362 Global Ethics for Leadership
of collective opinions, which ends in marginalization of long-term de-
velopment strategy. Secondly, it is difficult to realize perfect democratic
ideas when it comes to action. John Stuart Mill strongly defends the
freedom of expression by each and every individual; censorship in an
attempt to silence any opinion is morally wrong. But he in the mean-
while makes a clear difference between words and action: actions cannot
be as free as ideas or viewpoints, and the law must limit all actions
whose implementation would harm others or be an outright nuisance.
In China, there is this classical view of leadership under the Confu-
cius doctrine as “self-cultivation, family harmony, state administration
and world pacification”, in which only the definition of “family” can be
seen more or less as an organisation. Therefore, there are two distinct
characteristics of depiction of leadership. For one thing, the wordings
are magnificent and vehement (the results of having intellectuals in offi-
cialdom). For another, the remarks are politic and general. The reason
behind this is that traditional leaders had more imperial power to wield
than representing or managing interests of local citizens and members in
a certain organisation. However, “world” is an abstract concept that only
is meaningful to emperor because in reality the society is composed of
numerous interest groups which might be called as organisations. They
could be government department, for-profit companies and non-profit
institutions. Moral judgment is seriously subjective since they are often
the product of social recognition within a confined circle, which have
both social universality and particularity of organisations. The universal-
ity results from organisations communicating with each other while par-
ticularity stems from difference in history, culture and circumstances
from other organisations. The inverse relationship between common
aspiration of organisation members for interests and the cost to gain the
interests decides the power of moral leadership. Generalization of re-
sponsibility of the leaders will undermine their trust and loyalty to a
defined organisation, posing challenge to professional ethics. In this