Page 34 - The Ethics of ASEAN

The Ethics of ASEAN

This provoked an international debate about Asian ethics among academics and
political commentators. Amartya Sen, who at the time was working on the United Nations
human development programme, became the champion for the other side. In a 1997
defense of universal ethics at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in
New York, Sen readily accepted that regional differences exist but argued that the virtues
claimed as Asian Values do not represent the diversity of Asia, and certainly not two of the
world’s largest democracies, India and Indonesia. He also argued that regional or national
values do not replace universal human rights. 7

In this context, the idea of “human rights” has to be properly spelled
out. In the most general form, the notion of human rights builds
on our shared humanity. These rights are not derived from the
citizenship of any country, or the membership of any nation, but
taken as entitlements of every human being. They differ, thus, from
constitutionally created rights guaranteed for specified people
(such as, say, American or French citizens). For example, the human
right of a person not to be tortured is independent of the country of
which this person is a citizen and thus exists irrespective of what
the government of that country—or any other—wants to do.

The Asian Values debate of the 1990s died quickly with the Asian economic crisis
which brought into question Asian economic superiority (even though Southeast Asian
economies recovered in two years). The debate provided two important lessons for ASEAN
in defining its virtue ethics. First, virtue ethics should promote a positive human good
rather than claiming superiority defined as a competition with other cultures. Second,
virtue ethics for a region should have universal validity while recognising its cultural roots.
How can virtue ethics be both regional and universal? In the early 1990s, the
anthropologist Donald Brown showed that cultural beliefs and behaviours are often
universal. He reversed the perspective of anthropologists who study cultural differences in
human groups and focused on what is shared by all. He ended up listing four hundred traits
found in all the human cultures ever studied by anthropologists, many of them ethical
concepts such as fairness, honesty and social responsibility.
8
Universality applies to the virtue ethics of religions like Islam, Buddhism and
Christianity which grew out of specific cultural and historical contexts. You do not need a
passport or a certain social status to follow their ethical prescriptions.
In 2020, the ASEAN Human Development Organisation published a list of virtue ethics
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for human development professionals in the region. Unlike the ethics of Asian Values of
the 1990s, these virtues have the ambition to define an ASEAN ethic as well as to improve
human development at work in ASEAN. They also represent universal behaviours in human
7 The full text of Amartya Sen’s speech on Human Rights and Asian Values in the 1997 Sixteenth Morgenthau
Memorial Lecture on Ethics & Foreign Policy at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs can
be found here: https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/archive/morgenthau/254/_res/id=Attachments/
index=0/254_sen.pdf&lang=en. Retrieved 25 February 2023
8 Human Universals by Donald Brown, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991
9 Leading Human Development in ASEAN: Using Management Concepts from ASEAN Countries to Create
an Authentic Model of Human Development by Bob Aubrey with Founding Members of the ASEAN Human
Development Organisation, McGraw-Hill Education, ASEAN Human Development at Work Series, 2020

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