The Once and Future Global Ethics

Editors' note: This essay is part of the 2025 Global Ethics Day online exclusive roundtable from Ethics & International Affairs. View the whole collection here.

The Once and Future Global Ethics

Geopolitics and economic relations by themselves do not make a world order. Throughout history, ethics, too, has been a crucial component. Today, however, most analysts agree that the world is witnessing a growing deficit in global ethics. As Joel Rosenthal and Wendell Wallach put it in a 2022 coauthored essay for the Carnegie Council, “Ethics As We Know it is Gone.”¹ While it may seem like a consensus is building around this idea, there is no consensus on how to reenvision global ethics and develop new principles.

What is global ethics? In my view, global ethics is best seen not as a single or uniform moral code that is “one size fits all.” It is rather a set of principles that, despite their diverse origins and forms, are similar enough to leave room for a negotiated convergence. Within this convergence, I argue that the main elements that are imperiled today include human rights, humanitarian values (such as protection of non-combatants in conflict), norms against genocide and crimes against humanity, racial discrimination, and religious intolerance.

Due to the space constraints of this essay, I focus here on human rights and humanitarian values, but I add that in addition to the categories above, the personal ethics of world leaders and their regimes is a key component of global ethics, and has become ever more important today. This cuts across the democratic versus authoritarian or the West versus the Rest divide. History provides many examples of elected regimes committing atrocities or genocide (the worst example being Nazi Germany) while there are other notable examples of leaders who fit an authoritarian mold but who respected many ethical and moral norms (for example Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore). As the cases of the United States and Israel demonstrate, democracy is no guarantee of regime ethics; in fact, it can mask the ethical depravity of leaders and their governments.

To Build the Future, Look to the Past

How to repair and rebuild global ethics? In addressing this question, the West is likely to instinctively turn to its own constitutions, institutions, history, and traditions. Those in the West tend to reflexively believe that most of the core principles of global ethics originated in the Greco-Roman and Western European civilizations.

But global ethics, like world order, is not the monopoly of any single nation or civilization but a shared creation. To understand this perspective, global ethics should not be associated with the rise of “modernity,” because this neglects the importance of diverse ethical standards and texts that preceded this period. I agree with Rosenthal and Wallach that the “re-envisioning of ethics is certainly not a rejection of the past.” But any invocation of history should not just be the West’s own past, but our global cross-cultural past. At the same time, ethics is not “utopian,” a term whose Greek roots, as Rosenthal and Wallach remind us, mean “no place”—global ethics has always existed globally, across multiple civilizations and nations, well beyond ancient Greece or Rome or Europe, from which the West derives so much inspiration. In looking at sources of global ethics, whether for reviving old principles now under threat or developing new ones, it is out of this deep and broad well that one can draw truly “shared principles.”

For instance, across the world throughout several millennia ethical charters and laws governing peace and war were not only proclaimed, but respected. Here are a few examples:²

The Code of Manu, an Indian legal text dating back to two centuries before the Christian era, parts of which drew upon prevailing ethical norms in ancient India, stipulated that warriors may not harm soldiers who are asleep, who have surrendered, who are fleeing the battle, who are “disarmed,” whose weapons are broken, and who are “grievously wounded.” It also prohibited harming non-combatants, or any person “who looks on without taking part in the fight.”³ During the reign of King Ashoka of India’s Maurya dynasty (c. 268–232 BCE), after his victory in the Kalinga War (261 BCE), judicial protection was given to people who were “imprisoned, treated harshly and even killed without cause.” Magistrates were to ensure that such people “might not suffer unjust punishment or harsh treatment.”⁴ These rules were transparent, available to all public in writing and orally even a single person (for example those who could not read) could ask for it to be read to them, a kind of law on demand.⁵ These injunctions do not mean Indians had a peace gene, but they did represent practical ways to limit death and destruction when warfare was rampant. Later, the Christian Just War notion, and still later the Geneva Conventions, articulated such principles, but the Indian versions were more developed and comprehensive (and even included norms against use of poisonous weapons).

In the early thirteenth century CE, around the same time as England’s Magna Carta, Mali’s Kouroukan Fouga (Manden Charter) recognized a person’s right to life and physical integrity, and forbade acquisition of property except through “buying, donation, exchange, work and inheriting.”⁶ While the Magna Carta (which has been likened to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) is far more famous, it is noteworthy that it was implemented through the coercion of King John by the English nobility. As a result, it was soon nullified by the Pope, who sided with the king. Another contrast is that the Magna Carta benefited the landlords and further marginalized the peasants, while the Kouroukan Fouga was an act of legitimation by the chief of the tribe after winning the battle, and it benefited all his subjects, not just the ruler and his family.

In ancient China, Confucian thought regarded the personal morality of leaders and the ethical governance by the regimes they lead as indispensable requirements of stable and just governance and inter-state order. The Confucian concept of “governmental morality,” as Chinese scholar Yan Xuetong calls it, meant that a ruler must exercise “humane authority,” “restraint,” “non-use of force,” “mild force,” “justice,” “benevolence,” “gentleness,” “moral cultivation,” and benevolence. Ancient Confucian thought, as Yan sees it, also considers the “morality of leading a state,” “just war,” and “multilateralism” as part of the ethical code of inter-state relations.⁷ And the West—French, British, and later the Americans—borrowed from China the institution of a meritocratic public service recruited through competitive examinations that allowed no special favors to candidates from privileged classes. In the United States, it gradually complemented if not totally replaced the Spoils System, which was entirely based on patronage, party loyalty, and personal connections to the President, rather than on merit.⁸ Elements of that system survive today, but the regular or “permanent” rungs of civil service are recruited through competitive examinations, such as the Foreign Service examination, and civil service examination.

In North America, before the European intrusion, the tribes that made up the Iroquois Confederacy—Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora—developed a set of rules called “the Great Law of Peace,” which for five centuries regulated relations within and between the members on the basis of equality, disarmament, and peace. As Cadwallader Colden, the acting governor of New York in the 1760s and 70s wrote, the Iroquois “allow no kind of Superiority of one over another, and banish all Servitude from their Territories (sic).”⁹ Far from being subjugated, women played a major role in the economy, politics, and cultural life of these societies. Whether the confederacy served as an inspiration for the U.S. Constitution has been debated, although at least one leading figure in the creation of the American republic, Benjamin Franklin, exhorted the thirteen colonies to emulate the Iroquois “union” (as he called it), that “has subsisted for ages and appears indissolvable.”¹⁰ And in 1987 the U.S. Congress formally recognized the influence of the Iroquois on the democratic U.S. Constitution. Though the “founding fathers,” true to form, failed to emulate the status and rights of women granted by the Iroquois in their political system.

To be sure, historical texts and traditions seen in the modern context do present unsavory elements. For example, Manu’s code is seen today by some in India as having supported discrimination on the basis of caste and gender; while Confucianism has been criticized for sanctioning collectivism over individual rights. The Kouroukan Fouga called for the humane treatment of slaves but did not abolish slavery. But such limitations and contradictions can also be found aplenty in the West, as seen in the Magna Carta’s favoring the aristocracy over slaves, and do not warrant ignoring historical non-Western sources of global ethics.

Moreover, these examples of non-Western contributions to ethical standards that are now recognized as “modern” and “universal” are not limited to ancient or early modern periods. As I have documented in The Once and Future World Order, the newly independent nations of what is known today as the Global South played a major role in the development of the codification of human rights, including the drafting of the human rights principles in the UN Charter, the UDHR, and the human rights covenants, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, both adopted in 1966. They led the way in advancing global anti-colonial and anti-racism norms. African diplomats and leaders, such as Nelson Mandela, Francis Deng, Kofi Annan, and Mohamed Sahnoun, were leading voices and actors in developing the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) norm. Today, the African Union and subregional groups in Africa have emerged as the world’s leading actors in humanitarian peace operations outside the UN.

To be sure, developing ethical norms is not the same as upholding them in practice. Egregious violations of human rights have occurred and continue to occur in the Global South, a very politically, economically, and culturally diverse category comprising nations in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. But lest we forget, such violations only eased in the West in very recent times. And Global South nations have upheld ethical norms in critical times. Recently, for example, the majority of Global South nations have upheld the territorial integrity norm against Russia in its war with Ukraine in UN General Assembly votes. In Gaza, where the Global South nations have shown more ethical fortitude viewed against the Western nations’ timid, belated and, in the case of United States, enabling policies that allowed Israel to continue its attacks on Gaza despite horrific casualties.

No Moral Monopoly

We can see from the brief histories presented above that there is no nation or culture, or civilization that has a monopoly on the concepts that we currently attribute to some kind of global ethics, and that for those in the West this is particularly important to recognize given the tendency toward proclaiming intellectual and moral superiority. This leads us to a larger point: we not only live in an era where the conventional view of Western societies as more ethical than non-Western ones can no longer stand scrutiny, but also that, in the age of Trump, the West’s moral authority to preach human rights has been significantly compromised. The personal immorality of the leader in a major Western nation has been exposed, with very few other Western nations—including members of NATO or the EU— refusing to cooperate with the United States

With this, the West’s approach to promoting global ethics must change. For a long while, especially in the immediate aftermath of the end of the Cold War, the leading human rights advocacy groups, Western leaders, and other analysts told the world that key principles of global ethics—especially human rights, but also other humanitarian values, religious tolerance, and racial equality—are Western in origin and the rest of the world must follow them or face shaming and sanctions. A more credible and more effective approach would be to acknowledge that ethical ideas and principles have emerged in multiple locations, including in the non-Western world, as this essay shows. The idea that human rights are universal, yet mainly Western in origin—through the English Magna Carta, the French Revolution, and American Bill of Rights—is inherently contradictory.

We need to think past the “boomerang” approach to ethics promotion, whereby international NGOs respond to civil society NGOs in non-Western countries by persuading, or even pressuring, their governments to hit abusing regimes with sanctions.¹¹ Once thought to be a practical way of promoting human rights, it is no longer a viable approach on its own to promoting global ethics. An alternative approach would be what I have called the “Banyan approach,”¹² which ethics promotion should become more broad-based, aimed at empowering local, rather than foreign NGOs wherever possible to take ownership of human rights, multiculturalism, and universalism, and especially the protection of people in war and peace as part of the local NGO community’s own contributions to world order and thus the shared heritage of humankind.

We also need to discard narratives that equate the poverty of regime ethics with a lack of national or societal virtue. The personal ethics of leaders like Trump, Netanyahu, or Putin, should not be equated with those of the countries or societies they lead. There are two main reasons: first, because regimes change, whether through elections or revolutions; and second, in supposedly stable non-democratic states, leaders have effectively suppressed demands from members of these societies for more ethical values and policies at home and abroad, creating the illusion that these values lack broad support. The notion that “Chinese are autocratic” is just as problematic as “Americans are imperialistic,” because they stereotype and implicate entire nations of people in the abuses and atrocities committed by their leaders. Further, they can be counterproductive as they can generate nationalist sentiments in favor of those very leaders and regimes that suppress democratic and moral values. At the same time, blaming regimes and using targeted shaming and sanctions against those in power can be useful in encouraging domestic dissent against them.

Ethics Re-envisioned

Global ethics thus conceived could be the foundation for a “global multiplex” as a metaphor for a world order that draws norms and institutions from multiple civilizations yet allows for a negotiated convergence.¹³ Advocates of global ethics should recognize and respect diversity of principles and pathways. This does not mean accepting cultural relativism. It means calling for a dialogue to accentuate similarities, reconcile differences, and build shared principles and platforms. We must combine persuasion and pressure but minus coercive proselytization, double standards, and selective application. Such recognition will allow us to forge a new, re-envisioned global ethics, not only looking forward but also drawing on the rich global history of these ideas.

—Amitav Acharya

Amitav Acharya is Distinguished Professor and the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance at the School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC. His most recent book is The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West (New York and London: Basic Books, 2025). Aside from his academic writings, he has published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and The National Interest, among others and he has appeared on BBC, CNN, CBS News, CGTN, and Al-Jazeera

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