Traditional ethical theories developed to help guide daily interactions with those around us, those local, human-scale activities that have characterized the social lives of people for millennia. Today some of the most urgent problems are global in scale: climate change, extreme poverty, genocide, and terrorism, to name a few, and these demand a moral response from each of us. The traditional building blocks of ethical theory, in particular the idea that personal responsibility attaches to our intentions and the ...
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Traditional ethical theories developed to help guide daily interactions with those around us, those local, human-scale activities that have characterized the social lives of people for millennia. Today some of the most urgent problems are global in scale: climate change, extreme poverty, genocide, and terrorism, to name a few, and these demand a moral response from each of us. The traditional building blocks of ethical theory, in particular the idea that personal responsibility attaches to our intentions and the consequences of our actions, are very difficult to apply to large scale problems, since most of them overwhelm our efforts to affect them. Still, people of conscience want to feel that their choices and actions make a positive difference. We need a new theoretical framework for ethics--a macro theory-- that is suited to the realities of our contemporary global awareness.
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