Global Ethics for Leadership

32 Global Ethics for Leadership

2.5 Six Models of Global Ethics

Global Ethics in praxis can be observed in six different types as
the following table shows.

Model Description Examples

1 Domination ‘We have the truth’^ one

model is valid for all

Some religious ethics

2 Confrontation ‘You or me’: Clash of

Civilisations

Fundamentalisms

3 Syncretisation ‘All are the same’: Forget

the differences

Mystic ethics, new age

4 Contextualisa-

tion

‘Global values adapted to

my context’

Islamic Banking in my

country

5 Regionalisation ‘We have the same values

in our region’

‘Asian Values’
‘African Culture’
6 Glocalisation ‘Think global, act local’^ Global Climate Justice,
local energy saving
Global Ethics leads to domination when it leads to claiming absolute
truths (Domination Model). It can still be tolerant if it claims ‘truth for
me’ and tolerates that others may believe another truths for themselves.
If domination is combined with exclusion, it leads to confrontation and
conflict (Confrontation model) where ‘only me/we’ is valid leaving no
space for other values and attitudes. The opposite of confrontation is
Syncretisation (model 3). Diversity is integrated and amalgamated to
one so that differences are no longer relevant. This is the case on mysti-
cal traditions which exist in all world religions and concentrate on the
same “ground water” of common values. Model 4 combines global val-
ues with their contextualisation. E.g. justice is accepted as human global
value but distributive justice or gender justice may be implemented dif-
ferently in different contexts. Model 5 became more and more popular
since the last decade of the 20th century with Asian Values (starting from
Malaysia), European Values (mainly used by conservative parties
against Islam), African Values (used mainly for the Pan-African vision).
Regionalisation of values is often linked with a political agenda of
strengthening the identity of a geographical or cultural entity against