The century is approaching its conclusion in a climate of growing tension. Conflict springs up between individual rights and collective duties, between local roots and cosmopolitism. It is present in the tension between economic development and the safeguard of the environment, the aggression of global markets and the desire to protect fragile economies, the pressures of emigration from poor countries and unemployment in the more advanced nations. There is renewed bloodshed between ethnic, religious, cultural and economic groups, and between nations.
However, as the International Commission on Peace and Food reminds us, "the perspective the world seeks must be based on a greater understanding of the inextricable linkages between peace, democratization, development, equity and the environment. None of these great goals can be achieved, without corresponding progress towards the others. [...] What are the foundations of this new intellectual perspective and what sort of strategies, actions and results will it lead to? It requires a change in the way we look at and think of familiar things like war, developing countries, democracy, agriculture, industrialization. First, we have to awaken from the millennia-old nightmare that war is a natural and inevitable part of human existence, which can perhaps be mitigated or kept far from our shores, but never really mastered or eliminated. [...] Most of all, the new perspective the world seeks should be based on a recognition that humankind is the master of its own destiny, that the external limits are not binding on us if we tap the unlimited creative potential of our own inner human resourcefulness".
These recommendations are the starting point of the debate among the Nobel Laureates and international experts gathering in Milan, to discuss how to transform conflict into an occasion for dialogue, growth and innovation.
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Individual Responsibility: For Self, for Others
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Saturday 7 December 1996
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There are deep problems in ethics in assessing what people owe themselves, what moral obligations they have to others, and in particular what obligations do some individuals have to others who in some sense or another shirk their responsibilities.
I want to examine the value and limitations of the classical utilitarian or other consequentialist evaluations of social effects and what modifications are needed in it.
On the one hand, morality is universalistic. But it is asking much for an individual to be obliged to take a purely universalistic view. Rather, moral obligation is a tradeoff between self-interest and pure morality.
Further, an individualistic position would imply that one cannot be concerned about failings of an individual who is failing himself, although this must be modified if there are innocent victims.
I apply these abstract principles to provision for future needs when markets fail (as in environmental questions) and to income redistribution.
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