Ethics, Economics and International Relations

A pioneering work in ethics and economics for the new global era raising all the hard questions that we need to think about in the coming decades, and proposing a radically new way of thinking about how the global community should function.'Peter Singer, IRA W. De Camp Professor of Bioethics, Princeton University'One of those rare books whose every chapter is a source of both exhilaration and despair.'William E. Rees, University of British ColumbiaIn the first edition of this remarkable book Peter G. Brown identified three challenges that lay ahead of us:* to come up with an adequate account of our minimal obligations to each other, and to the rest of the natural order;* to redefine and reshape the institutions of economics, government, and civil society to reflect those obligations;* and to re-conceptualize and redirect relations between nations so as to foster those institutions and discharge those obligations.In this second edition he revisits and expands on those original ideas and draws some new, and innovative, conclusions that will redirect what we do and give substance and direction to the institutions that must be adopted if life is to flourish. Finding our historical attitude of 'full-human- use' toward the environment unsatisfactory, Brown offers an alternative: an 'all-species- use'. What he calls 'the commonwealth of life' and the acceptance of this reasoning has vital implications for all life that share this planet.

Peter G. Brown is Professor in the Department of Geography at McGill University. He is the author of Restoring the Public Trust: A Fresh Vision for Progressive Government in the Americas (Beacon Press, 1994).