SmilingGengar
SmilingGengar t1_ja8ly53 wrote
Reply to Universal ethics/basic law for all people & global moral education: A new way to sustainability and peace? by fortin1984
The problem here is that there are irreconcilable divisions among people with regards to the ontological foundations for what is considered good. Some people derive their ethics from an essentialist or teleological understanding of the world, while another subset of people believes ethics is derived from measurement of utility, and other believes ethics are nothing more than expressions of personal preferences (emotivism), etc. If we cannot even agree on what makes something ethical in the first place, then I doubt we would be able to establish an effective universal curriculum to teach what is ethical.
That said, maybe an alternate way to approach this proposal would be to simply create a council comprised of moral philosophers representing each ethical perspective. Nations would submit ethical issues that would be accepted or denied by the council. If accepted into the docket, members would simply write opinions on ethical issues submitted by nations. The opinions would be non-binding, but nations would be obligated as part of submitting the request to provide a response to the opinion in terms of how they plan to action on recommendations.
SmilingGengar t1_ja9gr1x wrote
Reply to comment by gobbo in Universal ethics/basic law for all people & global moral education: A new way to sustainability and peace? by fortin1984
I cannot deny that there is an upward trend towards universal alignment on some goods. The tricky part is making sure we don't equate universal agreement on what is good with what is good and so ought to be universally agreed to. If we reduce universal morality to just consensus without clearly defining what the good is, we could see universal agreement around things that may not actually be good in the future, especially if there is a reversal of democratization, access to education, and higher standards of living that contribute to certain goods being adopted over others.