74 Global Ethics for Leadership
(f) in ecology, an assemblage of interacting populations occupying a
particular habitat.
Owing to ambiguity and vagueness of some English verbs, nouns
and adjectives, engagement in precise and concise discourse in matters
of ethics and morals is often difficult. If someone simultaneously be-
longs to a kinship “community”; a professional “community”; an ideo-
logical “community”; a Religious “community”- of what use is the word
“community” when discussing Applied Ethics? If some people belong to
the first “world” and others to the third “world”; some to the developed
“world” and others to the developing “world”; some to the developed
“world” and others to the under-developed “world”- what sensible
meaning can be associated with the noun “world”? Yet, in scholarly
discourse these phrases are taken for granted without hesitation. On this
point, Professor Robert Chambers titles one of his books Whose Reality
Counts?^37 Too often, discourses on Ethics become abstract and theoreti-
cal, leaving room for avoidance of moral responsibility. Postmodernism
is one of the outcomes of this vagueness and ambiguity. It is a variant of
“modernism”, without identifiable content. Deconstruction is a variant
of construction, but it is neither construction, nor destruction, nor recon-
struction. Cultivating a sense of community is impossible in a society
where individualism is normative. If the individual is supreme for the
Euro-American Ethos, community is supreme for the African ethos. This
remark may be an over-simplification of the notion of identity across
cultures. Yet it seems tenable.
5.3 Humans as Communal Beings
Biologically, humans belong to the category of mammals called pri-
mates, including apes, baboons, chimpanzees and monkeys. In compari-
son with these other primates the limbs of humans are least agile, but the
37
London: ITDG, 1997.