Human Dignity, Justice, Fairness, Youth - Eubios Ethics Institute

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10 Macer, DRJ and Saad-Zoy, S. eds., Asia-Arab Interregional Philosophical Dialogues: Human Dignity, Justice, Fairness, Youth, Democracy and Public Policy (UNESCO, 2011) also empower consumers instead of becoming dependent on capital-intensive energy production technologies. Examples from the Asia-Pacific Region will be cited. Abhik Gupta from India talked on “Environmental Justice: Importance of Integration and Assimilation”. Every inhabitant of the planet earth has the right to a healthy environment. This is reflected in the environmental justice movement that has its emphasis on public health, toxic exposure, and related issues in the context of race and class discriminations. The concept of environmental justice has mostly revolved round issues like exposure to and/or inadequate protection from toxic, xenobiotic substances of poor citizens, ‘blue collar’ workers in mines and industries, and other similar groups. This paper provided an ecological basis of as well as the philosophical ‘defense’ for a more inclusive premise of environmental justice in order to make this concept less overtly anthropocentric and consequently more ‘just’. Suwanna Satha-Anand from Thailand talked on “Between Freedom and Tradition: Inter- Generational Conflict in Buddhist Ethics”. This paper offered an analysis of the discussion of the Buddha on the question of inter-generational relationship, basically between father and son. It based its analysis on two main suttas, namely the Agganna Sutta and the Sigalaka Sutta. The final Session was on Philosophical Dialogues for Shaping the Future of Society Darryl Macer from UNESCO Bangkok talked on “Bioethics is Love of Life”. Souria Saad-Zoy from UNESCO Rabat gave her reflections. A draft statement was developed and agreed. All the participants thanked the volunteer interpreters, John Carlo P. Uy from Ateneo de Manila and Kimberley Junmookda from UNESCO Bangkok, Laura Vittet-Adamson who had acted as a secretariat for the meeting prior to the event, and Sawa Kato who assisted. After each paper there was a commentary, and the written versions of the commentaries will be included when they are sent to the editors. For comments please write to Darryl Macer (d.macer [at] unesco.org
Macer, DRJ and Saad-Zoy, S. eds., Asia-Arab Interregional Philosophical Dialogues: Human Dignity, Justice, Fairness, Youth, Democracy and Public Policy (UNESCO, 2011) 11 Welcome Words - Ms. Cynthia Rose Banzon Bautista, Chair, Social and Human Sciences Committee, Philippine National Commission for UNESCO On behalf of the Social and Human Sciences Committee of the UNESCO National Commission, I am honoured and pleased to welcome you to the Philippines and to this inter-regional philosophical dialogues. I would also like to take this opportunity to welcome and thank Souria, Darryl and the Regional Unit for Social and Human Sciences in Asia and Pacific, the Ateneo Human Rights Center, APPEND and the Eubios Ethics Institute for organizing a timely and extremely relevant philosophical exchange. For non-philosophers who have not fully appreciated the value of philosophy and who have carticatured philosophers as ungrounded thinkers or dreamers who float in the air, my statement about the extreme relevance of this Conference would be rendered inappropriate or at best a diplomatic exaggeration. I am not a diplomat. I am a social scientist, who by circumstances that are not fully in my control, happens to be part of a small team that is grappling with an ongoing higher education reform process in the Philippines. This work has compelled us to go back to basics, that is, to review the role of education in general and higher education in particular. Two observations connected to this work provide the context for the relevance of philosophy and of this particular dialogue. First, education is mandated to bridge the underlying tension between the socialization and acculturation functions of education—e.g., to ingrain love of country, good citizenship and cultural values, on the one hand; and its individuation function on the—i.e. to recognize the movement of individual, intellectual, emotional and spiritual differentiation, the multiple worldviews that result from it, and the activation of unique individual potentials, (Tawil, et al., 2011)—towards the development of whole human beings, specially among the young generation, who in UNESCO’s parlance have the competency to learn throughout life and to negotiate the complexities of a world in flux. The tensions that education ought to bridge can be partly traced to conflicting value premises, the clarification and tentative resolutions for which demand a lot of philosophical reflections. Second, there has been a tendency to focus the required changes in higher education to those that meet the socio-economic challenges of globalization and national development. However, living quality lives and enabling meaningful engagement in communities and critical participation in nation building among higher education students is premised on a strong humanist orientation that is believed to have been imparted well by the classical liberal arts tradition. Unfortunately, the response of higher education to global developments and national imperatives over the last few decades has eroded this tradition. Our team’s strong advocacy for the adoption of an outcomes-based education and quality assurance in higher education—implied in the lifelong learning discourse—is partly a response to the erosion of the liberal arts tradition. It offers the possibility of balancing effectively the inordinate focus on individual and national competitiveness, advancement and growth engendered by the globalization of most, if not all dimensions of contemporary life. We argue that a learner-centered paradigm—opens up spaces for building competencies that weave in the values and principles of a strong humanist orientation—i.e. moral/ethical moorings, fundamental respect for others as human beings with intrinsic rights, cultural rootedness, an avocation to serve, and ‘imaginative sympathy’ as fundamental to democracy, among other manifestations of
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