Planetary Ethics

In The You On AI Field Guide

The tension in the proposal is real and Mbembe does not try to resolve it neatly. Most planetary-ethics proposals in the AI space — from UNESCO declarations to the EU AI Act to the various industry self-governance frameworks — operate from the metropolitan center and distribute obligations outward in ways that preserve metropolitan authority over the framework itself. The developer in Lagos is governed by the framework; she was not consulted in its drafting. This is not planetary ethics; it is metropolitan ethics with global reach.

What Mbembe proposes instead is an ethics that requires substantive participation from the populations its frameworks would govern. This has procedural implications (governance structures must include meaningful representation from affected populations), substantive implications (the values encoded in the framework must be negotiated across traditions rather than imposed from a single tradition), and institutional implications (the bodies that develop and enforce the frameworks must be genuinely multi-polar, not merely formally so).

For AI specifically, the planetary-ethics framework generates several specific commitments. Data sovereignty for the communities whose data is used. Epistemic decolonization of training corpora. Participation of content moderation workers in the decisions that govern their labor. Redistribution of the value created by AI toward the populations whose work made it possible. Technical and institutional infrastructure that is not concentrated in a small number of metropolitan corporations.

None of this is straightforward, and Mbembe is too honest a thinker to pretend otherwise. The coordination problem is immense: getting many parties to the table, each with distinct interests and distinct capacities, and producing frameworks that none of them could impose unilaterally. The institutional problem is immense: existing international bodies (UN agencies, trade organizations, standards bodies) are themselves structured by the very hierarchies the ethics is meant to address. The temporal problem is immense: AI is developing on a timeline that outpaces the slow work of building legitimate governance.

What the framework provides is not a blueprint but an orientation. It tells us what success would look like and what specific failure modes to resist. It makes visible the difference between planetary ethics in substance and planetary ethics as metropolitan ethics in planetary drag. That clarity is itself a contribution, and it is the contribution Mbembe's work is best positioned to make.

Origin

The planetary-ethics framing develops through Mbembe's later work, particularly Out of the Dark Night (2021), in conversation with thinkers including Dipesh Chakrabarty on the planetary condition, Gayatri Spivak on planetarity, and the broader tradition of decolonial political theory.

Key Ideas

Planetary scale, not metropolitan universalism. A real planetary ethics must be negotiated across traditions, not extended from one tradition.

Participation is substantive, not procedural. Including affected populations means they have real authority, not advisory roles.

Multiple institutional implications. Data sovereignty, epistemic decolonization, worker voice, value redistribution, and multi-polar infrastructure are specific commitments.

Coordination is hard. The framework does not pretend the coordination problem is solvable by will alone.

Orientation, not blueprint. The contribution is to make visible the difference between real and performed planetary ethics.