Why universal ethics?

For centuries mankind has been perfecting systems of individual ethics because “Man is the measure of all things” said Protagoras. However in recent years the individual has lost many of his prerogatives to national and international institutions in which individual responsibility has been diluted.

Most existing ethical systems have been developed to help humans survive, reproduce, fulfill themselves and live together. International institutions are not designed to reproduce. They are designed to produce one form or another of “common good” for our societies. Their survival should therefore depend on their ability to produce the common good for which they were established. When it comes to survival, reproduction and the fulfillment of one’s self, a subjective, self-referring ethics is adequate: this explains the appearance of concepts such as “freedom of conscience”. But when the issue is living together and promoting one form or another of “common good”, then ethics must be truly objective, i.e. based on impartial foundations which can be verified anytime, anywhere.

A new ethics will not protect us from scammers; they will always be around. It is our role and that of the authorities to implement protective legislation and systems. But the problem lies elsewhere. A good con artist like Bernard Madoff caused damages amounting to several billion dollars, while recent stock market losses – to say nothing of the job losses, the looting of resources and the tremendous rise in inequalities and other imbalances – caused by institutional misconceptions have proven a thousand fold more significant. It is therefore at the level of national and international institutions that problems are most acute. While medicine has a long and well established ethical tradition at the heart of its thinking, neither the economy nor the finance, or politics have made ethics a cornerstone of their programs; their references are mostly ideological and ideologies are fragile. We have seen the collapse oof communism and now we are observing neoliberalism bending under the weight of its own excesses.

When new technological challenges appeared doctors, biologists, geneticists and philosophers have established bioethics to guide their actions. With the advent of financial mathematics neither Governments, nor bankers or the quantitative analysts have elevated their thinking to the level of ethics. Most were trapped in a deterministic vision of the world where the individual and its self-centeredness is King and where natural selection favors the strong over the weak. With this vision the strong did not need ethics. Ethics was good for the weak. However, privileges are sometimes overthrown and the strong are brought low when they encounter stronger than them. Then they spontaneously demand more fairness, better justice!

We should be able to offer these institutions a simple and flexible framework to guide their activities towards the common good.

An objective, universal ethics would allow legislators and other regulators to look at certain fundamental principles before enacting laws and regulations. It would also allow citizens to keep an eye on these institutions by providing simple but reliable benchmarks.

Let us consider, for example, the World Trade Organization, which has no ethical charter and whose the decisions have affected the lives of billions of people. How could the 154 negotiators agree on a common referential system if each one had proposed its own ethical vision? Which one could have been chosen? Faced with such an abundance of proposals, it was impossible to settle on one choice, and negotiators were content with bargaining, i.e. negotiating the resolution of the many problems of the time: market access, subsidies, competition, conflict resolution, etc. Each negotiator referred to its own ethics and we can see that, in this specific case, “Too many ethics kill Ethics!”

After over a decade of globalization, the WTO still has no consistent, reliable code of ethics to govern its negotiations. Admittedly, it claims certain principles as its own, such as embracing transparency and non-discrimination between domestic production and imports, prohibiting dumping, and restrictive measures on trade and regulatory subsidies. Unfortunately these principles are not enough to constitute a dependable ethical system.

In the financial world, where the need for new regulations has become imperative, promoting the values which were violated is not sufficient; we must also discover core values, and fight against those myths which persist even today, such as “let it be: the market is fair, it will fix all of this for you”, or “Companies have no other social responsibility than maximizing their profits.”

The consequences of this moral void are obvious: commercial and financial imbalances, rising inequalities, the loss of solidarity, unfair trade and irresponsibility all reflect the errors of commercial, financial and economic theories. Given the magnitude of the problems our societies face now, both critics and proposals arise from all sides, and confusion reigns. Some offer technical solutions, others turn philosophy or religion for answers, while others still seek whom to blame and are paralyzed.

So what can we do if we wish to do some good? From my point of view, the first step is establishing a reliable referential system.