Page 48 - The Ethics of ASEAN

The Ethics of ASEAN

Creating an Ethics Council and Advisory for the ASEAN Region
(ECAAR)
Marzuki, Choltis and I defined the mission for an Ethics Council and Advisory for the
ASEAN Region (ECAAR). The council function would identify ethical issues of sufficient
importance to be addressed at the level of the ASEAN regional community and provide
a space for dialogue. The advisory function would be for expert conference and white
papers, fact-finding missions and research.
We were not thinking of ECAAR as an actual building with a round table for seating
eminent persons wearing long capes like you see in the space movies. ECAAR was not
meant to be a legislative body. Nor was it intended as a debate club for opposing political
or religious doctrines. We wanted this space to be as participative as possible in order to
allow the general public to dialogue with stakeholders, experts and thought leaders on a
given ethical topic.
ECAAR would not shy away from addressing difficult but important ethical themes
for the ASEAN region including human rights, democracy, diversity, leadership, business
ethics and sustainability. We would not limit ourselves to the politically correct issues
while at the same time the forum would be responsible for respecting truth, diversity and
fairness.
We thought that ECAAR should serve as a think tank for emerging ethical issues
of interest to ASEAN and for collaborating with international bodies such as the United
Nations on ethical issues.
We clearly saw ECAAR as an ASEAN voice for ethics in education and professional
training, given that many university ethics courses or training programmes rely on Western
textbooks and manuals which have no content on ASEAN or even Asia.

A surprising early success

One thing you learn when managing new enterprises is to pay attention when successes
exceed your expectations. The co-founders of ECAAR wanted to get started during the
Covid pandemic so the only logical way forward was to go online. The ASEAN University
Network team working with Dr Choltis was particularly well-organised for managing large
scale webinars.
We decided to test the waters right away. With my business background, I was well
aware that ethics can be seen as an esoteric topic, disconnected from the real world and
a waste of time for people who believe that doing something right is what matters -- not
asking yourself if you are doing the right thing. Practical people don’t generally like to
spend time on theory and speculation. They prefer to deal with the ethics of a real situation
when it comes up. We decided to highlight real ethical questions in ASEAN.

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