States has also seen heated debate on such questions both in universities and more widely. The point here is that among those participating in this project it was a scholar from an African country who raised this concern. Moreover, I have chosen not to identify the country or university from which the scholar came, not in order to generalize the relevance of this point across all of Africa, but to ensure the anonymity of the individual who raised it.

24 For one effort to think about how values and norms can develop through a process of contestation, see Wiener, Antje, Contestation and Constitution of Norms in Global International Relations (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.