Eric Palmer

Introduction: The Sustainable Development Goals Forum

This introduction notes the contributions of various authors to the first issue of the Journal of Global Ethics 2015 Forum and briefly explains the United Nations process through which the sustainable development goals have been formulated up to the receipt by the General Assembly, in August 2014, of the Report of the Open Working Group of the General Assembly on Sustainable Development Goals (UN A/68/970). The goals are identified as a confluence of distinct streams of UN work attended to variously by policy experts and political figures in the past several decades. Sources include, most obviously, the Millennium Declaration of 2000 and the Millennium Development Goals, but also the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the Human Development Reports of 1990 forward, and the 1987 Brundtland Report.

Introduction: The 2030 Agenda

This introduction notes the contributions of authors to the second (final) issue of the Journal of Global Ethics 2015 Sustainable Development Goals Forum. It briefly explains the process through which the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have developed from their receipt in 2014 to their passage in September 2015 by the UN General Assembly, and it considers their development in prospect. The Millennium Development Goals, which spanned 1990–2015, present a case study that reveals the changeability of such long-term multilateral commitments. They were enmeshed in overlapping and inconsistent national and intergovernmental commitments reaching from 1995 to 2005, and the text of those goals also evolved, stabilizing for the last time in 2007. The SDGs and attendant commitments should be expected to evolve similarly over their 15-year run. This presents a concern, for among the three committees established by the UN to create the goals, the two committees charged with public consultation were retired as planned in 2014. The process evident thereafter has displayed a shift towards a strategy of enrolling broad public endorsement that leaves such consultation and specific responsibility to those consulted in doubt. This bodes ill for public deliberation on the goals and for public accountability as the agenda proceeds towards 2030.

The shifting patterns of progress

Publication of the final issue of Journal of Global Ethics for 2017 is an opportunity to look back at an eventful year and reflect on what might be in store for us next. As Martin Schönfeld, who is an environmental philosopher, is now co-editor of the journal, we thought this is a good opportunity to focus on environmental issues in our editorial article – particularly as the events of this year illustrate an ideological polarization on how to respond to Earth system overshoot. In 2017, Earth Overshoot Day fell on August 2. This is the illustrative calendar date when annual total consumption exceeded annual planetary capacity. The overshoot is a quantitative measure and it works like this: divide what the Earth system assimilates and produces in a year (environmental services plus biotic productivity) by what civilization puts in and takes out from it (ecological footprint), and multiply the resulting fraction with the number of days in a year. Ideally, the value of the fraction ought to be 1 or greater, but since the 1970s, it has been less than that, and it keeps falling. This signals a crossing of system limits. Civilization overshoots system capacity when collective human demand exceeds environmental supply. A sustainable civilization would run out of a year’s supply by December 31, if ever. Unsustainable cultures, however, do run out. How much eco-debt they rack up is told by the date. In 1971, global demand exceeded supply for the first time and civilization edged into unsustainable territory. Overshoot Day that year fell on December 21. In 1988, 30 years ago, civilization used up a year’s worth of system capacity by October 16. When Journal of Global Ethics was founded in 2004, with volume 1 released in 2005, the overshoot date was September 2. This year’s date, August 2, is the earliest yet. We now operate as if we lived on 1.7 planets. The global average glosses over national differences, and these differences don’t quite match long-standing expectations anymore – as if, for instance, rich countries must have big environmental footprints and incur large ecological debts, and poor countries would have to be their direct opposites. Of course, to an extent, the old pattern still persists. Norway, for instance, ranks highest on the UN Human Development Index (HDI) and had its national overshoot day already on April 18 –months before the global average. Honduras, by contrast, operated within planetary boundaries in 2017 and didn’t run out of supply until December 31, but its HDI rank is only a modest #130 (out of 188 ranked countries). On the one hand, these differences align with conventional expectations. Consider the contrast in sustainability, with wealthy Norwegians being wildly in overshoot, and modest Hondurans staying within Earth system limits. Location surely matters. Societies exposed to subarctic and arctic climate are bound to consume more energy and materials per capita and year than societies with a mild climate that varies from tropical at the coasts to temperate in the mountains. Furthermore, and unlike Honduras, Norway is a major oil producer, and extractive industries are notoriously energy-intensive. This adds to Norway’s overshoot and large carbon footprint. At the same time, oil production also partially explains Norway’s high level of human development – just as the lack of oil wealth accounts for the relatively modest development of Honduras. Before discovering oil in 1969, Norway’s postwar economy had amounted to little more than fishing and farming, quite similar to the Honduran economy of the time. Since then, crude oil extraction and the production of petroleum gases have become the central sources of Norway’s wealth, while the Honduran economy shifted from

Freedom and Corporate Responsibility: The Niger Delta Case

This article briefly introduces a new argument concerning corporate social responsibility, based in an analysis of values expressed by the recent and contemporary liberal economists Milton Friedman and Michael Jensen. I will provide the gist of the argument by considering implications of Friedman’s very familiar view, that “…there is one and only one social responsibility of business - to use its resources and engage in activities to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.” Harvard professor Michael Jensen has argued from slightly different premises to a similar conclusion, that “social welfare is maximized when all firms in an economy attempt to maximize their own total firm value.” Vestiges of such influential argument are also easily spotted in American corporate culture (See Palmer, 2007). I suggest that these authors’ positions allow for possibilities that undermine their broader fundamental values, however. I will concentate especially on Friedman’s classic treatment of liberal politics and capitalist economics, Capitalism and Freedom, in which he alludes to the importance of accepting and promoting individual freedom. Such values demand governmental and social stability, and so, in some cases, particularly where business activity may destabilize society, it would appear that freedom may be seriously threatened by corporate activity that follows Friedman’s narrow prescription. Nowhere is this more evident, at present, than in the Niger River Delta, where the promise and profits of oil have produced a society in great disarray. A case study of the delta situation indicates the problems of the narrow view of business goals and business responsibility, and this article will go on to consider possible solutions to those problems that delineate general sorts of responsibilities. The solutions require corporations to take a much broader view of their activity: I suggest that Friedman’s flaw reflects a general weakness of liberal individualism, nicely exposed in Amartya Sen’s arguments that lead to the conclusion that, “we have to see individual freedom as a social commitment.” That social commitment includes the goal of promoting individual freedom, but reaching for the goal may proceed along lines that are not so narrowly economic as Friedman would have, indicating new roles for business and government cooperation even in less extreme cases than that of the Niger Delta.