Ethics, Leadership and Global Citizenship

When I first read the texts and watched the video provided at Moodle of this block I have just remembered that I did a course (Computers, Ethics and Society) in my University that we have studied exactly the same subject.

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What is the meaning of Ethics?

According to the Oxford Dictionaries the word Ethics is defined by: 

''Ethics means the moral principles that govern a person's behavior or the conducting of an activity.''

From my point of view, Ethics means the group of behavior and attitudes that a person has to follow in order to live in a community and it also help to maintain the social order. In other words, ethics can be consider as the reflection about the values of the social actions in a group and individual way.

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Ethics and moral, both can be related to two kind of conducts that are the Right and the Wrong.

When you think about the social actions in group or in an individual way it is always going to be two choices, one that is the right decision that comes with ethics and the one that is the wrong decision and it will come without any principle of ethics. Generally, the second choice also come with future problems. When you do something without ethics you are probably crossing the rights of someone else.

It is possible to rank many principles of ethics, however ethics can be really broad and also have different principles for specifics areas. For instance, each kind of work have their own ethics principles. I would say that one ethic principle that could be apply for every area in the world is the one that say about the respect between each other. For instance, your right finish when the right of someone starts. It means that we need to be respectful with each other. Furthermore, we also can point out some principles of ethic among the nature and environment such as the respect about our natural resources that can lead to the sustainability.

What is the difference between Ethics and Moral?

Ethics is the rules related to something in special (e.g. profession) for maintain the social order. Moral is the own rules that each one have inside their minds, in other words, their own principles to act. 

Ethics and the Global Citizenship

In the block 3 of the Summer Course, we have studied some texts that were about NGO's (non-governmental organizations), Loyalty, cultural beliefs and time (TED video), cross-cultural awareness and globally competency. First of all, we can easily point out that all of them can be discussed in terms of Ethics. Manly, the text about loyalty (see http://theconversation.com/kids-and-divided-loyalties-what-we-can-learn-from-the-sydney-riots-9662) can be consider as the most questionable. When we talk about loyalty we are also talking about culture. For instance, the author of that text point out that the loyalty can be rank in a hierarchy way where the family comes in the first stair. What happen when the loyalty comes before the Ethics? This is a question that is hard to answer, because it is always possible to refute saying that the Ethics could be changed by the culture. For example, in my country we eat some animals that in another part of the world could be seem as a non-ethical action. Furthermore, how can we say what the truth about the ethics is in regards to the global citizen? I would say that the global citizen should focus on the global ethics that involve the human rights and the respect by each other and also for the nature. Moreover, Guillaume Gevrey do a comparison of the time. He helped people to cross cultures. He also point out the difference about how each individual perceive the time. In the Hindu representation, the time is infinite, it means that it never stops. In the Judeo-Christian representation the time has the right starting and the end, which is in the apocalypse, it means that the time is finite.

What is the relation between Ethics, Leadership and Global Citizenship?

To be a global citizen you must have ethics principles in your mind. For example, the global citizen care about the environment and also about the humanitarian subjects, both of them must be worked with ethics to be sure that it is going to be a useful change in the world. The behavior of a global citizen is also an important thing, because he needs to be aware that there are global ethics and morals. The respect about the human rights and the culture are essential behaviors. The leadership with ethics make the work much fairer and the actions probably will be much more related to the way that the global citizenship work about.

We can also say that the principles of ethics and morals (manly western) are becoming globalized. However, it can lead to problems related to cultural genocide that is when one culture imposes the ethics and morals upon another culture.

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Examples positives and negatives of universal ethics and moral order.

From my point of view, I think that the universal ethics and moral order can help a lot the global community. For example, the poverty intervention realized in global scale in order to help to stop the starving in poor communities around the world. Moreover, as I point out before, there are also the NGO's that can keep the focus on social problems such as violence, poverty, healthcare, humanitarism, etc. Some NGO's can be consider as international aid, because they have a broad area of work and huge investments. The spreading of the human rights and the institutions that make it works can be consider as a positive point as well.

However, there are also some negatives point of the spreading of universal ethics and moral order. For example, even though the NGO's are helpful for many people, there are also a lot of problems related to the funds that should be used in those NGO's that are receiving a lot of money, but not spending the same amount in what they should. Some of them are well-known as 'money wash machine', it means that they are created just to have a reason to explain the money that someone have.

Furthermore, with the globalization of the ethics and moral order, some cultures are being overwritten by other cultures, and this is not really fair. The western culture has been the strongest one and it does not make some countries happier.