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A Global Ethic and the Hybrid Character of the Moral World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2012

Nicholas Rengger
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Extract

In the lead essay of this symposium, Michael Ignatieff offers a characteristic blend of philosophical acuteness and political good sense on a topic that, we can all agree, is central to many of the most important questions on the contemporary political and international agenda. His analysis is prescient, challenging, and deserves pondering at some length; thus, in this short response I cannot deal with it in anything like the detail it deserves. But the enforced brevity is perhaps an advantage as well, in that it forces me to concentrate on where I differ from Ignatieff and on my own sense of what we might imply when we use such a term as “a global ethic.”

Type
Symposium: In Search of a Global Ethic
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , Spring 2012 , pp. 27 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2012

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References

NOTES

1 See Michael Ignatieff, “Reimagining a Global Ethic,” in this issue.

2 Following the initiative of then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the Canadian government set up the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in September 2000. At its third meeting Gareth Evans, Mohamed Sahnoun, and Ignatieff suggested that the phrase “responsibility to protect” be adopted in place of such phrases as a right (or a duty) of intervention. The commission reported in December 2001 and the language was adopted by the UN World Summit in 2005.

3 The growth of cosmopolitan ethics and political theory over the last thirty years is testimony to this. Leading figures include Charles Beitz, Onora O'Neill, Thomas Pogge, Henry Shue, and Peter Singer.

4 This is not just because they are dealing with different problems—Ignatieff's point in his paper—though it is certainly partly that, but also because of the somewhat baroque origin of many of the ideas in the first place. A very good example in the case of the UN Charter can be found brilliantly discussed in Mazower, Mark's excellent No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 A good discussion is Ann Glendon, Mary, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2002)Google Scholar.

6 Here I follow Michael Oakeshott's discussion in his essay “The Tower of Babel,” in Oakeshott, Michael, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, expanded ed. (Minneapolis, Minn.: Liberty Fund, 1991[1962])Google Scholar.

7 Ibid., p. 481.