WT12 – The change to ethical reference points

In partnership with :

Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques : www.asmp.fr

Workshop presentation

Ethics is the set of criteria that refer to what is a just and good behaviour that guides choices. It’s both the observation of the real ethics of a society, through the behaviours of its members, and the expression of a requirement: that of making decisions and choices in accordance with the idea one has of man and of society, and also in accordance with the preservation of the future of societies, likely to ensure their survival and to preserve their harmony. Ethics are not the declaration of a list of values to which each person would adhere. Nor can they be reduced to the series of precepts – « you shall do; you shan’t do » – that are rather of the order of morality.

Ethics can be understood well only through the resolving of ethical dilemmas, when the concrete conclusions of two values in which one equally believes become inconsistent, forcing one either to give priority to one over the other, or to look for new practices that would reconcile the to the best.

Ethics is a major component of culture. For this reason, in each society it is endowed with a certain lasting quality. But ethics are also evolving, even if it’s because the concrete situations that require ethical choices are themselves constantly evolving on their scale or in their nature. To mention only two examples, our societies are first of all faced with new questions relative to the balance between humanity and the biosphere and the management of a planet where we are irremediably interdependent; the impact of scientific and technical activity on life, along with the development of molecular biology, and then that of nanotechnologies raises radically new ethical questions for science, by extending to unprecedented proportions the hold that men and societies have on their own destiny.

We are accustomed to saying, in China as well as in Europe, that our times are marked by individualism, consumerism and egoism. Each of these seems to invite one to pursue one’s own happiness and one’s own interests with relative indifference to those of others. The market economy offers the attractive certainty that this pursuit of individual interest is moreover profitable to common interest.

How do these evolutions influence the future of Chinese and European societies? For both of them to participate in the management of our unique planet, which is populated, fragile and limited in natural resources, it’s necessary for them to agree on a basis of common principles. This basis may be renouncement of old values or their encountering one another and the transmutation of each one.

The workshop will thus have a dual descriptive and normative aim. Descriptive by comparing the evolution of ethical and moral reference points in the two societies and the consequences that this evolution entails, normative by seeking to affirm common principles on which they can agree in order to contribute to a pacified and prudent management of the planet.