Moral Portability-Some Insights from Cultural Semiotics

Portability is the general characteristic of being readily transportable from one location to another. Increasingly sophisticated forms of economic and technological portability are being developed in order to suit the needs of people who move across a more and more globalized world. Yet, despite the current "entanglement of civilizations", the world still lacks any notion of "moral portability". Moral portability is not moral exportability, is not moral relativism, is not moral cosmopolitanism; it is the ability to conceive morality as a normative pattern that mediates our relationship with the world and allows us to both affirm our moral identity and negotiate new moral communities. The perspective of cultural semiotics is suitable to facilitate the elaboration of such moral portability: different moralities are conceived as moral discourses, whose inner structure can be analyzed and compared, as well as re-engineered through processes of moral entextualization, a cultural bricolage in which moral discourses are transplanted from East to West, and vice versa, in order to suit the moral needs of an increasingly interconnected world community.