Globalization: Another false universalism?

Abstract

Throughout human history the idea of moral universalism has repeatedly appeared, but always in some less than universalistic, and hence morally compromised, form: in the religious imagination and culture, in the ideologies of liberalism and official socialism and in the liberal theory of the state, and in the informing worldview of the modern human and social sciences, especially anthropology. This discussion raises the question whether, and poses the possibility that, despite all the travails which globalization processes are unleashing worldwide (and perhaps even unknown to, and despite the political preferences of, many of globalization's more ardent champions), the present era of advancing globalization may be ushering in a truly historical moment and change in the history of the human moral imagination. By producing for the first time, no matter how unevenly, a single, interdependent humankind and, in prospect if not yet in actuality, a single worldwide human community, globalization processes may be producing an objective, experiential basis for the emergence of a genuine and uncompromised moral universalism: as a successor to, and to transcend, the sequence of selective intimations and incomplete intuitions of human universality that has hitherto constituted the history of humankind's moral imagination.