Writing this has been a humbling but rewarding experience. The idea came out of an initiative from the ASEAN Human Development Organisation (AHDO), the Foundation for International Human Rights Reporting Standards (FIHRRST), and the ASEAN University Network (AUN) Secretariat.
While I am the author, the AUN provided a research team and organised the webinars known as the “ECAAR Dialogue Series” on different ethical issues held from January 2021 to January 2023. My sincere thanks to them!
Our 8 webinars featured 44 experts, including ASEAN Nobel Peace Prize laureates, in open dialogue.
I was surprised when we started this because we immediately had very large live audiences or viewership totalling over 8,017 participants, not including those who accessed the content in “watch-later” mode. Many of them were students and some ethics professors had even assigned the dialogues in their classes. This proved the need for a book on ethics.
This is not an academic book. The purpose of the Ethics of ASEAN is to provide a reference that does not exist on the ethical issues of ASEAN – both for working professionals and students.
You may wonder if there really can be an ethics for this diverse region. ASEAN actually began with aspirational ideals that became ethical values. Freedom was foundational. Human development was another. Cooperation and respect for differences is still another .
Looking at these early ASEAN declarations you see how aspirations and values evolved over the years with the regional declarations and commitments we know today. The book shows how ASEAN ethics have evolved and what institutions and organisations are responsible for ASEAN ethics.
More importantly the book explains why, on some ethical issues, ASEAN seems unable to take a clear ethical position as a region or commit to taking action on emerging ethical issues. I try to answer why this happens in the book.
Although ASEAN is clearly successful as an international community of nations, it is not mature in managing its ethics. Today we see critical ethical dilemmas that do not move forward.
Here are 10 ethical dilemmas that ASEAN is struggling with today.
To think through these dilemmas, I created a model of five different kinds of ethics represented in the chart below. These different types of ethics come into conflict in fundamental debates, but people are often not aware that there are different ethical logics in ASEAN.
The five types of ethics in the model are: virtue ethics, rules-based ethics, results-based ethics, leadership ethics and emerging ethics.
This model can help understand how ASEAN as a community finds itself tied in knots when taking a positions or making ethical decisions. To take an example, ASEAN rules-based ethics on representative government (in the ASEAN constitution) were clearly violated in 2020 when the Myanmar military Tatmadaw arrested leaders of a democratically elected government, fired on peaceful protesters, banned or jailed reporters and tortured prisoners.
An intense ethical debate continues to this day about why ASEAN gives priority to its virtue ethics of non-interference and unanimous decision-making as the Myanmar Tatmadaw continues to disregard ASEAN's rules-based order. Or to take results-based ethics as a reference, the current Myanmar situation demonstrates increasingly negative outcomes for its economy, for its workforce, for its culture and for its young generation.
Although I had studied ethics in Europe for my philosophy doctorate, I noticed when I moved to Southeast Asia that very little was published in ethics. The university textbooks all referred to Western ethics, or occasionally included Chinese or Indian ethical ideas.Southeast Asia was a black hole.
But what really made it necessary to produce a book was in that all of the professionals who went through the AHDO certification programme agreed that ethics is the foundation for human development. When we asked the question if ethics is the foundation in our surveys, we got a 100% positive response in each cohort of professionals.
How can you advocate for human development without ethics? How can you decide what's the right thing to do if you can't reason ethically? This gap for me was sufficient motivation to write the book. There are, of course, other professions where ethics is foundational. That's why I hope the book achieves the goal of making ethics relevant and useful for professionals in Southeast Asia.
Download a PDF of the book here, or read the online e-book here.
