ABSTRACT
Multinational corporations often appeal to ethical relativism as an excuse for using business practices which enhance profits but would be morally questionable in their home country, and which are frequently exploitative in the host country in which they are operating. The affinity of utilitarianism with ethical subjectivism and relativism, and of Kantianism with ethical universalism, will tend to make them accept conflicting answers to the Candu dilemma. The global morality which, over time, emerges will be a product of the natural relations between cultures, and not something imposed by some privileged cultural elite or an abstract rational theory of ethics. The doctrine of radical individualism, the view that individuals are ontologically independent of the social institutions which nurture them, when analogically transferred to interpret the relations between cultures, is as destructive to the development of a global morality as it is to developing adequate local moralities.
