Thoughts on Global Ethics – our need to study the real range of views and the processes of norms-building

The paper argues for attention in work on global ethics to: (1) ethics on a global scale in a globalized world, not only ethics across national borders and between supposedly separate ethical realms; (2) pragmatic, pluralist systems for co-existence; (3) descriptive ethics, not only prescriptive ethics; and (4) learning from practice, not only engaging in abstracted theory. Section 2 presents some descriptive ethics, first illustrating how global ethics includes a wider range of issues and viewpoints than only about the mutual relations of states. It suggests how global ethics can gain from attention to the historical sociology of norms-building, within societies and also between and across societies. It draws especially on the work of Norbert Elias and Andrew Linklater. We need to understand norms systems not only as derived from systems of family, locality and state, but as emerging also from other channels of interaction. Section 3 indicates the relevance for global ethics of studying recent processes of international and global norms-building, for example as attempted in regard to businesses and in the establishment of a “human development” movement. There is now an extensive literature on such processes. The section notes especially two contrasted cases: the emergence and adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals during 2010-15; and the comparable work on issues of migration, in the Global Forum for Migration and Development and other fora, leading to the Global Migration Compact of 2018, that illustrated however the dangers of a chasm between domestic politics and specialist- and elite-level global norm generation. The final section adds concluding thoughts.