The Ethics of Risk in the Global Economy

Abstract

In India, The Philippines, Nigeria, and elsewhere, technology is spread thin on ancient cultures. In 1984, in Bhopal, India, the devastating potential of technology's hazards in a non-technological culture was brought home with awesome pain?over 2,000 dead and 200,000 injured. My aim here is to in quire about the justice of practices, like those in Bhopal, that subject foreign citizens to technological risks higher than those faced by either home country citizens or more favored foreign citizens. The object of exploration, hence, is the justice of the distribution of technological risks in and among nation states. What moral obligations underlie, what extra-national responsibilities should inform, the behavior of global actors such as Union Carbide and the United States? The question not only intrigues us, it demands answers on behalf of those who have been harmed or who have been harmed or who are presently at risk. Yet it appears disturbingly clear that the question as framed eludes answers because we possess no viable interpretive scheme for applying traditional moral precepts to the moral twilight created by the juxtaposition of differing legal and cultural traditions. The key issue to address is obligation. In particular, what are the obligations of or to or parties who are denied membership in those macro-organizations? The terms macro-agents or macro-organizations will be used interchangeably. They refer to key organizational actors in the international economy, and especially nation states and multi-national corporations. By third party I mean persons who are put at risk by a given macro-organization who are not themselves members of that organization, for example, innocent bystanders or citizens of another country; by fourth party I mean fetuses and future generations. In general, and party victims do not make policy decisions that affect the level or distribution of risk, and when harmed are entirely innocent. Both categories are to be contrasted to first-party victims such as corporate managers or government leaders, ancl second-party victims such as rank and file employees or national citizens. These latter categories of persons, when harmed, may or not be innocent. The point about non-membership is important. We expect corporations