The authors argue that the time is ripe for national and corporate leaders to move consciously towards the development of global ethics. This papers presents a model of global ethics, a rationale for the development of global ethics, and the implications of the model for research and practice.

As transnational interactions increase, cross-cultural conflict concerning ethical issues is inevitable. This article presents a model for assisting decision makers in selecting appropriate strategies for addressing cross-cultural ethical conflict. A theoretical framework for the model is developed based on the literature on international business ethics and on conflict resolution. The model is illustrated through several case examples. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

This paper examines the role of clinical practitioners and clinical researchers internationally in establishing the utility of harm-reduction approaches to substance use. It thus illustrates the potential for clinicians to play a pivotal role in health promoting structural interventions based on harm-reduction goals and public health models. Popular media images of drug use as uniformly damaging, and abstinence as the only acceptable goal of treatment, threaten to distort clinical care away from a basis in evidence, which shows that some ways (...) of using drugs are far more harmful than others and that punitive approaches and insistence on total abstinence as the only goal of treatment often increases the harms of drug use rather than reducing drug use. Therefore the leadership and scientific authority of clinicians who understand the health impact of harm-reduction strategies is needed. Through a review of harm-reduction interventions in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, we identify three ways that clinicians have helped to achieve a paradigm shift from punitive approaches to harm-reduction principles in clinical care and in drug policy: through clinical research to provide data establishing the effectiveness and feasibility of harm-reduction approaches, by developing innovative clinical programmes that employ harm reduction, and thereby changing the standard of care to include routine use of these evidence-based approaches in their practices. We argue that through promotion of harm-reduction goals and methods, clinicians have unique opportunities to improve the health outcomes of vulnerable populations. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of clinical practitioners and clinical researchers internationally in establishing the utility of harm-reduction approaches to substance use. It thus illustrates the potential for clinicians to play a pivotal role in health promoting structural interventions based on harm-reduction goals and public health models. Popular media images of drug use as uniformly damaging, and abstinence as the only acceptable goal of treatment, threaten to distort clinical care away from a basis in evidence, which shows that some ways (...) of using drugs are far more harmful than others and that punitive approaches and insistence on total abstinence as the only goal of treatment often increases the harms of drug use rather than reducing drug use. Therefore the leadership and scientific authority of clinicians who understand the health impact of harm-reduction strategies is needed. Through a review of harm-reduction interventions in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, we identify three ways that clinicians have helped to achieve a paradigm shift from punitive approaches to harm-reduction principles in clinical care and in drug policy: through clinical research to provide data establishing the effectiveness and feasibility of harm-reduction approaches, by developing innovative clinical programmes that employ harm reduction, and thereby changing the standard of care to include routine use of these evidence-based approaches in their practices. We argue that through promotion of harm-reduction goals and methods, clinicians have unique opportunities to improve the health outcomes of vulnerable populations. (shrink)

Drawing on broad definitions of technology and engineering as well as precedents in the philosophical literature, this paper makes the novel argument that the purposeful design of one’s unique good life using existing philosophical concepts is an engineering activity. Whether as a metaphor or as an engineering activity in its own right, a sampling of important benefits and perspectives provided for well-being by the presented “life engineering” framework are highlighted. A key strength of the framework is the conceptual simplicity, with (...) minimal sacrifices in completeness or consistency. This necessitates a tradeoff of limited precision for any one practical implementation. Consistent conceptual definitions for wisdom, virtue and the good life are presented within an informative ethics. Only a descriptive evaluation to aid in conceptual understanding is discussed, no prescriptive normative evaluations are made. The good life is defined to be one in which the minimum requirements are met and then performance is good, but no attempt is made to define what is good. A fundamental limitation of the framework stems from the inherent focus of technology on human utility. Although no novel fundamental conclusions are drawn in this paper, the presented framework is demonstrated to correspond with numerous ethical precepts of many existing philosophical traditions. (shrink)

This brief 1994 book review essay (5500 words) examines Telford Taylor's memoir, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (1992). The review is a personal one, set against two things - the author's work, while reading Taylor's memoir, in Iraq for Human Rights Watch leading a forensic team excavating Kurdish victims of the 1988 al-Anfal campaign, and the diplomatic discussions leading to the formation of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia. The essay argues that the Nuremberg trials, according to Taylor, had (...) a certain deflationary emotional affect - deliberately ratcheting down the emotions of what had occurred to the limited world of the courtroom. It was able to do that because the WWII allies had been willing to pay the price of victory and had 'earned' the right to conduct a trial. The Yugoslavia tribunal, by contrast, and at that time, was premised on a claim to universal justice that did not depend upon the willingness of its sponsors to intervene in the slaughter in the former Yugoslavia. "Nuremberg was a lovely hood ornament," said one of the author's unnamed sources, a senior European military judge advocate, "on the ungainly vehicle that liberated Western Europe, but it was not a substitute for D-Day.". (shrink)

This 2007 article (based around an invited conference talk at Wayne State in early 2007) addresses risk assessment and cost benefit analysis as mechanisms in counterterrorism policy. It argues that although policy is often best pursued by agreeing to set aside deep foundational differences, in order to obtain a strategic plan for an activity such as counterterrorism, foundational differences must be addressed in order that policy not merely devolve into a policy minimalism that is always and damagingly tactical, never strategic, (...) in order to avoid domestic democratic political conflict. The article takes risk assessment in counterterrorism, using cost benefit analysis, as an example of a foundational disagreement that cannot easily be elided. Examining an extreme, indeed crude, recent example of cost benefit analysis applied to the risks of terror and the costs of counterterrorism - John Mueller's widely noticed Overblown - the article suggests that cost benefit analysis, at least applied in this way, runs roughshod over other important values in counterterrorism policy, such as justice, but in addition, makes radical yet unstated assumptions about what cost benefit analysis seeks to compare in establishing counterterrorism policy or estimating the risks and costs of terrorism - unstated assumptions that, in fact, assume the conclusion. The article notes that cost benefit analysis tends to promote a policy-minimalizing "event specific catastrophism" - seeking above all to prevent simply the next, serial terrorist attack, with however no greater strategic vision. Indeed, the article says in conclusion (as Philip Bobbitt has noted) cost benefit analysis is "relentlessly tactical," not strategic; it also tends toward serial 'event specific catastrophism' as its analytic frame; and it is a method of evaluating proposed courses of action, not generating them, and hence promotes a strategically questionable tendency to reaction as a response to terrorism. This article presents these ideas in brief fashion, however, as the first draft in a larger project on cost benefit analysis and counterterrorism, and it does so by reference to a book that is unabashedly crude in its approach to both cost benefit analysis and terrorism/counterterrorism. The critical project will extend beyond this particular article, which is in effective a a first pass at developing a critique. It is also an article that does not extend beyond events of early 2007 (when the original address was given) and should be read in that light. (shrink)

A narrative approach to the teaching of philosophy at the introductory level offers to traditional aged college students, eighteen to twenty one years old, an accessible entrée to philosophical ideas. For many students in the introductory course, this single philosophy course will be their only exposure to philosophy. Through specific reference to three Platonic dialogs and Descartes Meditations it is argued that the presentation of philosophical discipline by way of personal narrative allows an approach that is true to the spirit (...) of the ideas as well as attractive to students at this stage of life. Reference to the settings of these philosophical works and a detailed analysis of the horse trainer analogies in the Platonic dialogs demonstrates the usefulness of this approach. It is further argued that any complete philosophical system will be similarly approachable in this way. (shrink)

Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason depends upon an ideal of subjectivity that operates linguistically. The subject of the Critique progresses through three transformations: first, the organic subject; second, the serial subject; third, the common subject. Each stage reveals different configurations of the expressive possibilities inherent in Sartre’s late conception of subjectivity and his materialistic view of language. The organic subject emerges in the initial contradiction between the human organism and its material environment. This contradiction results in the primordial movement of (...) signification that projects a future structured in response to the material system. The serial subject then emerges within the system of language and a social structure of antagonistic struggle. Finally, the common subject emerges out of the dissolution of the serial subject by means of a repetition of the original expressive gesture. This common subjectivity is the site of a complete communication occurring within the group-in-fusion. (shrink)

This is the original Spanish language version of an essay (10,000 words) appearing in the Revista de Libros (Madrid), considering the history and future of the United Nations and global governance through the lens of Paul Kennedy's recent work, The Parliament of Man. The essay is highly skeptical of what it describes as platonism about the future of the UN as the seat of global governance. It offers an alternative view of how to consider the work of the UN, in (...) three areas: security, economic development, and values. The essay argues that, particularly with the rise of new great power tensions and multipolarity, the fantastic dream of the UN as the seat of a gradually arising global government, as Kennedy imagines things, should be given up in favor of a UN devoted to a modest set of quotidian tasks and the place for the great powers to engage in multilateral discussion, argument, and negotiation. (shrink)

This brief review (1100 words) examines Stephen Hopgood's half journalism-half anthropological journey inside the world of Amnesty International. The book is an outstanding piece of both reportage and analysis, and the review discusses the various pressures, political and ideological and social, on AI and those that work in its International Secretariat. As the review notes, AI is more like a religious order than anything else, and that observation has ramifications for the NGO world beyond AI.