Cultivating Ethical Openness and Humility in a Globalizing World

• In Event: 35.063 - Revitalizing Ethical Education in Today's Globalizing Ethos

Abstract

In this presentation, I foreground ethical openness and ethical humility as a normative perspective on moral education that can respond to our fast-changing, globalizing world. I sketch current views of open-mindedness and of humility. Then, I elucidate the significance of the qualifier “ethical,” which, in keeping with the overall symposium, I take to be a term of art that encompasses how persons cultivate, as best as life circumstances permit, their aesthetic, moral (or other-regarding), and reflective capacities.

Ethical openness means learning to face and engage that world. It is not a ‘strategy’ for negotiating social reality; it is not a strategy, period. Rather I picture it is an orientation predicated upon respecting and participating in social reality wholeheartedly. Moreover, ethical openness to the world, to what is new, requires ethical connection to the known, to one’s local roots, values, commitments, and ways of life. If I am to be open and hospitable to other people, or to new ideas and values, I need a place in which to receive them. Openness and local connectedness move hand in hand.

Ethical humility encompasses an epistemic aspect: the ongoing recognition of the limits of my knowledge and understanding in the face of new people, values, ideas, and practices. But the ideal also includes ontological, moral, and cultural humility. To be ethically humble is to remain open about who and what we are as beings. It is to be wary of ‘definitions’ of the human and of any and all labels, some of which may have deep cultural value but all of which can lead to harmful exclusions. To be ethically humble is to grasp why we can characterize ourselves and others in significant and enduring ways, but not define people as we would a concept in chemistry or mathematics. Thus ethical humility implies the recognition, however inchoate it may be, that the moral life of humanity is inescapably complex. Moral principles, ideals, and assumptions are necessary starting points for engaging with others – otherwise I have no basis upon which to approach them – but they are not ending points. I may approach people mindful of ethical openness and humility, but those very terms mean that I must be ready to reconstruct my grasp of them.

I will suggest that the fusion of ethical openness and humility can help people sustain their agency as actors in the world rather than as mere reactors to events. Ethical openness and humility can also assist people in retaining their integrity as beings, that is, their ability to perceive and treat their lives holistically. These claims do not imply that ethical openness and humility constitute a solution to the predicaments in being a person today, so pushed and pulled as we are by our globalizing ethos. Nor do I wish to suggest that ethical openness and humility in some way trump concerns for justice, truthfulness, or compassion. Rather, the qualities can serve as a bonding energy, helping to hold together the dimensions of a person’s life without rendering them brittle and therefore subject to shattering.

Author

• David T. Hansen, Teachers College, Columbia University