Freedom, ethics and economy
Summary
Freedom is a capability of people to make responsible decisions about their lives. It is a complex vector of various personal and social variables. In order to make free choices we need an informational basis, which reflects the reality. Mass media often provide just one-sided and selective information and therefore our view on the world may be fudged to some extent. Devaluation of the terms misinterprets the reality, and is widely used in politics and military. A big progress has been made in securing the human rights in various Conventions. But still there is a lack of political will in keeping their action plans and securing the rights in reality. NGOs and civil society play a vital role in this issue. The so-called free trade cannot be amoral trade with no ethics. Business sector should make a strong commitment to help society, in which it operates.
I’m interested in international affairs and connection between the business sector and human rights. I work in one NGO as HIV/ Drugs prevention lecturer and I had a possibility to take part at some international conferences dealing with this issue.
Freedom, ethics and economy
1.1 Freedom
Freedom is a capability to achieve the ends one has a reason to value. It’s a possibility enjoyed by people to make decisions about their own life and fully employ their abilities to satisfy their personal physical, psychological, spiritual and social needs. It is a complex vector of physical, mental, spiritual, social and economic variables, which people tend to weight according to their individual and cultural preferences and backgrounds. Even if there are same conditions applied to two different individuals, their benefit and outcome may differ because of various abilities of those ones. For example, if two people have the same income and other x variables, but if one person is healthy and the other is seriously ill and must pay for an expensive treatment, the possibility of the letter to enjoy his or her freedom is severely limited.
Therefore, if we are to grasp the essence of freedom we must see it in the scope of the existing reciprocal relationships between the possibilities of the environment and abilities of the individuals, that are influencing each other. Freedom is a dynamic vector, which is in permanent evolution and has no borders. It means the “free or no-free” perspective is inadequate, because it doesn’t reflect the qualitative differences of the freedom function. The comparative approach must be applied, so we can consider someone as “more free” or “less free” than someone else. There are various levels of freedom realization. It can be compared to Maslow’s model of motivation. If we are free to satisfy our physical needs, we are looking for security, psychical wellbeing and loving relationships and later for self-actualization and even self-transcending. These aims may have various priorities indeed. Development of one’s creativity and abilities is the key point for the enhancement of freedom. The relationship between creativity and freedom is most vivid in contemporary art, where artists seek new forms of expression and try to tear down all barriers. But, unfortunately they sometimes forget the importance of harmony and are merely concerned with shocking the public. This is rather destructive approach to freedom.
There is no freedom without a set of certain laws. In every system and every environment there are specific rules of interaction between the present subjects.
We cannot be free, unless we have tools for anticipation of the environment’s reaction or functioning. If we are to be free, we need to make informed choices and then take responsibility for our actions. There is no freedom without responsibility and no responsibility without freedom to act.
There is no actual freedom without knowledge. In this view, we are free e.g. to ride a bicycle, if we have it, but to enjoy our freedom for real we need to know how to ride it.
1.2 Informational basis for a free choice
To benefit from our possibilities, accurate and accessible information must be provided about the certain objective, one wants to decide for. The mass media play a vital role in providing information on the daily basis and shaping the public opinion. Because of big competition media try to bring hot, breaking news, which tend to shock and attract people. Tragedies, sex and celebrities create the most of the income. But if we are given only one-sided and selective information our freedom to make informed choices and actions is very restrained. There was a study presented in the daily press, showing how many dead are needed for the information to be noticed worldwide. There must die 20 people in the USA, in order for this information to penetrate the public mind worldwide. But there must die around 1000 people in an African country to create a worldwide interest with the even intensity. But “only” 200 dead are needed, if a certain celebrity visited the country in last three months. There is a famous quotation saying that 20 gorillas in a danger would mobilize world public more that 800 000 dead in Rwanda. This conflict was totally in the shadow of the Balkan one. The same happened with the big explosion in Nigeria, which killed 2000 people but was shadowed by the 9/11 tragedy and stayed totally unnoticed. What is maybe even worse, the reality perception of the masses doesn’t match with the actual situation, because there is a tendency to show only negative information. If there is, e.g. a successful significant NGOs’ meeting of Palestinian and Israeli activists, it usually stays in the shadow of some notorious bombs attack in Jerusalem. But the majority, who receives the information only through mass media may have a feeling of depression. Such selective information may seriously affect the psychical wellbeing of an individual and in the worst case cause suicidal wave.
Mass media want to sell the information to the most possible consumers. Therefore they apply the simple mathematical tool of the lowest common determinant. Almost everyone is consciously or unconsciously attracted to such themes as sex or cheap humor. A tragedy and its brutality as well shock everyone. Media misuse fear of the people. The bad impact of violence and unsafe sexual scenes on child’s mental growth is immense. There is a huge lack of the sense of responsibility in the contemporary celebrities. They present the kind of very unhealthy and evil culture under, what they call freedom of speech. The majority of celebrities totally neglect the bad effects of their actions on the youth and they are not willing to take the moral responsibility for it. The most celebrities are under the pressure of the giant record companies, and they are pushed to show a kind of very shallow, cheap, external and selfish party culture.
Advertising industry also creates a pseudo-ideal image of a successful and beautiful individual. Everything is so clean, bright and shiny. People are always smiling and enjoying life. Marketing experts are too worried about their safe positions to escape the present advertising cliché. The one who dared, was Oliviero Toscanni who worked for the Benetton Company. Through his advertisements he tried to attack the taboos of the society and point out its aching problems. For example he has launched the Benetton campaign in the South Africa at the time of apartheid, showing on the billboards a black woman feeding a white baby. On one of his another billboards a kissing couple was presented. He was Palestinian and she Israeli. The couple had a presentation in Jerusalem’s theatre and they have got married later in reality. But after some years Toscanni had to leave because of the permanent arguments with the marketing department.
His advertisements received many international prices indeed and helped to “wake up” and educate people. He is an example of a virtuous businessman who doesn’t trade his ideals for a safe position.
Another aspect of the poor informational basis, apart from the one-sided information is the bad quality of the linguistic terms. According to the Oxford philosophy and Vienna’s philosopher Wittgenstein, we can grasp the reality only trough the existing terms of our language. Many anthropological and linguistic researches have supported this conclusion. The serious impact on our freedom to be informed correctly has so-called devaluation of the terms. In the name of cosmetic changes and “better sound” many terms have weakened and devalued. For example “poor countries” have been renamed to “less-developed countries”, but this didn’t have the right and positive sound, so now we call them “developing countries”. This degradation of the term may not be as dangerous as many military ones. The lately uttered term in the Iraq war was e.g. “a friendly fire”. No one would have ever thought that it means an accidental shooting of the fellow soldier. If we say:“ physical elimination of the enemy” it doesn’t sound so harshly as simply “killing of the enemy”.
The quality, plurality and accessibility of the informational source is crucial for securing the solid informational basis, which allows us to make informed choices and take responsibility for our free decisions and actions.
1.3 Freedom, rights and institutions
Substantial freedoms can be seen not only as the primary goals of economic development, but they also play a vital role as its principal means. There are included five freedoms in this “instrumental” perspective: political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees and protective security. Each of these distinct types of rights helps to advance the general capability of a person and they may also serve to complement each other.
Civil liberties are guaranteed in national constitutions as well as in international treaties and conventions. The first constitution that was really equalitarian was French one, after adopting The Declaration of Human and Civil Rights in 1791. This constitution has never entered into force, though. The American one have been the first ever, but it have included racial discrimination.
One of the most widely ratified documents in the past decades was The Convention on the Rights of the Child, that was adopted by General Assembly of the UN in 1989. Its philosophy is : “If the weakest are protected, then everybody must feel safe.” Children not only have rights to health, nutrition and education, they have rights to protection, freedom from violence and exploitation, and to “a safe and supportive environment”. Once the convention has been adopted the ratification process has begun. The problem of fulfilling the goals that have been set in the convention is the lack of political will of many national governments, inadequate monitoring and UN’s weak tools for sanctioning. Some countries make an effort to sponsor international conferences and follow-ups, which deal with the issue of the children’s rights. Canada is interested in helping children in the armed conflict and organized a couple of conferences on this topic. The government of Italy helped to tackle the problem of children’s exploitation and trafficking in Albania. These actions can be seen as a seed of hope for better protection of children, but unless a strong global movement for children arises and all political and civil actors unite and make a strong commitment, these actions will just stay in the position of image-makers.
Political freedoms guarantee equal treatment from the authorities, equal chances for everyone, gender equality, minority rights, right to vote and be elected, freedom of speech and religious freedom.
In the past much was argued, that we cannot apply the same values globally. Some speak about the traditional so called “Asian values” to which counts a great sense of authority, national loyalty and duty…African cultures are well known for their comunitarism and e.g. Russia was almost never a democracy and even now the reforms are very slow. Despite all national differences, in every culture there is a record of both dictatorial and also democracy-like regimes, therefore there is no solid ground for defending the authoritarian forms of government. Despite the order and economic stability in Singapore and Taiwan we cannot neglect the human rights violations committed recently in these countries.
Maybe the most sensitive right is freedom of faith. Some countries in Europe e.g. France and Belgium show in this case big shortcomings and have worse ranking than Burundi or Namibia. Also if we compare EU and USA, even after the 9/11 tragedy Muslims still enjoy grater religious freedom in USA.
An interesting study has been made by Amartya Sen and other authors about the impact of political freedom on social safety and food security. In this study it is argued, that there are no famines in democracies. The democratic governments feel responsible towards their citizens and the free media’s feedback inform truly about the real situation, e.g. of food stock. In the dictatorial regimes the government doesn’t feel the pressure of the public criticism, and also the media are afraid to inform about the actual problems and much information is hidden. The huge famines that occurred in Russia and China after the Great Leap Forward were the direct outcomes of wrong policies, weak informational feedback and no political freedom.
1.4 Freedom, values and economy
In economic terms freedom means equal chances in the business and so called “laissez faire” approach of the government, which calls for deregulation and so-called “free trade”. But now is the time for the old liberal theories to be revised. The holistic approach in measuring the impact of economic activity has to be taken into account. How certain economic activity influences our social, cultural and natural environment must be considered. According to futurologist Mrs. Henderson the pricing system should resemble the real environmental costs of the production. Otherwise our freedom to live healthy lives in pleasant natural environment cannot be achieved. But it would be rather difficult to measure the scope of environmental damage a certain company causes. The shift to more sustainable policies can be seen also in EU structures, which have introduced new environmental taxes. The Slovak Republic as well, has passed the Reciclation Fund law, which is in compliance with the EU standards, and orders to pay for every imported car, as potential future waste, 3000 SKK.
On the other hand regulations may have a wrong influence on the business and create a place for nontransparent actions, bribing, costly administrative system and inflation. The decision-makers’ plans often don’t mach with reality and wrong legislative actions may hinder economic growth.
It’s important to realize the potential of each individual as well as the power of civic groups formed by committed people. There are two major ways how to express our attitude and decide the character of our environment. By voting at the time of elections we support politicians with the similar views and philosophy and by buying particular products on the daily basis.
There is only little possibility to inform policy makers on one’s opinions on their recent decisions, despite some pioneering projects as online discussions between politicians and citizens were carried out. The elections’ period is too long to provide a valuable and practical communication.
Much greater possibility to influence the present status quo lies in business communication between the consumer and the producer. If we decide for healthier, organic products, Eco-packaging and alternatively traded products we give an important incentive for producers to reshape their production strategies towards more sustainable ones. The customer’s voice and choice helps to decide the future of our planet. And the truth is:“ In unity is power”, therefore NGO’s are becoming important actors in the international politics.
The important step has been made by many companies, which have adopted the social marketing concept. They want to contribute to the development of the environment where they operate. They feel a sense of commitment towards the society and they sponsor local NGOs or health institutions and use this image for marketing. In the business’ philosophy a shift toward a long-term goals and strategies must be made.
The promise of giant pharmaceutical companies to lower the prices for their antiretroviral drugs against HIV/AIDS and allow their generic production for local (e.g. African) companies was a big victory of joint effort of NGOs and business sector. There are many successful examples of healthier alternative approach to economy.
Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, which provides micro-credits for poor farmers who have no collateral. Their average loan size is 70 $ and they operate in 23 000 villages. 92 % of borrowers are women and their repayment rate is over 98 %.
Alternative trade organizations (ATOs) are another example. Some formed by NGOs some sponsored by churches they are based in the developed nations and help small farmers and traditional art producers in the Third World to sell their products abroad under the fair trade conditions. They avoid mid-level traders, who usually put pressure on and abuse small farmers and this way, they make it possible for the poor producers to earn more.
Free trade doesn’t mean an amoral trade without values. People rather buy more expensive products in the company where they feel pleasant and caring atmosphere. Business sector should understand the importance of long-term and sustainable strategies. They bear as well, the moral responsibility for the society and they should promote moral values and attitudes rather than selfish individualism.
If they use their advertisements to educate especially the young people rather than just pushing them into consumism, they will receive respect and their products will acquire internal “moral” value. This new approach embodied companies like Benetton, Esprit and now, we can see a new image of Avon that tries to point out the risk of cancer in its new advertisements.
Freedom is closely linked to creativity and ability to make informed choices and individual will to take responsibility for them. There is great need of new alternative fairer approaches, virtuous businessmen and business ethics, which is vital for sustainable economic development.
posted by jaksim @ 3:37 PM
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