Transcript meeting-2-the-evolution-of-global-law-with-film

The Axial Moment:
GLOBAL LAW AND
WORLD PEACE
Julie Geredien, Facilitator
Course Number: PRC-373-101
January 23nd through February 27th
Monday 2:30- 4:30 pm
MEETING 2:
THE MEANING OF LAW
AND ITS EVOLUTION
1. Theme and organizing questions
The Meaning of Law and Its Evolution
•
What is law?
•
Is there such a thing as universal law or divine
mandates?
•
Why does law change and how do changes in
the law over time reflect the development of
humankind?
2. Opening Quote
Law tells us how we view authority,
individuality, what our view of freedom is,
how are we respect it, how we protect it. It
tells us how we view the status of men and
women and children. It tells us how we view
collective rights in contrast to individual rights.
So it’s a very important benchmark.
--James O’Dea
2. Personal response
Do you agree with O’Dea? Is law an outer benchmark or
indicator of our collective inner views and beliefs?
Can you think of a law that reflects our views on
authority, individuality and freedom?
How does a shift of attention toward global law reflect a
movement of growing concern for collective rights and
well-being? Does this change how we view individual
rights?
3. Direct Instruction
3 topics to be covered:
1. Law and normative science of ethics as
evolution of human consciousness
2. Transformations in our vision of law and
punishment
3. Relationship between conflict, violence and
crisis and the emergence of law
What is Law?
Law becomes a mirror of belief, a mirror of our
collective conscience, of conviction, of morality.
It is often a clear external marker of
evolutionary progress.
-- James O’Dea
3. Direct Instruction (cont)
Types of Laws and Their Authority and Sanctions
Civil Law
Religious Laws
Natural Laws
Logical Laws
Ethics or Moral Laws
Scientific Laws
The State
The Church or God
Nature
Intelligence
Rational Will
Science
Carter, Miller, Radhakrishnan. Global Ethical Options, 2001.; Brightman. Moral Laws.
1969.
Are civil laws always ethical or aligned with
moral laws?
Should they be?
Are religious laws always ethical or aligned with
moral laws?
Why might some people agree
or disagree with this?
Are natural laws aligned with
ethical or moral precepts?
If so, would this mean that natural laws
guide us to or just that they affirm our sense
of ethics?
Do logical laws conform with
ethics or moral laws?
If so, does this mean that ethical or moral
laws should be mandatory?
Can scientific laws or observations at all lead to
ethical or value-based conclusions? Can they
at least confirm those conclusions?
What does this say about the is-ought
relationship from this perspective?
WE NEED TO CONSIDER THE RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN LAW AND ETHICS
The law without ethics is just power.
The law without ethics is devoid of justice.
Ethics with law ”is the difference between
democracy and dictatorship.”
https://www.quora.com/How-is-law-related-to-ethics
How is Law Different from Ethics?
Science of ethics or ideals is not a closed system.
It is an open ‘synoptic’ approach.
It takes into view the whole.
It is still evolving.
It offers universal perspectives acknowledging
imagination and rational life.
The science of ideals trumpets obligation and deals with the good.
Descriptive sciences
provide us the facts,
normative sciences
arrive at the value of
facts.
Normative science
suggests that ethics
deals with what “ought”
to be,
not just announcing the
value of what is.
Hume’s Guillotine
is-ought
fact-value
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPN-ZksvOg4
Science of ethics or ideals uses regulatory
principles, not prescriptive principles.
The regulatory nature of these principles
“support renewal of humanity’s ways to interact
with each other’s world view.”
The normative scientist is encouraged to think
broadly, clearly, logically, and empirically about all
of the analyzable data.
Regulatory Principles
• Identify biases in theory and practice
• Encourage collaboration and creativity as the
basis for ethical critical thinking
• Promote inclusive and holistic practices
• Transcend tribalism and embrace globalism
• Synthesize the personal, social, situational,
political, ecological and auxiliary virtues
inherent in ethical decision-making
LAW REFLECTS EVOLUTION OF
CONSCIOUSNESS
• As law aligns with the science of ethics and
regulatory principles for contemplating
decision-making and right relationships, law
increasingly becomes a reflection of an
encompassing and integral human
consciousness.
• We can begin to think of a relationship to law
that is heart-mind centered. In other words,
we relate to law from deep within our being
and allow it to transform feelings and
thoughts from the inside out.
“changing of the Earth”: the total reformation of human
character and blossoming of wisdom and unity through
renewal of humanity’s ethical and spiritual relationships
By the term ‘earth’ is meant the earth of understanding and knowledge, and
by ‘heavens’ the heavens of divine Revelation. …
Know thou, that upon whatever hearts the bountiful showers of mercy
raining from the ‘heaven’ of divine Revelation, have fallen, the earth of
those hearts hath been changed into the earth of divine knowledge and
wisdom.
What myrtles of unity hath the soil of their hearts produced! What
blossoms of true knowledge and wisdom hath their illumined bosoms
yielded! (Kitab-i-Iqan, p. 43)
Shubash Sharma calls upon similar imagery of inner
world transformation and spiritual self-development in
his discussion of a New Earth Sastra.
Sastra or Shastra (शास्त्र ) is a Sanskrit word found in
Hinduism and some lines of Buddhism that means
"precept, rules, manual, compendium, book or
treatise" in a general sense.
It can also represent scientific and basic knowledge in
a domain and is associated with the English suffix –
logy, as in ecology or sociology, and therefore also
with the spiritual understanding of logos, as a
structure communicating reason, judgment and
creative order.
In the model of holistic development that Sharma
presents four driving forces need to come into balance
through the movement of harmonic globalization
which I believe can only be rightly guided by the primal
concept of harmony (ho) itself. (85) These forces are:
•
•
•
•
Force of Market
Force of State
Force of People or Community
Force of Self or Spirituality
• Global law reflects evolution of human
consciousness on a broad scale.
• It reflects the journey of critical numbers of
individuals from atman to brahman self and
awareness.
http://www.unmultimedia.org/avlibrary/asset/1
288/1288630/
The UN Charter
The Charter of the United Nations was signed on 26 June
1945, in San Francisco, at the conclusion of the United
Nations Conference on International Organization, and
came into force on 24 October 1945. The Statute of the
International Court of Justice is an integral part of the
Charter.
TRANSFORMATIONS IN LAW AND
EVOLUTION OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS
Universal Declaration of Human Rights Preamble 1948
“Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and the equal and
inalienable rights of all of the members of the human family,
whereas a disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted
in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscious of mankind
and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy
freedom of speech, of belief, freedom from fear, freedom from want,
has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common
people…”
This was a time of virulent ideological
differences between Communism and
Capitalism.
Instead of one treaty there were two treaties
created:
• the covenant on civil and political rights, and
• the covenant on economic, social and cultural
rights.
Government with capitalist orientation signed the
covenant on civil and political rights.
They said: “Our societies are free, we protect freedom of expression. We
protect all those civil and political rights.”
Government with communist orientation, the so-called
third world, signed onto the covenant of economic,
social and cultural rights.
They said: “We’ve got to protect our cultures; you’ve got to feed people;
you’ve got to give health rights; you‘ve to give economic rights.”
There the split remains to this day.
The United States for example has not signed
the covenant on economic, social and cultural
rights.
from 1960s- 1990s- We saw the emergence of the
formulation of legal treaties:
• on the rights of women, to protect women who
are being oppressed in so many countries
• the rights of children, children’s rights covenants,
protecting their right to education and not to
send them off to forced labor at early ages
• the rights of indigenous people, these struggles
are still not understood and indigenous rights are
not protected
Current struggles for transformation in law reveal
underlying feeling beliefs and ideologies:
Example:
U.S. and China are leading proponents of executing
prisoners. Share punitive world views though
ideologically different.
“An eye for an eye will only make the whole world
blind.”-- Gandhi
‘Disability’ rights, animal rights and rights to
bio-diversity of plant life, are still largely
unaddressed.
History of Transformations in
our Vision of Law and Punishment
BIG BENCHMARKS
1. Trend toward concern about International
Justice
Example: WWII- Nuremberg Trials
Western powers exonerated themselves and said
there were no human rights crimes in Hiroshima or
Dresden or any other activity of the colonial powers
and the allied forces.
This is called triumphal legalism, the law of the
victors.
2. Trend towards the search for truth
reconciliation and restorative justice.
Example: Argentina after the junta
This involved atrocities and oppression by the generals there.
They launched the Truth Commission and the publication of that work, Nunca
Mas, never again, became the most read book in Argentina.
In a sense, this was a new benchmark saying:
“What is important is not so much vengeance but truth, and
the truth of the people’s experience, the truth of the voices of
those who are the relatives of the disappeared.”
3. Trend away from punitive punishment
Example: African Commission of Truth and Reconciliation
Commission coming out of South Africa
Mandela and Tutu were able to begin this
transformational process in South Africa without overexaggerated punishment, without calling on vengeance,
a whole system of apartheid, a pernicious system of
degrading people on the basis of their race, was taken out
and all of the atrocities related to it were looked at
through a new lens.
The Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC) was a court-like restorative
justice ] body assembled in South Africa after
the abolition of apartheid in 1994
Witnesses who were identified as victims of
gross human rights violations were invited to
give statements about their experiences, and
some were selected for public hearings.
Perpetrators of violence could also give
testimony and request amnesty from both
civil and criminal prosecution.
Truth and Reconciliation has become a
movement internationally
Truth and Reconciliation Commission
of Canada
Truth and Reconciliation Chile
Truth and Reconciliation El Salvador
The El Mozote Massacre took
place in and around the village of
El Mozote, in Morazán
department, El Salvador, on
December 11, 1981, when the
Salvadoran Army killed more than
800 civilians during the Salvadoran
Civil War
Truth and Reconciliation in Colombia
Colombia’s National Committee of Reparation
and Reconciliation (CNRR) includes an
investigative arm known as Historical Memory
(MH). Historical Memory is charged with
producing an account of the origins and
evolution of Colombia’s internal armed
conflict, giving special attention to the
perspectives of victims. MH is investigating
several "emblematic cases," including the
Trujillo massacre of 1990. The report on
Trujillo is the first that MH has completed.
Truth and Reconciliation in Brazil and
Argentina
4. Trend to accountability and international
awareness
Example: Rwandan trying 70,000 genocides in
Gacaca
Local, traditional, village level courts were
established. Books were written about Rwanda and
forgiveness. They evade the mass media.
Object of inquiry is truth and reconciliation and
‘moving the story forward’.
5.
Trend to combine universal rights matched with universal
individual responsibility
Example: UN Earth Charter
There are many sections of the actual principles of the charter:
•
•
•
•
Respect and care for the community of life.
Ecological integrity.
Social and economic justice.
Democracy, nonviolence, and peace.
In section 16, it outlines five or six points around promoting a global
culture of peace, tolerance, and nonviolence.
UN Talks- Truth and Reconciliatin in
Climate Change- Bonn, Germany
Indigenous Global Wisdom Summit
16 Principles for a Sustainable and Harmonious World
Relationship between
conflict, violence and crisis and
the emergence of law
•
Heraclitus the ancient Greek philosopher of the late 6th century BCE understood the need to
expand our perception in order to recognize underlying processes of transformation that live within
harmony making. He saw strife not as something to be obliterated or controlled, but rather, as the
stuff of harmony itself. To Heraclitus, it was evident that there was a unity within opposites:
through transformation, opposites within the physical world, like daylight (day and night),
temperature (hot and cold), seasons (summer and winter) and life (birth and death) became
equivalent to each other. (246)
•
By engaging an enlightened way of relating to opposites, one is able to perceive how the
transformation of opposites within life in fact maintains balance in the world. Heraclitus went so far
as to view the seeming oppositions within strife or conflict as justice itself, explaining that “We
must recognize that war is common and strife is justice, and all things happen according to strife
and necessity.” (DK22B80) (http://www.iep.utm.edu/heraclit/#H3) Chung-yi reports: “He
[Heraclitus] also seems to suggest that from the viewpoint of the logos or wisdom, even strife is a
form of bringing out or fulfilling the hidden harmony and in this sense strife is only contrariety and
relativity of things in change/transformation: it is a mode of harmony.” (1989: 227)