Keynote address by Dr. Christoph Stueckelberger: When Justice and Love Embrace Each Other – How Globethics.net tries to Contribute to it as an Embracing Global Network

Dr. Christoph Stueckelberger gave a thorough speech on “When Justice and Love embrace each Other – How Globethics.net tries to Contribute to it as an Embracing Global Network” With consistent economic development, the conflict between justice and love appears more and more often. It is a future trend to properly deal with the relationship of justice and love. Dr. Christoph is the Executive Director and Founder of Globethics.net. He has always been working on the study of ethics and morality, covering a range of wide topics, such as environment, international trade and corruption. He is also the founder of Transparency International. Dr. Christoph revealed his ideas from a dialectic approach. The speech was lively and the audiences were all attracted by his viewpoints.

 Dr. Christoph started with a dialectic relationship between justice and love, following business ethics and CSR, and finally introduced the platform established by Globethics.net, giving wish to more participation and perspective expressions from the open public on topics like love and justice.

 According to Dr. Christoph, love and justice are inseparably related to each other like a couple. Talking about any one of them without the other is void and meaningless. Dr. Christoph defined love to be a vague and broad concept, including compassion, sympathy, care, etc. Justice is a universal provision, which could be equal to law. The relationship of love and justice is a reflection of law and ethics. So, the dialectic relationship between love and justice also applies to that between law and ethics. Meanwhile, Dr. Christoph emphasized the balance between justice and love. Sometimes, what seems rightful from the perspective of law and justice might not be humane, while what is humane might not be rightful. It is crucial to find the conjunction point of love and justice. With development of society, the relationship of justice and love are also changing. We need to look at them through a developmental point of view.

 After that, Dr. Christoph introduced business ethics and CSR. The survey conducted from 2009 till 2011 reveals that different countries and enterprises have different understanding of business ethics and CSR. Generally speaking, there are three levels of business ethics, the macro, the medium, and the micro, and CSR belongs to the medium. Corporate Social Responsibility means that corporations should shoulder social responsibilities while operating. Dr. Christoph studied into the current development states of CSR and found out that people attend to the topic more whenever there were economic crises. However, there are significantly more scholars promoting CSR in the recent decades.

Then, Dr. Christoph introduced Globethics.net, a free speech new work fair to all users, providing a platform for ethnical and moral discussions and exchanges of ideas. People with different educational and cultural background would have different understandings of business ethics, which makes the platform useful for finding a common ground. Registers of the website comes from all over the world, creating collisions of different perspectives, as well as sparkles of wisdom. Dr. Christoph sincerely welcomed scholars and fans on the topic of ethics and morality to register. After the enrichment of content and the fulfillment of global business ethics list in the near future, Globethics.net will definitely become the academic authority of the study of international business ethics.

At last, the forum facilitator asked Dr. Christoph how could justice and love compliment each other. Dr. Christoph answered that human behavior could be concluded into four categories: legal and proper, legal and improper, illegal and proper, illegal and improper. People would make different judgments from different standpoints. The final conclusion would be to promote the legal construction with proper and dynamic considerations of local situation.

Dr. Christoph’s speech left us with deep thoughts. We should actively apply the academic discussions of the relationship of justice and love to daily life. It is important for the building of a harmonious society. Loving the society and others is a traditional virtue of our nation. Law cannot be almighty. Emphasizing on CSR should be a consistent principle.

Exercitation Reporter: Jin Xiaoyan
Translated by Fu Tanping