80 Ethics in Higher Education: Values-driven Leaders for the Future
those in multi-cultural societies, as most now are. The problem is a
growing concern that humanity’s morality (a word used interchangeably
with ethics) is losing ground in the struggles against violence, greed,
discrimination and other evils.
The problem can be stated as follows. On a planet facing the serious
world-wide crises mentioned above, the moral domain comprises a large
number of separate, culturally embedded ethical traditions with
important similarities but also important differences, many but by no
means all being part of the world’s multitude of religions. Using Lloyd
Geering’s helpful and instructive typology (Geering 2014: 17-18) we
have the many surviving forms of ethnic morality – the kind that was
once the world’s only kind - such as traditional Zulu or Maori morality;
we have what Geering calls the trans-ethnic moralities associated with
the so-called great world religions that originated in India, China and the
Middle East from about 2500 years ago, and we have the moves towards
more inclusive, modern kinds of morality like the human rights
movement that began about 300 years ago.
We can thus think of the world as a place of distinct and disunited
moral provinces but no consciously shared, fully inclusive global ethic,
inviting the belief that humanity’s moral development has not kept up
with the rise of a technological, global civilization beset by worsening
world-wide problems. In this situation the opportunity exists to bring
together two powerful forces to counter those problems: the global
ethics movement and the contemporary, multi-cultural university,
exactly as envisaged by Whitehead’s view of the university, in quest of a
multi-culturally created global ethic.
5.2 The Global Ethics Movement
The term “global ethics movement” can be taken to refer to a number
of attempts at arriving at a set of ethical values that could be accepted