The Axial Moment: GLOBAL LAW AND WORLD PEACE

1. The Axial Moment: GLOBAL LAW AND WORLD PEACE Julie Geredien, FacilitatorCourse Number: PRC-373-101January 23nd through February 27thMonday 2:30- 4:30 pm

2. MEETING 2: THE MEANING OF LAW AND ITS EVOLUTION

3. 1. Theme and organizing questions The Meaning of Law and Its Evolution • What is law? • Is there such a thing as universal law or divine mandates? • Why does law change and how do changes in the law over time reflect the development of humankind?

4. 2. Opening Quote Law tells us how we view authority, individuality, what our view of freedom is, how are we respect it, how we protect it. It tells us how we view the status of men and women and children. It tells us how we view collective rights in contrast to individual rights. So it’s a very important benchmark. --James O’Dea

5. 2. Personal response Do you agree with O’Dea? Is law an outer benchmark or indicator of our collective inner views and beliefs? Can you think of a law that reflects our views on authority, individuality and freedom? How does a shift of attention toward global law reflect a movement of growing concern for collective rights and well-being? Does this change how we view individual rights?

6. 3. Direct Instruction 3 topics to be covered: • Law and normative science of ethics as evolution of human consciousness • Transformations in our vision of law and punishment • Relationship between conflict, violence and crisis and the emergence of law

7. What is Law? Law becomes a mirror of belief, a mirror of our collective conscience, of conviction, of morality. It is often a clear external marker of evolutionary progress. -- James O’Dea

8. 3. Direct Instruction (cont) Types of Laws and Their Authority and Sanctions Civil Law The State Religious Laws The Church or God Natural Laws Nature Logical Laws Intelligence Ethics or Moral Laws Rational Will Scientific Laws Science Carter, Miller, Radhakrishnan. Global Ethical Options, 2001.; Brightman. Moral Laws. 1969.

9. Are civil laws always ethical or aligned with moral laws? Should they be? Are religious laws always ethical or aligned with moral laws? Why might some people agree or disagree with this?

10. Are natural laws aligned with ethical or moral precepts? If so, would this mean that natural laws guide us to or just that they affirm our sense of ethics? Do logical laws conform with ethics or moral laws? If so, does this mean that ethical or moral laws should be mandatory?

11. Can scientific laws or observations at all lead to ethical or value-based conclusions? Can they at least confirm those conclusions? What does this say about the is-ought relationship from this perspective?

12. WE NEED TO CONSIDER THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LAW AND ETHICS The lawwithout ethics is just power. The lawwithoutethics is devoid of justice. Ethicswithlaw ”is the difference between democracy and dictatorship.” https://www.quora.com/How-is-law-related-to-ethics

13. How is Law Different from Ethics?

14. Science of ethics or ideals is not a closed system. It is an open ‘synoptic’ approach. It takes into view the whole. It is still evolving. It offers universal perspectives acknowledging imagination and rational life.

15. The science of ideals trumpets obligation and deals with the good. Descriptive sciences provide us the facts, normative sciences arrive at the value of facts. Normative science suggests that ethics deals with what “ought” to be, not just announcing the value of what is.

16. Hume’s Guillotineis-oughtfact-value https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPN-ZksvOg4

17. Science of ethics or ideals uses regulatory principles, not prescriptive principles. The regulatory nature of these principles “support renewal of humanity’s ways to interact with each other’s world view.” The normative scientist is encouraged to think broadly, clearly, logically, and empirically about all of the analyzable data.

18. Regulatory Principles • Identify biases in theory and practice • Encourage collaboration and creativity as the basis for ethical critical thinking • Promote inclusive and holistic practices • Transcend tribalism and embrace globalism • Synthesize the personal, social, situational, political, ecological and auxiliary virtues inherent in ethical decision-making

19. LAW REFLECTS EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS • As law aligns with the science of ethics and regulatory principles for contemplating decision-making and right relationships, law increasingly becomes a reflection of an encompassing and integral human consciousness. • We can begin to think of a relationship to law that is heart-mind centered. In other words, we relate to law from deep within our being and allow it to transform feelings and thoughts from the inside out.

20. “changing of the Earth”: the total reformation of human character and blossoming of wisdom and unity through renewal of humanity’s ethical and spiritual relationships By the term ‘earth’ is meant the earth of understanding and knowledge, and by ‘heavens’ the heavens of divine Revelation. …  Know thou, that upon whatever hearts the bountiful showers of mercy raining from the ‘heaven’ of divine Revelation, have fallen, the earth of those hearts hath been changed into the earth of divine knowledge and wisdom.  What myrtles of unity hath the soil of their hearts produced! What blossoms of true knowledge and wisdom hath their illumined bosoms yielded! (Kitab-i-Iqan, p. 43)

21. Shubash Sharma calls upon similar imagery of inner world transformation and spiritual self-development in his discussion of a New Earth Sastra. Sastra or Shastra(शास्त्र ) is a Sanskrit word found in Hinduism and some lines of Buddhism that means "precept, rules, manual, compendium, book or treatise" in a general sense. It can also represent scientific and basic knowledge in a domain and is associated with the English suffix –logy, as in ecology or sociology, and therefore also with the spiritual understanding of logos, as a structure communicating reason, judgment and creative order.

22. In the model of holistic development that Sharma presents four driving forces need to come into balance through the movement of harmonic globalization which I believe can only be rightly guided by the primal concept of harmony (ho) itself. (85) These forces are: • Force of Market • Force of State • Force of People or Community • Force of Self or Spirituality

24. Global law reflects evolution of human consciousness on a broad scale. • It reflects the journey of critical numbers of individuals from atman to brahman self and awareness.

25. http://www.unmultimedia.org/avlibrary/asset/1288/1288630/ The UN Charter The Charter of the United Nations was signed on 26 June 1945, in San Francisco, at the conclusion of the United Nations Conference on International Organization, and came into force on 24 October 1945. The Statute of the International Court of Justice is an integral part of the Charter.

26. TRANSFORMATIONS IN LAW AND EVOLUTION OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS Universal Declaration of Human Rights Preamble 1948 “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all of the members of the human family, whereas a disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscious of mankind and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech, of belief, freedom from fear, freedom from want, has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people…”

27. This was a time of virulent ideological differences between Communismand Capitalism. Instead of one treaty there were two treaties created: • the covenant on civil and political rights, and • the covenant on economic, social and cultural rights.

28. Government with capitalist orientation signed the covenant on civil and political rights. They said: “Our societies are free, we protect freedom of expression. We protect all those civil and political rights.” Government with communist orientation, the so-called third world, signed onto the covenant of economic, social and cultural rights. They said: “We’ve got to protect our cultures; you’ve got to feed people; you’ve got to give health rights; you‘ve to give economic rights.”

29. There the split remains to this day. The United States for example has not signed the covenant on economic, social and cultural rights.

30. from 1960s- 1990s- We saw the emergence of the formulation of legal treaties: • on the rights of women, to protect women who are being oppressed in so many countries • the rights of children, children’s rights covenants, protecting their right to education and not to send them off to forced labor at early ages • the rights of indigenous people, these struggles are still not understood and indigenous rights are not protected

31. Current struggles for transformation in law reveal underlying feeling beliefs and ideologies: Example: U.S. and China are leading proponents of executing prisoners. Share punitive world views though ideologically different. “An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.”-- Gandhi

32. ‘Disability’ rights, animalrights and rights to bio-diversity of plant life, are still largely unaddressed.

33. History of Transformations in our Vision of Law and Punishment BIG BENCHMARKS

34. Trend toward concern about International Justice Example: WWII- Nuremberg Trials Western powers exonerated themselves and said there were no human rights crimes in Hiroshima or Dresden or any other activity of the colonial powers and the allied forces. This is called triumphal legalism, the law of the victors.

35. Trend towards the search for truth reconciliation and restorative justice. Example: Argentina after the junta This involved atrocities and oppression by the generals there. They launched the Truth Commission and the publication of that work, Nunca Mas, never again, became the most read book in Argentina. In a sense, this was a new benchmark saying: “What is important is not so much vengeance but truth, and the truth of the people’s experience, the truth of the voices of those who are the relatives of the disappeared.”

37. Trend away from punitive punishment Example: African Commission of Truth and Reconciliation Commission coming out of South Africa Mandela and Tutu were able to begin this transformational process in South Africa without over-exaggerated punishment, without calling on vengeance, a whole system of apartheid, a pernicious system of degrading people on the basis of their race, was taken out and all of the atrocities related to it were looked at through a new lens.

39. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was a court-like restorative justice ] body assembled in South Africa after the abolition of apartheid in 1994 Witnesses who were identified as victims of gross human rights violations were invited to give statements about their experiences, and some were selected for public hearings. Perpetrators of violence could also give testimony and request amnesty from both civil and criminal prosecution.

42. Truth and Reconciliation has become a movement internationally

43. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada

44. Truth and Reconciliation Chile

45. Truth and Reconciliation El Salvador

46. The El Mozote Massacre took place in and around the village of El Mozote, in Morazán department, El Salvador, on December 11, 1981, when the Salvadoran Army killed more than 800 civilians during the Salvadoran Civil War

47. Truth and Reconciliation in Colombia Colombia’s National Committee of Reparation and Reconciliation (CNRR) includes an investigative arm known as Historical Memory (MH). Historical Memory is charged with producing an account of the origins and evolution of Colombia’s internal armed conflict, giving special attention to the perspectives of victims. MH is investigating several "emblematic cases," including the Trujillo massacre of 1990. The report on Trujillo is the first that MH has completed.

48. Truth and Reconciliation in Brazil and Argentina

49. Trend to accountability and international awareness Example: Rwandan trying 70,000 genocides in Gacaca Local, traditional, village level courts were established. Books were written about Rwanda and forgiveness. They evade the mass media. Object of inquiry is truth and reconciliation and ‘moving the story forward’.