Alliances range from alliances between individuals working to a common but specific goal, through organisations within countries and across borders to very broad alliances of commitment to common values and principles as with bodies that produce declarations such as the Earth Charter (Earth Council. 2000. The Earth Charter. http://earthcharter.org/). This paper focusses on such general statements, in particular the potential and limits involved in shaping a global ethic as a set of values and norms shared by people from all over the world. The idea of diverse people sharing an ethic has several levels of interpretation, from a set of values that happen to be shared, through a set of values that are self-consciously shared by people and groups for whom that sharing is a source of solidarity, to a set of values that is shared because it is shaped and agreed by an active process of dialogue, often cross-cultural, which may be ongoing, evolving and dynamic. The latter form of sharing can certainly be seen as a kind of global ethical alliance, and arguably has a role to play in facilitating more specific kinds of alliance, e.g. between people interested in development peacebuilding or security and sustainability.

Ethics concerns the nature and justification of moral values and their application to decisions about how to act. How should we act? What kind of life should we live? What are the elements of a ‘good’ life? Moral values cover various norms of behaviour, such as telling the truth, keeping promises, not causing harm, acting justly, respecting rights and acting for others. These moral norms generally are accepted at least partly because their observance contributes to the realisation of well-being. So we also need, at least, an account of what human well-being consists of – things like pleasure, happiness, health, knowledge, love, relationships, and appreciation of nature. Different thinkers have different views about what the norms are and what the ‘goods’ are, and how to interpret and justify them. Nevertheless, the ethical point of view is generally contrasted with the self-interested point of view, because it is concerned with what is good, just and right from the point of view of everyone affected by our actions. Therefore, here I present my personal reflections as a philosopher, following 30 years of thinking about environmental issues.

Global ethics is an emerging discipline which has not yet reached maturity. The main tasks before it to gain maturity are: first, to achieve a greater integration of various domains of enquiry all of which are concerned with global normative issues. At a general level this includes integrating global ethics with cosmopolitanism, global justice and human right discourse. At the level of areas of concern, there needs to be greater integration of various areas such as development, trade, environment and climate change. And it must grapple with the question of diversity within universality: how far can diversity of practices be accommodated within a culturally sensitive universal framework? Second, there is the question of finding a shared normative framework with respect to the diverse worldviews that may lie behind this: what degree and kind of convergence/consensus are worth working for? Third, there is the task of creating the conditions for its own wider acceptance, which should include taking the idea of global citizenship seriously.Keywords: cosmopolitanismdevelopment ethicsdiversityglobal citizenshipglobal justicehuman rightsshared valuesuniversalismworldviews Notes on contributorNigel Dower is Honorary Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, where he taught for most of the period 1967–2004. He has also been a visiting professor a number of times in the USA and Iceland. He was President of the International Development Ethics Association from 2002 to 2006. His research interests in the last 30 years have focused on various issues in global ethics, including development, the environment, human rights, peace & security, and global citizenship. He is author of numerous articles and four books: World Poverty Challenge and Response (Ebor Press, 1983); World Ethics: The New Agenda (Edinburgh University Press, 1998, 2007); An Introduction to Global Citizenship (EUP, 2003) and The Ethics of War and Peace (Polity, 2009).

AbstractHunger is the lack of food needed to avoid malnutrition, and world hunger is the aggregated version of this, with by far the most hunger located in the Third World. Malnutrition, as the lack of some or all the nutrients necessary for health, affects approximately one billion hungry people in the world. Almost all hunger is caused by absolute poverty, defined as living on US$1.25 per day or less. This also affects approximately one billon people – many children – or nearly one‐fifth of the world's population. Even with a rising world population, the world produces enough food to meet everyone's nutritional needs. If the poor do not have enough, it is because, in the absence of external intervention, they either do not produce enough from their land or do not earn enough to buy it.

Development ethics examines the ethical issues concerning the pursuit of socioeconomic development. The emergence of this as a subdiscipline over the past few decades sprung from earlier international debates about development in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly in relation to alleviating world poverty. Different models of development presuppose different concepts of well‐being and of justice which inform them. A development ethic can also be used to critique, if it is seen as unsatisfactory, what is done in the “name” of development by others. One significant disagreement is between those who focus on economic growth and those who argue for more expansive conceptions of well‐being and justice and put stress on factors such as environmental constraints on development. Development ethics is located within the wider framework of global ethics, which informs both the responsibilities of individuals as global citizens and the international responsibilities of nation‐states and business corporations to promote and not impede development.

Criticism or rejection of cosmopolitanism comes from many sources: from nationalism, ethnic loyalties, communitarian accounts of the sources of meaning, obligation and identity, and relativist rejections of universal morality; from accusations of Western hegemony in the name of universal values, and fears of (imposed) world government or “cosmopolis”; and from the insistence on the priority of national security in the face of a threatening world of terrorist threats, fundamentalist agendas, economic competition and environmental conflict. These sources of rejection will be examined and largely disarmed. Whilst some forms of opposition are simply mistaken, most rejections of cosmopolitanism stem from a failure to understand it in its most plausible form. Whilst some forms of cosmopolitanism are indeed to be questioned, such as dogmatic fundamentalisms, religious or political (including the dogmatic forms of neo-liberalism), we must not throw out the baby with the bathwater, but retain a flexible cosmopolitanism which is justified dialogically through cross-cultural dialogue as well as by individual intellectual reflection, combines a modest universalism with respect for diversity (within limits), favors multiple levels of governance, local, regional and global, and combines global solidarity and responsibility with other levels of particularistic solidarity and relationship in community.

This paper arises out of comments which I was asked to make on Clare Palmer’s conference paper on environmental ethics and out of further reflection on the theme of the conference. For the purposes of her paper she takes environmental ethics to be about what is considered to be of intrinsic value in the environment, and discusses the impacts, positive or negative, on four cases of carriers of value in the environmental – individual sentient things, individual living things (respect for life); species of living things and whole ecosystems. Palmer’s paper focuses then on environmental ethics as about the intrinsic value of things in nature and the impact of agricultural intensification. But given the general title of her paper included ‘environmental ethics’, I feel that before I turn to her particular points in the second half of this paper, I should like to look at the issue of environmental ethics more broadly as concerning the impact of human activity on the environment from the point of view of the well-being of human beings.

This article surveys the recently established field of enquiry called ‘development ethics’ – that is, ethical enquiry into the normative basis of socio-economic development. This covers two levels of enquiry. First, it involves enquiry into the nature of human well-being and the social norms within which the conditions of well-being should be promoted, and includes consideration of both the means and the ends of development. Second, it involves the ethical basis of the wider global framework within which the development of countries takes place. This covers both the normative basis of international relations and the global relations between individuals in different parts of the world as expressed in the idea of global responsibility. Keywords: developmentethicsglobal responsibilitymeans and endswell-being Notes This was originally a keynote lecture given at the IDEA International Conference, University of Makerere, Uganda on 19 July 2006. Specific references to Uganda have been removed. He has written extensively in the area, a recent book being Development ethics: A guide to theory and practice (Goulet Citation1995). Whilst the standard view is that it is the actual functionings that constitute a person's well-being which the capabilities make possible, it is plausible to regard certain capabilities (or at least the agent's awareness that he possesses them) as also constitutive of his well-being. Being free and being aware that one is free both seem to be ‘goods’ apart from anything I do to exercise my freedom. These were the organising ethical themes of the conference in Uganda. See n1.

World Ethics: The New Agenda identifies different ways of thinking about ethics, and of thinking ethically about international and global relations. It also considers several theories of world ethics in the context of issues such as war and peace, world poverty, the environment and the United Nations. Key Features Rejects the idea of international scepticism and the 'morality of states' Demonstrates the distinction between a global ethic as a theory and as social reality Defends the claim that we are world citizens with global duties The second edition has been substantially revised to take account of recent global developments. The discussion is grounded in an awareness of the post-9/11 world in which we live and offers a more detailed exploration of the idea of global citizenship and a global or cosmopolitan ethic. There are new sections on terrorism and security and on global justice, and additional material on issues such as climate change, internationalist ethics, the ethics of war, sustainability, development, globalisation, global civil society and global governance. Each chapter now has a summary box at the beginning and a set of questions for discussion at the end.

This article presents global ethics as critical reflection on the nature, justification and application of a global ethic. Much of the article focuses on the nature of a global ethic as the content of global ethics, e.g. whether it is thick or thin, is about universal values or transnational responsibilities, is a set of values justified by a particular thinker, values widely shared or values universally accepted. Global ethics itself as a process is also examined. In the last part the Earth Charter is examined as an example of a global ethic, and a case is made for regarding it, both in respect to its content and in respect to the senses in which it is and is not a global ethic, as an appropriate subject matter for global ethics.

Although this paper attends to some extent to the question whether the global economy promotes or impedes either justice or sustainability, its main focus is on the relationship between justice and sustainability. Whilst sustainability itself as a normative goal is about sustaining inter alia justice, justice itself requires intergenerationally the sustaining of the conditions of a good life for all. At the heart of this is a conception of justice as realising the basic rights of all–in contrast to a more demanding distributive principle or a less demanding principle of not violating the liberty rights or other basic rights of others. Although Pogge’s analysis that the global economy causes harm by failing to realise basic rights is seen as a useful challenge to common libertarian assumptions, the acceptance of other positive correlative duties, following Shue, is advocated. Insofar as the global economy fails to realise basic justice, the question is ‘how far can it realistically be changed?’ and this is a function partly of the moral attitudes of individuals at large.

AbstractIn what sense(s) is the Earth Charter a global ethic? The Earth Charter is a global ethic as a set of values and norms which can be supported from many worldviews rather than as a "set of values and norms plus a particular worldview"; and the Earth Charter is also a global ethic as an ethic which is widely shared across the world rather than as one which is universally shared by all. What kinds of resistance does promoting the Earth Charter meet? A number of intellectual positions are addressed, such as realism in international relations and the neoliberal paradigm. The Earth Charter thus raises many issues in global ethics as an intellectual enquiry, particularly if it is thought of as a tool to be used in the spirit of critical loyalty.