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A Global Ethical Society

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The philosopher says individual ethical stances are ill-equipped to face today’s global challenges.

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Dale Jamieson:

Dale Jamieson joined the NYU faculty in Spring, 2004, from Carleton rnCollege, where he was Henry R. Luce Professor in Human Dimensions of rnGlobal Change. Previously he was Professor of Philosophy at the rnUniversity of Colorado, Boulder, where he was the only faculty member torn have won both the Dean's award for research in the social sciences and rnthe Chancellor's award for research in the humanities. He has also heldrn visiting positions at Cornell, Stanford, Princeton, Oxford and Monash. rn

rnProfessor Jamieson's most recent book is Morality’s Progress: Essays rnon Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature (Oxford, 2002). Hern is also the editor or co-editor of seven books, most recently A rnCompanion to Environmental Philosophy (Blackwell, 2001), and Singerrn and his Critics (Blackwell, 1999), named by Choice as one ofrn the outstanding academic books of 1999. He has also published more thanrn eighty articles and book chapters. His research has been funded by thern Ethics and Values Studies Program of the National Science Foundation, rnthe US Environmental Protection Agency, the National Endowment for the rnHumanities, and the Office of Global Programs in the National rnAtmospheric and Aeronautics Administration. He is on the editorial boardrn of such journals as Environmental Ethics; Environmental rnValues; Science, Techology and Human Values; Science and rnEngineering Ethics; the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare; rnand The Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics. rnrn

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Is American individualism compatible with today’s global challenges?

Dale Jamieson: We tend to have very quick and often misleading associations with words like ethics and values and so on and so forth. And it reminds me of a story, many years ago when I worked at the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1980, the first years of Reagan regime, we were interested in founding a center that would study social policy questions but would really be concerned with the kind of moral and ethical issues that really separate people when it comes to public decision making.

And so we started something that was called The Center for Values and Social Policy which seemed to us to be a completely apt description of the work that we wanted to do. Well, it turned out that almost everyone hated the name of the center and we were completely flummoxed by it and being a little slow in the uptake, we only later realized it was because Center, okay, for Values, well, that’s a right wing buzz term, right? It’s people on the political right who are concerned with Values, and Social Policy, Social Policy, that’s a buzz word that’s associated with the political left, the people who want to reengineer society and all that.

So almost no one could relate to a center that was interested in values and social policy. So going back to your question about ethics, it’s true that when we think about ethical behavior and moral behavior in American society, a kind of individualist bias immediately creeps in, we think of people as being individually responsible for doing the right thing, we even associate ideas of ethics and morality with, I think, questions of purity. Not to be smirched with wrong doing and so on and so forth but when we live in highly complex interconnected societies that are in some way have some reasonable semblance of democratic governance, often our moral obligations are political obligations and policy obligations and obligations to act.

If you’re interested in doing something about climate change as we all should be, all of us who care about future people and creatures that will inhabit this world. Then buying a Prius is a good thing but an even better thing would be to be on the streets demanding urgent action from the United States’ Congress.

Question: Can individual moral stances solve the challenges we face?

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