Concurrent Session 4b: International Dimensions of Moral Responsibility 

Chair: Anya Topolski (Eindhoven University of Technology)

Moral Responsibility in Conflicts. Justice as a Basis of International Relations

Olga Potapova
Faculty of Philosophy
State University – Higher School of Economics
Moscow, Russia

Contemporary international relations can be described as a permanently changeable system. Appearance of new actors and new global problems inevitably lead to transformation of traditional institutions. International society faces lack of institutions, norms and mechanisms which can regulate it in a proper way and correspond to new reality. Thus I suppose that we can turn to principles of ethics and use them in international sphere.

The aim of my investigation is to verify the assumption that international justice as ethical category can give us fundamental norms and rules to form international system in a way of human rights respect and orientation to individual’s interests.

One of the most disputable issues of contemporary world conflicts is a problem of humanitarian intervention. There is a necessity to study various approaches to intervention and set out some standards for its realization. It is important to keep the balance between state sovereignty and human life protection. The best way is to realize moral basis of humanitarian intervention. 

I assume as a basis conception of the “law of peoples” stated by John Rawls in his recent works. Rawls inter alia gives us guide lines for conducting of just wars. I try to show my view of rawlsian conception studying case of Russian-Georgian intervention in 2008.

Western Modernity, the Environment and Human Oppression:  An African Perspective

Michael Cloete
Department of Philosophy
University of South Africa
South Africa

The possibility of determining the value of human actions in terms of moral obligations and responsibility has provided the normative foundation for the justification of just about every human society throughout history. The normative foundation of Western modernity has been the ontological assumption of a universal human subject, viewed as the foundational frame of reference for the understanding and justification of modern forms of rationality, especially in the areas of ethical and scientific thinking. 

From an historical perspective, however, western modernity has betrayed the universalistic significance of its own normative foundations by “re –presenting” the project of modernity as a project of colonial conquest, enslavement and domination of the African human subject.The colonial project of modernity has sought to legitimate its conquest of the African “other” with Eurocentric claims of cultural superiority and racism, on the one hand, and radical doubt regarding the ability of “African mind” to think philosophically, on the other hand - all of which flies in the face of the African philosophical tradition of humanism.  

Many thinkers have argued that Africa’s postcolonial legacy of human suffering, poverty and poverty-related diseases, environmental degradation, can best be addressed by modern science and technology, and under the guidance of the neoliberal economic-political imperatives of global capitalism, thereby disregarding the devastating effects of these modernizing projects on the African human and natural environments.

In this paper I argue that global restructuring must be guided by the moral and historical imperative of reframing the question of our (common) human-being in-the-world as the precondition for understanding our moral responsibility towards the “other”.

Moral Responsibility and Cynicism: Epistemical Considerations Regarding an Oath for 'Responsible Managers'

Dirk Jos Leys
Center for Ethics and Value inquiry
Ghent University
Ghent, Belgium

We understand moral responsibility to be concerned with acts by individuals and its content to differ pending on whether it refers to the a priori or a posteriori situation. Moral responsibility before the act is solely in the mind of the agent, yet it can be checked and valuated.  Afterwards, the epistemic features alter radically: moral responsiblity is construed, attributed and executed by others. We apply this epistemic approach to a particular moral phenomenon in the wake of the Financial Crisis, namely the launch and rewriting of an "Oath for "Responsible Managers".  We analyse the moral discourse that preceeded it and we scrutinize the speech acts that are in it.  We find that the endeavour is preponderantly influenced by a mistaken attribution rather than by morally responsible initiative on the part of the authors of the Oath.  In fact, the epistemical analysis yields that they are either morally incompetent or outright cynics.  Both possibilities imply that this project for "responsbible managers" should be treated with the highest scepsis if not kunically dismissed altogether. Either way, signatories of the Oath disqualify for occupying managerial positions.