Page 42 - The Ethics of ASEAN

The Ethics of ASEAN

ASEAN’s Emerging Ethics
Regional ethics are in constant evolution. Some ethical priorities today were not present
at the founding of ASEAN. Because they are important priorities, I have formed a category
to include sustainability, biodiversity and technology. These are the most prominent but
there are others and the list will inevitably get longer over time.
Sustainability and biodiversity are now primary ethical responsibilities for ASEAN in
managing its vast and unique heritage of life on earth. A hundred years ago, the Southeast
Asian region was a mosaic of colonies whose importance for Western powers were their
natural resources. For hundreds of years the Spice Islands were a huge attraction for
trade, exploration and war. In the second world war, ASEAN’s oil reserves made it the
primary objective of the Japanese invasion. After the war came tourism. Today, ASEAN
represents one of the three main centres of biodiversity on the planet, together with the
Amazon in South America and the Congo in Africa.
What makes this ethical? In the twenty-first century mankind’s development on our
planet has become the dominant influence on the environment and climate and now in its
own geological age, the Anthropocene.
At age 93, natural scientist, author and BBC broadcaster David Attenborough summed
up his personal testimonial of life on the planet in a 2020 documentary and book by
describing how in his lifetime the planet has gone from a seemingly vast wilderness, with
wonderful species for explorers like himself to discover, to an ecosystem in which the
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living world is collapsing.
Sustainability and biodiversity are no longer questions of virtue ethics. They are
existential ethical responsibilities. ASEAN’s tropical rainforests are home to a staggering
number of species as well as producing oxygen and reducing carbon in the atmosphere.
Southeast Asia also has the world’s largest maritime territory with huge wealth in
biodiversity and urgent sustainability issues.
Another unavoidable emerging area for ethics is technology. ASEAN as a world power
is confronted with competing technological pressures, notably China and the United
States, with very different ethical rules for the use of artificial intelligence, surveillance,
personal data privacy and bioethics. ASEAN as a non-aligned region cannot simply be
a follower, or wait until a crisis happens. ASEAN needs to develop its own cross-border
ethics for regulating how technology companies operate in the region and how ASEAN’s
own technology champions assume their role in using ethics standards globally.
This model of five ethical types does not say which one should take precedence
on a given issue. That several types of ethics compete for priority is the source of many
of ASEAN’s ethical dilemmas because ethical stakeholders take the perspective that
their preferred type should dictate the position that the ASEAN region should take. It is
precisely this entanglement of types that makes ASEAN ethics interesting. And it is the
disentanglement of the knots created by mixing ethical types that make ethical thinking so
important in ASEAN.

23 David Attenborough with Jonnie Hugues, A Life on our Planet: my Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future,
Grand Central Publishing 2020

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