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GLOBAL ETHICS: SEMINAL ESSAYS Thomas Pogge and Keith Horton (eds.) St. Paul, MN: Paragon House Publishers, 2008 642 pages, paper, $22.95
As 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.
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