Knowing Their Own Good: Preferences and Liberty in Global Ethics

Abstract

Citizens of liberal, affluent societies are regularly encouraged to support various reforms meant to improve conditions for badly-off people in the developing world. Non-governmental and intergovernmental organizations, volunteer consciousness-raising campaigns, and even for-profit companies all solicit our economic and political support for causes such as: banning child labor, implementing universal primary education, closing down sweatshops and brothels, opposing the practice of female seclusion, and ending female genital circumcision. The same citizens are also encouraged to donate to aid programs that provide goods such as food, medicine, clean water, toilets, contraception and small business loans to the global poor.¹

If a person possesses any tolerable amount of common sense and experience, his own mode of laying out his existence is the best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode.

—John Stuart Mill