ABSTRACT
What makes the development of a global ethic so urgent now is both the global nature of many of our current environmental problems and the increasingly interconnected nature of the world economy. Globalization has created what Beck [Pd1] refers to as a “risk society,” in which people may end up suffering from the negative consequences of decisions made not by themselves but by others. Individual acts which on the surface seem to be ethically unproblematic can in fact have global consequences. In a tragically amusing article Bahouth [Hd1] demonstrated how his apparently innocent act of eating a tomato in Toronto in fact lent tacit support to labor exploitation and unsafe working conditions among the workers in Mexico who grew the tomatoes; the disposal of toxic wastes from the production process in poor African-American communities in Alabama; exposure to dioxin by the workers in Texas who made the plastic wrapping to package the tomatoes; the cutting of old-growth forests in the Pacifi c Northwest to make cardboard boxes to ship the tomatoes; the use of CFCs and the burning of fossil fuels in the refrigerated trucks which transported the tomatoes from Mexico to Canada; and the eventual burning of the packaging at an incinerator in Detroit, Michigan.
