The ethics of maintaining a global strategy which benefits the accumulation of intergenerational wealth and hoarding and which necessitates the use of barbaric violence to legitimize.
Ethics of science spending versus "welfare" spending on national and global levels
Can countries impose "sanctions" on companies whose products do not comply with producer responsibility requirements?
What is the ethical compromise between freedom of information exchange and keeping sensitive/dangerous information out of the hands of malefactors?
Should any one country or small group of countries be allowed to buy up the energy resources of the world without providing for the energy resources and environmental protection of future generations of people on the globe?
The ethical issues surrounding the insurance industry include kickbacks from the companies to brokers and access to information: How is a public protected when routinely denied basic information and rights, and, when insurance commonly states it represents that public, when in fact it does not?
Is it ethical for a nation or group of nations to use weapons of war that continue to affect people long after peace agreements are signed?
Despite advances in sciences and in high-tech technologies, conditions in working places are worsening; people face social uncertainties more than in the past.
Given virtual reality and the Internet; add ethical questions on the use and advantage of Internet network: Obligations and rights.
Should all citizens be required to take responsibility for publicly declaring and rationally defending the political and economic norms that they espouse, practice, and impose?
Do we have the right not to belong to, nor contribute to the defenses of, any sovereign nation?
Do children have the right of free thought - the right not be indoctrinated into the religion, culture or nation of their parents?
Should compulsory schools in the world be required to ethically defend their curriculum priorities to stakeholders (i.e., everyone)?
Should we have a right to contribute to a UN independent, cosmopolitan, peacekeeping force, comprising volunteers without nationality, to respond rapidly to humanitarian need?
One important issue would be “should democracy be advanced forcefully?
Have all children in the world to have the right to learn to write and to read?
Have all children in the world to have the right to have enough food?
New Issues 2010 to 2025
The ethics of global businesses in providing or helping to provide necessary public services.
The issue of the responsibilities of rich people to the less privileged will become important; what sort of assistance should they offer to bring respite?
If we succeed in achieving meaningful communication with other species (e.g. other primates), what changes will be necessary in the ethics of their treatment?
Should the concept of national sovereignty established by the Treaty of Westphalia be revisited and debated?
How do we define/separate "normal" and "abnormal,” or health and disease? Alteration of the genetic germ line can be used as a tool of 21st century's genocide.
A future ethical issue pertains to the food chain and specifically to the consumption of mammals. As research progresses, intelligence and social ordering is being noted in mammals often dismissed as "dumb.” The question should be "should we continue to consume mammalian life forms as food"?
New Issues 2025-2050
What ethical consequences follow from globalization?
The use of nuclear power plants is a bad legacy for future generations and raises the ethical question with respect to the control of the countries that have nuclear warlike devices.
Very sick and older people that loose ordinary functions required to live should be able to have state provided ethical hospice.
Is it ethical to segregate migrants and to accept or reject them on the base of their education and other qualifications?
Is it ethical for nations to collaborate in order to manage the planet while one of them is dominating the others
One can only imagine the digital divide issue becoming as pre-eminent as access to health.
Other New Issues
An important issue is the human-animal relationship, since animal abuse and exploitation is an established and institutionalized global practice. Rather than asking ourselves whether machines should be ascribed rights, we should ask: “Should non-human animals have rights and what ethical issues are involved in the interactions between humans and animals?”
Add an ethical issue: the respect and right of the animal life.
An additional issue is the persistent inequalities that exist in the world.
What is the responsibility of the rich and mighty nations for the others that are poor or not so far developed?
To what extent should we accept the fact that the rich enjoy better living standards than the poor? It seems that we accept that the rich eat better food and live under better conditions (which already cause a significant difference in life expectancy) - Should we accept the rich continue to widen this gap? What ethical obligation should the rich have and why?"
(An additional ethical issue ought to be) the right of marriage between homosexuals, and their right to adopt children.
I believe that the question to ask is "Do we protect the individuality and free will of all humans and is that the very nature of human beings?
Human rights questions will remain a priority and will become more and more acute in all countries intensifying political struggle in the world especially in the period 2010–2025 and remain actual in the period 2025-2050
Problems of hunger and homeless children will influence more and more world politics and development especially in the period 2010–2025 and remain in the period 2025-2050.
I think that most of issues presented here are technology- or science-orientated. But there are still so many (and certainly will be also in the future) issues and challenges of quite different nature, concerning the human psyche and human relations, both on the individual and social level (e.g. abortion, future of welfare system in developed countries, economic progress versus welfare system, media and violence, legalization of drugs, relations between North and South, wide environmental devastation in developing countries and growing numbers of poor, rights of religious and national minorities - e.g. Moslem girls at French schools). Some of them are minor, but some of them really of great importance (especially those concerning demographic trends, economic growth, environmental issues and developing world). If we don’t deal with these issues carefully and with responsibility today, maybe we will risk such social decay and disintegration, and the discussions about scientific and technological issues will become an academic luxury or irrelevant..
Is it ethical that existent oppressing governments of their people and other countries buy their basic raw materials without being concerned of the freedom of those people?
Is it or will it be ethical to continue selling arms to governments of countries who will use them to stay in power and to threaten their people and to suppress their freedom and rights?
Considering that vast numbers of the people in the world are struggling with basic subsistence or very basic technological development, hi-tech future is very far from many. … These are very basic ethical questions for today: should we (as rich north) invest in a couple of designer babies or try to keep annually 2 million poor children alive? Could you please consider the Very Basic things in your final report, just to bring the reality from the growing urban slums and conflict ridden remote areas into global agenda again? Let us give the rest of the world an opportunity to come to the present in this planet before encouraging them to migrate to the space!
Should support be continued to governments that restrict the freedom and discriminate and violate the fundamental rights of their citizens?
The possible colonization of new planets is the second phase of the era of the conquests of humans. Without having confirmation of life and beings of other planets, as prevention mechanism one should analyze and think what relation and interaction should humanity have with other inhabitants of the universe.
I think that your questionnaire doesn’t include the possibility of the 3rd world war.
An ethical question that seemed to me poorly treated in the previous questionnaire is concerning the energy forecasts for the sustenance of the humanity in the future.
Consider the ethical issues that arise from concentration of power and accumulation of information in strong and more and more unscrupulous multinationals
Consider the ethical issues from diminishing negotiation power and decreasing consideration of the rights of the native ethnic groups in the 2nd and 3rd world countries
Ethics of the environment: increasing deterioration of health due to continuous worsening food contamination, electromagnetic contamination, and pollution of water and air, global warming and deterioration of the ozone layer
More attention should be devoted to the amount of earth resources we are dispersing into the universe for space missions.
I am surprised that the ethics of global commercialization without proper rules was not included here. It is a very ethical question, to my mind. It is clear that various services should not be seen similar: certainly basic services have more rights than economic goods. e.g. drinking water and basic sanitation vs. mobile phones.
Where are individual free will and spirituality, Mysticism, situational beliefs?
Were issues of race, cultural, ethnic, religious, sexual orientation, all prejudice fully addressed?
4. Newly Suggested Value Principles
To care and love, not only yourself and your relatives but all other people, animals, and nature.
Globally protective responsibilities need to be exercised by all to ensure global security and universal rights protection.
Individuals should take public responsibility for their consent to fundamental civic norms and arrangements - to publicly declare and defend their preferences.
In accord with the Right of Association, individuals have the right to choose not to belong to any sovereign nation, nor to contribute to the defenses of any nation.
In accord with the Convention of the Rights of the Child, children have the right not be indoctrinated into the religion, culture or nation of their parents.
All compulsory schools should be accountable to stakeholders (i.e., everyone) and required to ethically determine and defend their curriculum priorities in a democratic, global forum.
As moral agents, we have a right to choose to contribute to a UN independent, cosmopolitan, peace-force (comprising volunteers without nationality) able to respond rapidly to humanitarian need.
Add a new point about the importance of family relationships: exactly what role parents must play in the education and growing up of their children; about marriage; force or not force their children to marry and marry to whom they want.
Non-human animals have intrinsic value that must be respected regardless of their usefulness to human beings.
Some of the values e.g. "Do unto others", utilitarianisn, "Do no harm" are common but why not include other ethical systems? Categorical Imperative, Eastern thought, Authoritarianism and religious belief of authoritarian God?
.....and why not include the ethical value of "For the Good of the Planet" which might legitimately overrule some existing ethical systems?
It seems to me that there is a lack of questions concerning the war or the terrorism, but only general questions on private/collective security. There is also a lack about the right of a human organization (state, government) to decide to kill a man.
