From: J. Hughes (jhughes@changesurfer.com)
Date: Sun Dec 01 2002 - 15:25:40 MST
My favorite ethicist on globalization:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/01/books/review/01MARTINT.html?tntemail0=
&pagewanted=print&position=top
December 1, 2002
'One World': The Moral and Practical Challenges of Globalization
By ANDRES MARTINEZ
Close your eyes and picture your community. Whom do you see? Your
family, surely. Work colleagues? Everyone who shares your area code?
Your religion? All Americans? Folks in Afghanistan? Unless we start
answering yes to all of the above, we're in for big trouble.
That's the message of Peter Singer's timely and thoughtful book, ''One
World: The Ethics of Globalization.'' A professor of bioethics at
Princeton University and one of the most provocative philosophers of our
time, Singer writes, ''How well we come through the era of globalization
(perhaps whether we come through it at all) will depend on how we
respond ethically to the idea that we live in one world.''
''One World'' is a manual for elaborating this response. Singer's
recipes are at once simple and elusive: we need to do more as
individuals to alleviate the plight of the world's poor, and the world
needs more effective global governing bodies to establish protections
like meaningful labor and environmental standards.
The United States, Singer says, often stands as an obstacle to
humanity's quest to embrace the idea of one world. As a proportion of
national wealth, American foreign aid is the skimpiest among rich
countries. We constantly refuse to pay our United Nations bills. We have
failed to join, and are busy trying to undermine, the new International
Criminal Court, as well as global efforts to crack down on pollution and
end discrimination against women.
Ignorance may be our best defense. How many Americans understand the
extent to which their country, especially during the Bush presidency,
strives to undermine collective action on a number of fronts? Surveys,
Singer reminds us, have shown that Americans wrongly believe that some
20 percent of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. A majority of
respondents would like to see foreign aid's slice of the pie ''reduced''
to 10 percent. Of course, that would amount to a more than tenfold
increase in Washington's development assistance.
''One World'' opens with an analogy between terrorists who fly planes
into skyscrapers and drivers of sport utility vehicles who engage in
less deliberate killing by contributing to global warming. But that is
more a tease than a sign of things of things to come. As globalization
polemics go, the book is rather restrained. More than a rant, it is a
stimulating tour of the moral and practical challenges posed by the
world's accelerating contraction.
There is plenty here to encourage either side of the globalization
debate. Singer serves up many of the same criticisms of the World Trade
Organization that protesters at international gatherings chant about.
Yet throughout, he seems to believe that globalization, if only we could
regulate it properly, offers humanity its best hope. His is a study of
how, not whether, to embrace globalization.
In chapters dedicated to the environment, trade, the evolution of
international law and foreign aid, Singer grapples with globalization's
thorniest questions. Among them: to what extent must political leaders
look beyond their direct constituents and act out of a concern for the
welfare of people everywhere? And here's one that's well timed: when may
a state that is not itself under attack go to war?
''One World'' contains far more statistical analysis than one might
expect from a volume on ethics. But there is a refreshing intellectual
integrity in Singer's efforts to assess the facts on the ground, as when
he writes, ''No evidence that I have found enables me to form a clear
view about the overall impact of economic globalization on the poor.''
Singer is equally perplexed about contradictory indications on whether
global inequality is on the rise. At times, though, his exhaustive
surveying of others' research can become tedious -- as if he feels the
need to show he's done his homework.
Singer is a calculating ethicist. He applauds Kofi Annan's doctrine of
humanitarian intervention, arguing that sovereignty considerations
should not prevent the international community from intervening to
protect people from their own governments. But, he says, it would have
been foolish to try to protect Chechnya from Russia, or Tibet from
China. Costs must always be calculated when deciding whether to do
something potentially beneficial.
Singer's sense of realpolitik is more contrived when he writes that the
war on terrorism has turned America's need to embrace altruism into a
strategic imperative. This reads much like the spinning of an author who
got a call from his editor on Sept. 12 demanding a new introduction. To
argue that the terrorist attacks made the hardship of distant villagers
a national security issue is to disregard the fact that much of
America's development assistance during the cold war was conceived as
part of the effort to contain Communism -- often with disastrous results
for villagers.
The book's strongest chapter is undoubtedly ''One Atmosphere.'' It is,
at one level, a primer on global efforts to contain greenhouse gas
emissions, and it concludes with Singer's well-reasoned call for
granting nations, based on their projected population in 2050, a fixed
entitlement to the amount of emissions they can produce. Singer's plan
envisions the trading of polluting rights, along the lines established
domestically by the 1990 Clean Air Act.
The chapter on trade is less satisfying. Not only does Singer dwell on a
number of past disputes (including some that even he concedes are a bit
dated), but he fails to confront some of the issues that are most
outrageous from a moral perspective, like the hypocritical agricultural
subsidies in Europe and America and their dire consequences for poor
nations.
The pressing challenge for the new century, in Singer's view, is the
creation of a truly democratic global government, and by this he
emphatically does not mean federalism of the type that grants all
countries one vote, with the powerful ones having a veto. A lamentable
shortcoming of ''One World'' is its failure to dwell more on the
experience of the European Union in this and other areas. The union, a
trading bloc that has evolved into a formidable transnational regulator,
is the one cutting-edge research lab for many of Singer's core issues,
especially the need to subjugate national interests to the welfare of a
broader community.
Andres Martinez writes editorials for The Times.
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