African Values in Global Ethics and the Emerging New World Order

Abstract

Global ethics is the universal aspiration of the citizens of the world towards minimum common values, standards, and basic moral attitudes, shared by all for a better world order. While ethics is the rational justification of the principles of right and wrong. Contrary to the view that the emerging new world order is the intensification of international relations, globalization, or the advent of a cryptoclastic secretive world government conspiring to rule the world, this paper believes that the emerging new world order is a result of human effort to subjugate nature to the laws designed by human reason. It is the attempt of human beings to create themselves and their own laws. It is this effort to manipulate nature to give answers to human problems, which has produced the kind of modern technologies that has turned the world into a global village and made easier international relations. In this process, African traditional values will either be rejected as irrelevant, trans-valued to higher levels, or Africans are deemed to acquire some completely new values to regulate their affairs. However, contemporary society faces peril if it ignores some of these basic African values like, respect for life, the environment, and nature.