Global Ethics: Seminal Essays

GLOBAL ETHICS: SEMINAL ESSAYS Thomas Pogge and Keith Horton (eds.) St. Paul, MN: Paragon House Publishers, 2008 642 pages, paper, $22.95As the second decade of the twenty-first century begins, it seems uncontroversial to say that our world is a global one. As the editors of this important anthology point out, the proliferation of transnational actors and profound influence of their activities on the domestic life of national societies have rendered obsolete the sharp distinction between ?wiranational and international relations (p. xvii-xviii). In the last decades, moral and political theorists have sought to refine and reconsider the effects of these changes on our understanding of the world. How, for example, does globalization affect our responsibilities for alleviating the suffering of world's poor? Is the world system of nation-states morally justifiable, and if not, what kind of institutional structure should replace it? The attempts to find answers to these pressing questions have filled (indeed, is still filling) numerous pages in a plethora of academic journals and books. In Global Ethics: Seminal Essays (as well as the accompanying volume, Global Justice: Seminal Essays co-edited by Barrel Moellendorf), Thomas Pogge and Keith Horton have taken on the daunting task of compiling a collection of the most important, original and influential contributions to this debate in the last forty years.The conceptual distinction between justice and ethics, which dictates the thematic separation of this collection into two volumes, is made clear in the introduction. By the given definition, global justice concerns the moral assessment of institutions and the moral responsibilities with respect to such institutions, while global ethics takes the global institutional background as given. As the editors themselves admit, this distinction is not as clear-cut as might be thought and indeed several essays could be justifiably placed in the parallel volume. However, this distinction does make the overall theme of Global Ethics very clear to the reader, despite its very broad scope. Within this scope, one can recognise several reoccurring questions, such as, (a) the nature and scope of the rich world's distributive obligations towards the world's poor, (b) the justification of humanitarian military intervention, (c) national self-determination and partiality towards compatriots, (d) problems of global scope, such as climate change and overpopulation, and (e) the universability of western liberal conceptions of human rights.It is in this book's merit that competing arguments on these questions are presented in a challenging and thought-provoking way. Take the question of distributive duties for the world's poor. Peter Singer's classic essay, Famine, Affluence and Morality, is still, four decades after its publication, one of the most influential pieces in contemporary ethics. Singer criticises our ethical myopia, arguing that while we would endure personal costs to save a (hypothetical ) drowning child from a pond, we are idle in rescuing the millions of children dying of poverty worldwide. …