A Short Story of Ethics

A Short Story of Ethics Source: https://escapekey.substack.com/p/a-short-story-of-ethics

In 1893, the philosopher Paul Carus stood before the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago — the first major interfaith gathering — and made a claim that most of his audience probably wouldn’t have found surprising:

Science and religion weren't opposed, but two ways of expressing the same truth.

Science uncovered the laws of reality, and ethics turned those laws into duties. The facts, not the clergy, should decide how people live.

Carus called this the Religion of Science1. The central move was to recast moral obligation as something that followed from observation rather than religion. If science could work out what was true, and if truth had consequences for how people should behave, then ethics wasn’t a matter of opinion — it was a matter of measurement.

The idea didn’t lead to any immediate change. But it laid down the principle that a universal ethics could be drawn from scientific inquiry, applied across civilisations, and made effectively unchallengeable by grounding it in data, not doctrine.

A hundred years later, in 1993, the theologian Hans Küng returned to the Parliament of the World’s Religions and presented A Global Ethic2. Where Carus had laid the philosophical groundwork, Küng produced the first draft of what the ethic would actually say. His version was mainly social: a set of moral commitments that humanity owed to itself. Non-violence, solidarity, tolerance, equal rights. Broad enough to win agreement across religious and cultural traditions, specific enough to be quoted in institutional documents.

Two years later, the Catholic scholar Leo Swidler published his own Global Ethic3, which widened the scope. Swidler’s version added environmental obligations alongside the social ones and framed everything through the language of ‘rights and responsibilities’. Where rights describe what the individual can expect, responsibilities describe the conditions attached. The logic that would later shape conditional finance — you receive benefits when you meet obligations — was already there in the ethical vocabulary.

In 2000, the Earth Charter4 pushed the scope further still. Where Küng’s ethic dealt with humanity’s obligations to itself, and Swidler’s added the environment, the Earth Charter repositioned humanity within the planetary system. Humans weren’t stewards of nature managing it for their own benefit — they were participants in a living system, with obligations to the whole. The ethic was planetary.

Each version ratcheted the scope wider. Küng’s ethic covered social obligations. Swidler added the environmental dimension. The Earth Charter repositioned humanity within the planetary system. But none of them served as a governance architecture.

In September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Sustainable Development Goals5 — seventeen objectives including poverty, hunger, health, education, responsible consumption, climate action, peace and justice, and global partnerships. Every area of human activity — economic, social, environmental, biological, psychological — had a corresponding goal.

The SDGs weren’t debated in the usual sense. Technical working groups designed them, diplomats negotiated them, and every member state accepted them without a vote. No government was going to vote against ending poverty or protecting the oceans, because doing so would place it outside the moral community.

That was the point — the goals were worded so that opposing any of them was politically impossible.

Three months later, in December 2015, the Paris Agreement6 was signed, attaching financial conditions to carbon dioxide emissions, turning measurements into money. Every investment decision could now be judged against a climate standard. The planet’s physical systems and the global financial system were formally linked through a single piece of governance.

That September-to-December sequence completed what had been under construction since Carus’s 1893 address. The SDGs filled the ethical framework with comprehensive content — seventeen goals covering every domain. The Paris Agreement coupled that framework to the financial system, making the ethic enforceable through capital requirements, investment conditions, and regulatory standards.

The institutional machinery that enforces this coupling was already in place. ISO produces the technical standards that turn the goals into auditable requirements7. The OECD produces the normalised data that makes every national economy measurable on the same terms8. The Network for Greening the Financial System turns climate commitments into scenarios that central banks use to set capital requirements9. Basel turns those scenarios into costs that banks have to absorb10. And the Bank for International Settlements builds the settlement infrastructure11 — programmable, conditional, real-time — through which every financial transaction can be checked against the standard before it clears12.

The ethic authorises the standard.

The standard feeds the evaluation.

The evaluation conditions the finance.

The finance governs the economy.

And the economy, as every government since at least 1942 has acknowledged, governs society.

Carus established in 1893 that a universal ethic could be grounded in science rather than theology, which meant you couldn’t challenge it without challenging science itself. Küng, Swidler, and the Earth Charter gradually broadened the scope over two decades until it covered every domain. The SDGs achieved comprehensive coverage and universal adoption, while Paris coupled the ethic to money.

The clearing infrastructure that had been waiting since Julius Wolf first proposed an international clearing office at Brussels in 189213 finally received the ethic it had been built to carry.

1 https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.201244

2 https://www.weltethos.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Decl_english.pdf

3 https://www.jsri.ro/old/html%20version/index/no_7/leonardswidler-articol.htm

4 https://earthcharter.org/read-the-earth-charter/

5 https://sdgs.un.org/goals

6 https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement

7 https://www.iso.org/committee/7203746.html

8 https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators.html?orderBy=mostRelevant&page=0&facetTags=oecd-languages%3Aen

9 https://www.ngfs.net/ngfs-scenarios-portal/

10 https://www.bis.org/bcbs/publ/d424.pdf

11 https://www.bis.org/about/bisih/about.htm

12 https://www.bis.org/about/bisih/topics/cbdc/rosalind.htm

13 https://books.google.nl/books?id=wsGUffPEQKwC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false