This site's argument is that the standard usually existed before the failure. That holds at every scale, including the largest one. These are the things the species has actually signed — not aspirations, but instruments with ratification counts, and in several cases measurable results.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, passed with nobody against it.

Forty-eight states in favour, eight abstentions, zero votes against, three years after the war that made it necessary. Drafted by a committee spanning Chinese, Lebanese, French, Chilean and American traditions specifically so that no single philosophy could claim it. It is the most translated document in the world, in over five hundred languages, and every human rights instrument since descends from it. the Declaration

The Montreal Protocol is the only UN treaty every country has ratified.

Every member state, without exception. It phased out the chemicals destroying the ozone layer, and unlike most environmental agreements it worked: the hole is measurably closing and is projected to recover this century. It is the strongest available evidence that the species can identify a problem, agree a mechanism and follow through, because it has done so exactly once at full scale. the Montreal Protocol

Smallpox is gone, and the Cold War did not stop it.

The eradication campaign was proposed by the Soviet Union and largely funded and staffed by the United States, at the height of mutual hostility, and it worked. The last natural case was in Somalia in 1977 and eradication was certified in 1980. It killed around 300 million people in the twentieth century alone and it now kills nobody. This is humanity's one completed victory over a disease, and it required cooperation between people who had missiles pointed at each other. smallpox eradication

The Geneva Conventions bind every state on earth.

One hundred and ninety-six parties, which is universal ratification. They establish that there are things you may not do even to an enemy, even while losing: the wounded are treated, prisoners are not tortured, civilians and hospitals are not targets. They are violated constantly, and that is not an argument against them — a violated rule that everyone has signed is a rule you can be prosecuted under, which is precisely the difference between a norm and an opinion. the Geneva Conventions

The most ratified human rights treaty is the one about children.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child has more parties than any other human rights instrument. Its central move is deceptively simple: a child is a bearer of rights rather than an object of protection, entitled to a view and to have it heard. Almost every state on earth has agreed to that in writing, which is worth remembering when someone claims human rights are a parochial idea belonging to one culture. the Convention

Informed consent was written in a courtroom.

The Nuremberg Code came out of the trial of doctors who had experimented on prisoners. Its first principle is the one everything else rests on: the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. Every ethics board, every consent form and every clinical trial protocol descends from ten paragraphs written in 1947 because the alternative had just been demonstrated. the Nuremberg Code

An entire continent is set aside, and space is nobody's.

The Antarctic Treaty reserves a continent for peaceful scientific use, bans military activity and suspends every territorial claim, and it has held since 1961 through the entire Cold War and after. The Outer Space Treaty says no nation may appropriate the Moon or any celestial body. Both are cases of the species collectively declining to take something it was perfectly capable of taking. the Antarctic Treaty

The oldest agreement is not written down anywhere in particular.

Do not do to others what you would not want done to you appears independently in Confucian, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Greek, Christian, Islamic and secular humanist traditions, in societies with no contact with each other, across roughly three thousand years. That is about as close as moral philosophy gets to an experimental replication. Every codified instrument above is an attempt to write down machinery for a rule people worked out repeatedly on their own. the Golden Rule across traditions