criteria that can prove the existence of moral rules that govern humans—such as the prohibition against murder. These criteria can be based in group happiness (in the case of utilitarianism) or in absolute duty that is grounded in reason or the nature of human action (in the case of deontology). The swing theories (virtue ethics and ethical intuitionism) require direct connection to a source of what is (such as God or Truth) to validate the virtue or the intuition. Without this connection to such a source, virtue ethics and ethical intuitionism revert to anti-realism.17
Sometimes the moral and the non-moral become confused. In these situations, one must refer back to the personal worldview imperative18 and the relevant theory of ethics that have been embraced in order to separate an ethical from a non-ethical practice.19 It is easy to be prejudicial against what is new or unfamiliar. When the unfamiliar is merely different and non-ethical, then the common body of knowledge must expand to accommodate it (legitimate cultural relativism). When the unfamiliar is immoral, then the common body of knowledge should give direction for the proper way to exclude such an input to the community (for example, Charles Manson’s killing cult).
The third criterion describes common traits shared by the personal worldview imperative: complete, coherent, and connected to a theory of good (social/political philosophy). As per our embrace of the common body of knowledge, these pivotal criteria allow the members of the community to evaluate new members to the community so that they might be accepted or not. New doesn’t necessarily mean bad.
The fourth criterion enjoins that the creation of social institutions occurs within the guidelines set out by the imperative. The way communities act is via the creation of institutions that represent the worldview of the micro or macro group. It is important that the institutions that are so created actually represent the sense of the shared worldviews of the group’s members. It is certainly possible for an institution to be created that loses its original mission and strays in the way that it operates. When this occurs, it is the community’s responsibility to put the institution back on course (revise it or eliminate it).
Finally, the last part of the imperative is an acceptance of the diversity of the community in terms of core values: ethics, aesthetics, and religion. The acceptance of diversity is very important. This is because autonomy will necessitate that there will be no “standard or ‘normal’ citizen.” There is not an essentialist template by which we can measure. On the contrary, people are different. Embracing these differences and allowing institutional space for them is morally and practically important. There is a limit to this acceptance—not any core values will do only those consistent with the personal worldview imperative (as per criteria two and three mentioned earlier). The default position in the shared community worldview imperative is that diversity is prima facie good and a healthy state of affairs for the micro or macro community. The burden of proof to the contrary is upon those who believe that such behavior is unethical.
It is the position of this author that these five aspects of the shared community worldview imperative lay the groundwork for ethical human communities that operate effectively for all their members (hoti, dioti, ei esti).
Second, the complementary theoretical construct is an imaginative construction that extends community membership to those beyond the conventional boundaries of our micro and macro groups.20 To intellectually grasp this aspect of community membership we need to import a new concept: the extended community. The extended community is one in which the agent is remotely connected. For example, I live in suburban Maryland just outside Washington, DC. I am a member of various micro communities (such as my college and various groups associated with my wife and children) and macro communities (such as my city, county, state, and nation). In each of these I have some direct or indirect contact that is proximate and tangible. I can go into the District of Columbia. I can write to my congressperson or senator. I can get into my car or travel via public transit directly to the physical domains of the state or national capital. Each of these is connected proximately to me through a tangible, operational, institutional structure that operates (in theory) under the principle of sovereignty set out above.
Now the extended community is a little different (hoti, dioti, ei esti). Even though I travel there by rail, sea, or air, I do not have immediate access. I must present a passport. I can be denied entrance. I have many fewer tangible institutional rights in the foreign country than I do at home. The foreign culture is different to my national culture. In some cases, I may be completely ignorant about its customs, government, and social circumstances. The media often makes it more difficult for me to find out facts on many foreign nations—particularly those that are poor and don’t seem to fit our perceived national interest. Because of these aspects of remoteness there may be a famine occurring in Mali or severe storm damage on one of the islands of Indonesia that many in the United States (for example) don’t even know about.
International ignorance is a large cause of international apathy. To address a background condition necessary for morality and global justice we must embrace a third sort of worldview imperative: the extended community worldview imperative:
Each agent must educate himself and others as much as they are able about the peoples of the world—their access to the basic goods of agency, their essential commonly held cultural values, and their governmental and institutional structures—in order that they might create a worldview that includes those of other nations so that individually and collectively the agent might accept the duties that ensue from those peoples’ legitimate rights claims, and to act accordingly within what is aspirationally possible.
The extended community worldview imperative (community extended throughout the world) has three principal parts. The first has to do with self and micro community education21 about the peoples of the world (hoti). This educational exercise should include important facts like geographical situation, political and institutional structures, and culture and how the people fare with respect to the basic goods of agency (see Chapter 3). This education process should be ongoing. The point is to allocate space in one’s consciousness and in the consciousness of those in your micro community to the existence and lives of others remote from you. Because this is an ethical imperative, obedience is not optional.
The second feature has to do with the way you incorporate others into your worldview (ei esti). Fulfilling this has to do with the operation of one’s imagination. The imagination is the power of the mind that makes real and integrates what is abstract into lived experience and vice versa. When one educates oneself about the lives of others, the imagination steps in and makes possible rational and emotional applications of the good will. Thus, one might possess enough (particularity via education and the imagination) that one could be able rationally to assess one’s duties in response to others’ valid rights claims. Also, one will be able to create fictive reconstructions of the people in these countries based upon intersubjective facts that one can create an extended style of sympathy. Normally sympathy requires two people in direct contact. In the extended variety, all that is needed is enough facts to generate an image of some typical person living in the country such that the vividness of their particularity will generate a constructed variety of the actual person-to-person contact of proximate sympathy. In this way, the rational and affective good will act together to exhort one to action on behalf of another.
The third feature refers to an action response (dioti). Those in other countries who have legitimate rights claims are entitled to our responding via our correlative duties. Ignorance of their plight does not absolve us from our responsibility. What often gets in the way is that we view those in the extended community as having their own society (that is viewed as the proximate provider of goods and services). Because our world is set up on the model of individual, sovereign states, it seems to many that each country should take care of its own. The community model offers some support to this analysis. However, in the end this sort of parochialism fails because the boundaries of states are not Natural facts but socially constructed conventions. Where one country ends and
