Globalization and the Ethics of Care
By: Taylor Steelman*
What are the implications of economic globalization on individuals’ morality? Drawing on ‘care ethicists’ from David Hume to Michael Slote, as well as theories from social psychology, I argue that the scale and complexity of the global economy discourages ethical behavior at the level of the individual.
As markets become more efficient and more global, we get further away from the things we consume every day to the point we don’t even think about where they come from.
Pietra Rivoli (2007)
Many definitions of ‘globalization’ have been put forth over the past few decades. Perhaps one of the simplest comes from the World Bank: “the most common or core sense of economic globalization … refers to the observation that in recent years a quickly rising share of economic activity in the world seems to be taking place between people who live in different countries…” (Westerfield, 2004: 181). While international trade has been going on for centuries, globalization marks the dramatic acceleration of economic integration via major advances in information, transportation, and communication technologies, as well as the trend toward trade liberalization between states (Fischer, 2003; Harvey, 2005; Stiglitz, 2003).
Economist Pietra Rivoli finds the entire story of globalization writ in a single T-shirt she pulled out of a discount bin at a New York City Walgreens. The shirt’s cotton, she discovers, was grown and harvested in Lubbock, Texas, before being sent to Shanghai, China to be spun, woven and sewn.
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* Taylor Steelman holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Texas in Austin and an MA in human geography from the University of Leeds.
