International Political Theory and Ethics

I'm a bit behind on this one, but I picked up Kwame Appiah's book late last week and have been workinging through it this weekend. While not controversial or revolutionary in the realm of global ethics, he does provide a more convincing cosmopolitanism that most philosophers. He's keen to focus on imagination and conversation as the most important steps toward a more inclusive approach to our ethical and moral thinking, as well as our actions at a personal and political level. For Appiah, the heart of cosmpolitanism is the idea that we can and should be concerned with human beings distant from us, especially given the increased global interaction and the attendent effects of that interaction. Basically, given that how we think and act effects people throughout the globe, we need to have an ethics with global concern, a good starting point for cosmopolitanism I think.

From there he tries to identify what is shared among all people, both in common physical capacities as well as thin versions of our moral and ethical concepts (he speaks mostly in the language of values) as a basis for understanding and for practice, even if the reasons why we support certain actions may not be the same for all of us. The style is simple and clear, without doing a diservice to either the content or the importance of the kind of work that he is doing. It uses a broad range of examples drawn from throughout the world, history and literature widely defined. As an added bonus to me, he's one of the few authors speaking to international/global issues in the language of values and, at least in some minimal sense, pluralism (John Gray being the other notable exception).