The Practices of Global Ethics takes a unique look at global ethics: not as mere written statements but as a set of practices undertaken by thousands of organisations and hundreds of thousands of people to shape the normative trajectory of human affairs. It looks at statements of global ethical principles including The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Earth Charter and the Rio Documents and positions them as the outcomes and expression of ongoing practices. Offering innovative, critical and thoughtful analyses of ethical practices since World War II, the book examines efforts to promote human rights; foster ecological responsibility; end genocide; reduce global poverty; encourage responsible and sustainable international business practices; cultivate understanding and collaboration amongst the world's religions among other worldwide endeavours.

This provocative and original book challenges the commonplace that contemporary international interactions are best understood as struggles for power. Eschewing jargon and theoretical abstraction, Mervyn Frost argues that global politics and global civil society must be understood in ethical terms. International actors are always faced with the ethical question: So, what ought we to do in circumstances like these? Illustrating the centrality of ethics to our understanding of global politics and global civil society with detailed case studies, Frost shows how international actors constitute one another in global social practices that are underpinned by specific ethical commitments. Case Studies examined include: The War on Iraq The ‘Global War on Terror’ Iran Human Rights Globalization and Migration The use of Private Military Companies. Global Ethics forces readers to confront their own necessary ethical engagement as citizens and rights holders in global society. Failure to understand international relations in ethical terms will lead to misguided action. This book should be read by all scholars and students of international relations as well as the general reader seeking an accessible account of the importance of ethical decisions in world affairs.

Accounts of natural law moral philosophy and theology sought principles and precepts for morality, law, and other forms of social authority, whose prescriptive force was not dependent for validity on human decision, social influence, past tradition, or cultural convention, but through natural reason itself. This volume critically explores and assesses our contemporary culture wars in terms of: the possibility of natural law moral philosophy and theology to provide a unique, content-full, canonical morality; the character and nature of moral pluralism; the limits of justifiable national and international policy seeking to produce and preserve human happiness, social justice, and the common good; the ways in which morality, moral epistemology, and social political reform must be set within the broader context of an appropriately philosophically and theologically anchored anthropology. This work will be of interest to philosophers, theologians, bioethicists, ethicists and political scientists.

Ratified by the Parliament of the World’s Religions in 1993 and expanded in 2018, "Towards a Global Ethic (An Initial Declaration)," or the Global Ethic, expresses the minimal set of principles shared by people—religious or not. Though it is a secular document, the Global Ethic emerged after months of collaborative, interreligious dialogue dedicated to identifying a common ethical framework. This volume tests and contests the claim that the Global Ethic’s ethical directives can be found in the world’s religious, spiritual, and cultural traditions. The book features essays by scholars of religion who grapple with the practical implications of the Global Ethic’s directives when applied to issues like women’s rights, displaced peoples, income and wealth inequality, India’s caste system, and more. The scholars explore their respective religious traditions’ ethical response to one or more of these issues and compares them to the ethical response elaborated by the Global Ethic. The traditions included are Hinduism, Engaged Buddhism, Shi‘i Islam, Sunni Islam, Confucianism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Indigenous African Religions, and Human Rights. To highlight the complexities within traditions, most essays are followed by a brief response by an expert in the same tradition. Multi-Religious Perspectives on a Global Ethic is of special interest to advanced students and scholars whose work focuses on the religious traditions listed above, on comparative religion, religious ethics, comparative ethics, and common morality.

Global ethics addresses some of the most pressing ethical concerns today, including rogue states, torture, scarce resources, poverty, migration, consumption, global trade, medical tourism, and humanitarian intervention. It is both topical and important. How we resolve (or fail to resolve) the dilemmas of global ethics shapes how we understand ourselves, our relationships with each other and the social and political frameworks of governance now and into the future. This is seen most clearly in the case of climate change, where our actions now determine the environment our grandchildren will inherit, but it is also the case in other areas as our decisions about what it is permissible for humans beings to do to each other determines the type of beings we are. This book, suitable for course use, introduces students to the theory and practice of global ethics, ranging over issues in global governance and citizenship, poverty and development, war and terrorism, bioethics, environmental and climate ethics and gender justice.

Inspired by the 1993 Parliament of the Worlds Religions, this volume for the first time brings the scholarly discipline of comparative religious ethics into constructive collaboration with the community of interreligious dialogue. The contributors draw from both communities of discourse in addressing questions of method and theory and global moral issuessuch as human rights, distributive justice, politics of war, international business, the environment, and genocidein a cross-cultural context. }Inspired by the 1993 Parliament of the Worlds Religions, this volume for the first time brings the scholarly discipline of comparative religious ethics into constructive collaboration with the community of interreligious dialogue. Its design is premised on two important insights. First, interreligious dialogue offers to comparative religious ethics a new, more persuasive rationale, agenda of issues, and practical orientation. Second, comparative religious ethics offers to interreligious dialogue an arsenal of critical tools and methods which will enhance the sophistication of its practical work. In this way, both theory (a dominant concern and strength of comparative religious ethics) and praxis (a dominant concern and strength of interreligious moral dialogue) are joined together in mutual effort, each contributing to the benefit of the other.The volumes contributors share this vision of collaboration, drawing explicitly from both communities of discourse in a manner that crosses disciplinary and professional boundaries to deal creatively and constructively with important methodological and global moral issue. Although theory and practice cannot easily be separated in such a collaborative project, for the purpose of clarity, the volume is divided into two main parts. The first specifically engages questions of method, theory, and the social role of the public intellectual; the second, on substantive moral themes and issues, many of which were raised at the 1993 Parliament. Taken together, the volumes essays articulate and illustrate new ways of approaching contemporary moral concerns cross-culturally yet with a rigor appropriate to our complex and pluralistic world.

What kind of ethics in world politics is possible if there is no foundation for moral knowledge or global reality is at least complex and contingent? Furthermore, how can an ethics grapple with difference, a persistent and confounding feature for global politics? This book responds to the call for a bold and creative approach to ethics that avoids assuming or aspiring to universality, and instead prioritizes difference, complexity and uncertainty by turning to reflexivity, not as method or methodology, but as a practice of ethics for politics. This practice, ‘ethical reflexivity’, offers individuals, organizations and communities tools to recognize, interrogate and potentially change the stories they tell about politics—about constraints, notions of responsibility and visions of desirability. The benefits and limits of ethical reflexivity are investigated by the author, who engages writing on critique, rhetoric, affect and relationality, and carefully considers dominant and alternative framings of difficult issues in International Relations (IR)—the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and the US policies of ‘enhanced interrogation’ and drone strikes. This path-breaking study provokes new possibilities for agency and action and contributes to a growing literature in IR on reflexivity by uniquely elaborating its promise as an ethics for politics, and by drawing on thinkers less utilized in discussions of reflexivity such as Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault and Aristotle. This book will appeal to scholars and upper-level graduates in several sub-fields of IR, including international/global ethics, IR theory, global governance, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, foreign policy analysis and US foreign policy.

This revised edition of Kimberly Hutchings’s best-selling textbook provides an accessible introduction to the field of Global Ethics for students of politics, international relations and globalization. It offers an overview and assessment of key perspectives in Global Ethics and their implications for substantive moral issues in global politics. These include the morality of state and non-state violence, the obligations of rich to poor in a globalizing world, and the scope and nature of international human rights. The second edition contains expanded coverage of pressing contemporary issues relating to migration, changes in the technologies of war, and the global environment. Hutchings’s excellent book helps non-specialist students to understand the assumptions underpinning different moral traditions, and enables them to formulate their own views on how to approach moral judgement and prescription – essential in a world which, though it is shared by all, possesses massive cultural differences and inequalities of power.

Two of the dominant themes of discussion in international relations scholarship over the last decade have been global governance and rising powers. Underlying both discussions are profound ethical questions about how the world should be ordered, who is responsible for addressing global problems, how change can be managed, and how global governance can be made to work for peoples in developing as well as developed states. Yet, these are often not addressed or only briefly mentioned as ethical dilemmas by commentators. This book seeks to ask critical and profound questions about what relative shifts in power among states might mean for the ethics and practice of global governance. Three key questions are addressed throughout the volume: Who is rising and how? How does this impact on global governance? What are the implications of these developments for global ethics? Through these questions, some of the key academics in the field explore how far debates over global ethics are really between competing visions of how international society should be governed, as opposed to tensions within the same broad paradigm. By examining how governance works in practice across the Middle East, Africa and Asia, the contributors to this volume seek to critique the way global governance discourse masks the exercise of power by elites and states, both developed and rising. This work will be essential reading for all those with an interest in the future of international relations and global governance.

International order is one of the most challenging issues in political ethics today, and its place within the multifaceted fleld of politics is frequently debated. The diverse phenomena resulting from 'globalisation' - particularly in the wake of the end of the so-called Cold War - urge us to think about our 'world' in terms of a single political entity. Besides the existing international institutions, however, it is still open to question what this entity should be and what concrete political practices should correspond to it. In the essays collected in this book, political scientists, sociologists, philosophers, theologians and policy advisors explore how political practices can be institutionally localised without necessarily becoming incorporated into structures of governance. Political ethics, as presented in this book, seeks to address the particular practices of power, justice, and peace of citizens themselves, and to assess their relevance for the shaping of international insti