Globalization and
Justice
New
Horizons for Moral Theology
By
Enrico Chiavacci
(Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church: The Plenary Papers
from th3 First Cross-cultural Conference on Catholic Theological Ethics, edited
by James Keenan, pp. 239-244)
“Globalization” is a new term with two different meanings: a new technological possibility and a de facto structural reality in the life
of the human family as a whole.
A new possibility: from the 1970s onward, new technologies, silicon
transmitters and electronics, have wholly eliminated space and time in the communications between human beings,
whether individuals or groups, and this development is not yet finished – the
widespread diffusion of the Internet is only a few years old. Besides this, the
physical contact between people from
remote regions is possible today at low cost and in a short time, but this
began only in the 1970s with the introduction of “wide body” aircraft: in the
1950s, it took seven days to travel by ship from Europe to the United States,
but today it takes seven hours in a tourist-class plane. We must add to this
the massive emigration of people who flee misery and famine with every
clandestine means to their destination. Finally, today’s ships have a capacity
of 8,000 containers, so that the international transport of goods has very low costs per unit. This means that it
costs more or less the same to purchase an item in the neighboring city or at
the antipodes of the earth. The ideal of the “unity of the human family” -- and
the “human family” is itself a new term in juridical documents – which was
proposed by the documents of the United Nations and by the encyclical Pacem in terris is no longer purely
utopian but a concrete reality.
A structural reality: today, globalization means de facto an almost
complete domination and control by very small public and private groups with
economic or political interests. The political interests in developed countries
are controlled by powerful groups with economic interests. In the poor
countries, the governments are dominated, controlled, or blackmailed by
governments of the rich countries, while it is impossible for the frequent
cases of corruption to be subjected to democratic controls, since the people
are uneducated and have no independent means of communication, nor any
possibility of joining forces with others and of organizing and mobilizing. On
the technical level, the increasing concentration of immense amounts of capital
is made necessary by the costs of research, development, and marketing of
complex goods such as the media or transport systems. (For example, in the
United States there were three producers of big civil aircraft, McDonnell
Douglas, Boeing, and Lockheed, but Boeing is the only one left, since it bought
up McDonnell Douglas a few years ago and Lockheed now produces only military
planes.) Such a concentration is doubtless necessary. The problems is due to
the concentration in private hands
(e.g., of corporations or multinationals) because of financial interests that
are exclusively private and aim only at the maximization of profit,
irrespective of the human or environmental costs. Is this necessary, or indeed inevitable?
II
Moral theology, and social ethics in particular, must proclaim the
supreme commandment of love (caritas).
Thus, the virtue of justice too is --- and
must be --- nothing else than the virtue of charity applied to any form of
organized societal existence, such as the forms of social life in the various
cultural spheres and epochs of the past and the present. This is the
fundamental idea of the bonum commune,
the “common good,” which is typical of the entire Catholic moral tradition.1 In the West, where all the classical texts of
Catholic moral theology have their origin, the dominant structure from the
sixteenth century onward has been the sovereign national state, a structure
that was exported by colonialism and imposed on a large part of the world. We
may recall, for example, the absurdity of the borders imposed by the various
colonial countries on Africa or the Middle East, borders sketched at a drawing
board by the colonial powers without any correspondence to the social realities
that existed on the ground. Throughout the twentieth century, the common good
was (and still is) envisaged as the task of the governments of the individual
sovereign states, and even the United Nations was born and structured as a sum
of states and a pact between states.
Nevertheless, it is precisely in the two foundational texts of the
United Nations, the 1945 Charter and
the 1948 Universal Declaration, that
we find the completely new idea of the “human family,” which is generated by
the central idea that every human being ought to have the same essential rights
everywhere on earth.2 The
limited possibilities of communication prior to the advent of the new
technologies, and the safeguarding of the traditions and rights of the
individual states, have not allowed a broadening of this vision to include the
human family in its unity – and this judgment applies to Catholic moral
theology as well. Today, however,
traditional moral theology must come to terms with two new realities.
First, academic discourse has left behind the old cultural
anthropology with its central idea that Western culture was the only true
culture (or at least, the most advanced culture) for the construction of the
human family. In a similar way, the claims made on behalf of the theology that
has been elaborated in the West must be relativized; see the splendid analysis
by Benezet Bujo.3
Second, the new technological possibilities offer the potential for
active involvement to make the world a spatium
verae fraternitatis, (a space of true
solidarity) to borrow the phrase of Gaudium
et Spes. The conciliar text speaks
explicitly of the birth of a new
multicultural humanism,4
something that was in fact announced by all the texts in the New
Testament.
III
All this demands an approach to the subject of “justice” that is
radically different from what we find in all texts of moral theology, including
those of the magisterium, in the last four centuries – an approach that still
prevails today. It is not a new approach: it is already present in the Gospel,
in all the fathers of the church,5
and in St. Thomas. For example, the notion of private property (aliud quasi proprium possidere) in
Thomas and the fathers is limited by the essential needs of the poor: if
(Thomas writes: sit amen) the one who possesses does not give, the poor person
who takes what is necessary is not a thief, because he is taking what is already his own.6 A dust in your cupboard are not yours; they
belong to the poor.
The profound transformation of economic and financial life between the
fourteenth and sixteenth century7 (our checkbook was born near
Florence in the fifteenth century) and above all the doctrine of John Locke
about the innate right to property8 generated the doctrine that
everything that I have legitimately acquired is sacred and inviolable. It may
sometimes be a duty of charity to
give to the poor, but never a duty of justice.9 In the United States, “charity” means
“benevolent goodwill or generosity,”10 and charity/love is generally considered as
something separate from justice. This is reflected both in philosophy and in
political praxis. Nor is this all. Today, personal wealth (even if the amount
is modest) is regarded as a means of production of even more personal wealth,
and so on, ad infinitum. For the New
Testament, this is real idolatry.
Contemporary moral theology has the duty to overthrow this way of thinking.
Attention and care for every human person: these are the very essence of
justice. It is a strict duty of justice incumbent on the national and
international institutions, as well as on the individual members of this global
community, to ensure that every human being has the basic conditions necessary
for a life that is truly human: food, a place to live, health care, and
schooling.
IV
Justice, however, is not only an economic theme.11 We must give our neighbor not only money, but
also attention, time, and more important forms of solidarity, especially the
equality in dignity of every human being. This means respect for the different
cultures, an equal respect and treatment of the rich and the poor, respect and
support for all the disabled, etc. Xenophobia, racism, workhouses that recall
Dicken’s Oliver Twist and are still
exceedingly common today in the United States and in Italy –all these are
symptoms of the individualism and egoism of individuals and of groups, as I
have mentioned above.
The moral theologian faces deeper problems in connection with the
theme of globalization and justice. Let me mention three that seem to me to be
inescapable.
First, every human being is born and develops in a given societal
framework with its cultural conditioning. No ne is born and develops in a
vacuum. Accordingly, the attitude that one takes toward one’s neighbor is one –
or indeed the – basic question for a
moral life. I believe that fundamental problems of the “social” dimension do
not form part of applied ethics but of fundamental ethics. The basic decision
is how I include my neighbor in my project for a good life: I can consider my
neighbor as a help or a hindrance to my project, or else I can consider my
neighbor as an essential part (a goal) of my project. I do not believe that is
is possible to arrive at this decision by a process of rational deduction:12
it must be considered a primum ethicum.
For the Christian theologian, what is involved here is the call of God, the
supreme call to charity that is present in every conscience, both that of the
believer and that of the atheist, even if the latter does not know the author
of this call. This is the solemn affirmation of the council when it speaks of
the task of moral theology: to declare the sublimity of the human vocation in
Christ, namely, to bear fruit in charity of a principle that is absolute and
valid for every human being and can help in the construction of an ethic for
human family.
Second, it is also true that every human being is culturally
conditioned by a series of data that he or she unconsciously receives from
earliest infancy, and probably also by prenatal existence. These data are
imprinted on the unconscious or subconscious memory (in the shadowy zones”).
They include the various languages with all their nuances (a true translation is impossible: at most,
we may get an excellent interpretation), as well as the various systems of
social relationships (in family, politics, marriage, economics, and education).
These “data” are, in fact, structures, and one could define a culture as a
complex and coherent system of structures. This is why different cultures
inevitably produce different models of cooperation with other persons and
different concrete modes of behavior by means of which we express and live our
love and our service of others. It is clear that in the very recent epoch of
globalization, the continuous and massive contacts between various cultures are
leading to profound variations in every
cultural systems; but the stable principle that must be maintained is respect
for every culture.15
Third, we must bear in mind that each human being is an unrepeatable unicum.
Although each individual lives within his or her own cultural
conditioning, each has a biography of his own, made up of encounters, things
one has read, emotions, loves, and artistic experiences. In an epoch of globalization,
this element is expanding. Dante and Shakespeare are well known and read in
Japan, and in Iran, and they provide every reader (even if only unconsciously)
with food for reflection. Similarly, Western music is combined with African or
Asian music, and each one, whether performer or listener, “reads” this in the
light of his or her own unique sensitivity and personal experience. This means
that each human being must be welcomed and loved as e is, with his own culture
and his own biography.
In consequence, the intersection between a possible ethical decision
with foundations common to all persons and the diverse forms of living this
decision in concrete everyday reality constitute a very serious problem for
fundamental philosophical and theological moral discourse.16 Applied ethics must take up the practical
applications to the various spheres of social life (bioethics, nonviolence,
ecology, sexuality, etc.)
Conclusion
Contemporary globalization poses the dramatic problem of how we are to
live together as one single human family, with the same reciprocal love and
care for one another. This, in turn, implies a question: What conditions must
be met, if we are to live together in charity and justice, beyond all cultural
diversity, and what must be respected in all the diversity? Our race has lived
for hundreds of thousands of years on earth, but this is a completely new problem. The phenomenon of rapid and cheap movements
of persons en masse is not yet thirty
years old, and it is still developing in ever more complex forms – as yet, we
know little of the potential developments of nanotechnology and robots. This
means that the moral theologian must be patent! But his patience will attentive
and active, able to understand and to shed light on the difficult path that
each human person takes toward God. May the Lord help us poor moral
theologians!17
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