Thursday Seminar by Gaston Meskens
The Possibility of Global Governance
An ethics of care for our contemporary coexistence.
Abstract
The Possibility of Global Governance is a reflective exercise in the applied philosophy of ethics, and to some extent also in the poetics of ethics. My aim is to present a normative ethics idea open for reflection and discussion, namely that the possibility of fair and effective global governance should be perceived from out of an ethics of care perspective – caring for human relationships in making sense of the complexity of complex problems – and that this possibility becomes ‘unlocked’ and enabled with the realisation of methods of politics, science and education that would allow a fair dealing with the complexity that binds us, inspired and motivated by that ethics of care perspective. These methods can be characterised as deliberative democracy as a collective reflection and learning process, transdisciplinary and participatory scientific research and policy advice and education for a reflexive cosmopolitanism.
The idea is that these advanced methods of democracy, scientific research and education together do hold that ‘possibility’: they make our global connectedness in complexity ‘visible’ and are at the same time inspired by it; they stimulate our sense of social and political engagement and at the same time make that engagement practically possible; they take into account the vulnerability of the specific roles we take on and assign to each other in society but at the same time provide the possibility to take our responsibility in those roles … Some proposed aspects of this ‘advanced’ method of global governance are realistic or do even exist already today in some fragmented or ‘light’ form or policy ambition, as it is the case with transdisciplinarity in scientific policy advice or local public participation in decision making. Others are plainly utopian in terms of their possible realisation in the current situation, like global deliberative democracy or the relativisation of the sovereignty of the nation state in global (international) politics.
Obviously it would be naive to think that a positive narrative of care ethics for global governance could lead directly to concrete changes for the better. One can understand that most protagonists of political power in the politics of today have little desire to enter into dialogue about the justification of their power, as they see it as legitimised by the traditional political systems in which they operate. The initiative for advanced thinking about global governance will have to come from people who, in solidarity and inspired and motivated by an ethics of care vision such as the one proposed here, want to draw closer to engage in dialogue about the workings of politics, science, the market and education. The avant-garde of their solidarity lies in their willingness to see our coexistence not as a cynical society of conflict and competition, but as a society that, today more than ever, is characterised by our connectedness in complexity, by our sense of engagement in reflection and deliberation to give meaning to it, and by the recognition of the vulnerability of our roles that we assign to each other in the process. The idea of ‘cosmopolitanism as capability’ will be foundational in this vision. Only when we are prepared to reflect on our own position and behaviour ‘in that whole world of concern’ will we be able to see all other people as being of equal moral standing, simply because then we will not only see them as having equal moral standing in their own right, but because we can then consider them as also having an equal right to act upon a moral responsibility.