This excellent text presents an up-to-date discussion of the difficult question of world ethics in an increasingly diverse and fragmented global environment; measurable by the burgeoning number of independent nation-states. In 1945, at its foundation, the United Nations had just 45 members and even by 1960 its membership was still below 100, yet in 2006 the UN admitted its 192nd member, Montenegro (UN, 2008). Many other mini-states and independence movements exist in various stages of development, potentially doubling the current UN membership yet again. Nigel Dower begins with the ethical questions posed by the break up of Yugoslavia and the UN actions in Kosovo and concludes with the question of whether humanity should live under a world government-and if so, should the UN fill this role. The conclusion he reaches reminds us that ethics is very much an individual responsibility; more than this, there is a reciprocal moral obligation to respect the rightful autonomy of others in much the same way as the golden rule instructs 'do unto others as you would have others do unto you'.
Despite political fragmentation, often based upon ethnic fault lines, the world is also linked and interdependent as never before, by global flows of commodities and assets, also by negative by factors such as pollution and terrorism. The concept of 'world ethics' is, as the author points out, 'not a common phrase', but such a concept is needed as never before. However we also live in a world characterised, in most regions, by increasing diversity, begging the question, can there really be a universally applicable, and indeed universally acceptable, code of ethics?
Chapter 1 definitively lays the foundations for the rest of the book which is an essential reading for anyone new to the concept of ethics, or ethical philosophy and the historical development of theories of ethics. This is potentially a complex and esoteric subject, yet concepts such as 'cosmopolitanism' and 'communitarianism' are explained in a comprehensible way. The reader may well want to put a marker in the end of each chapter where a glossary of explicated 'ethical' terms is helpfully provided. Chapters 2 and 3 provide the key opposing arguments to those presented in Chapter 1, focussing on concepts of the nation-state and the Hobbesian ideas of Leviathan and anarchy. The role of the nationstate in modern times is analysed in terms of stakeholder theory. Machiavelli's ideas are also discussed here. His experience was of living in an age, much like ours, of fragmentation; Italy witnessing frequent conflicts between feudal states. This political situation was in stark contrast to the Pax Romana of a thousand years earlier, covering a territory, thousand times larger than Florence or Genoa (Goldstein, 1999). The theoretical moral analysis is continued with the role of the nation-state, and relations between the older authority of the Church and the more modern notion of the State as 'bordered power container' (Giddens, 1987: 120). A wide range of essential legal and moral philosophers, from Grotius and Hobbes to Rousseau and Hegel, are covered in this chapter, which fleshes out the different theories described in the first chapter of the book.
States face threats at many different levels, from 'individual wrongdoers' to aggression by other states, and increasingly today an intermediate level of threat from non-state warfare, namely terrorist activities; issues arising from the controversial US Guantanamo Bay detention centre highlight the difficulty of dealing with such threats-namely, the protection of society within the state, in an ethical and morally sustainable manner. Chapters 4 and 5 take the reader into a more in-depth analysis of Cosmopolitan theories. A useful feature of the book presented here is the assessment of the relative strengths and weaknesses of these theories, necessarily brief in a book that remains accessible as a