Beyond the Confines of Compliance and Virtue: Honing a Set of Global Ethics for South Africa and the United States of America

Abstract

Another practical frontier of ethics is global ethics which this article examines in terms of South Africa and the United States of America. Both nations wish to entrench ethics and ethical behaviour in their societies in general and their public sectors in particular. The author devoted special attention to the notion of a global ethic as a possible alternative approach to embedding ethical behaviour in the two countries. Notwithstanding the glaring differences between the USA and South Africa in terms of socioeconomic development, few can dispute the need for an ethical society in both nations. He argues that the proper yardstick to judge American and South Africa's morality will be, or should be, a global one, especially if South Africa, just as the USA, hopes to compete on a global scale for trade, investment, and other types of bilateral or multilateral agreements. There is a need for a trans-cultural corporate ethic which is a business and governmental ethic that is acceptable across the borders, traverses and transcends nations and nationalities. A huge development in post-apartheid South Africa is the focus on th global ethics that is a honing and refining of a set of “universal” ethics for the “new” South Africa (Hilliard and Kemp, 2000c). South Africa is now functioning and doing business in a global environment; since 1994 it has once more gained legitimacy in the international arena. In the wake of large-scale globalisation of all facets of human endeavour, speculating about the need for universal, global or cosmic values and norms is appropriate. If judged by international development, South Africa may, consequently, not want to be isolated from