Introduction

From the early 1990s on, terms similar to “global ethics” have been used to denominate renewed attempts to discover or construct what binds humans together across cultural and religious differences (Küng’s Declaration toward a Global Ethic, Unesco’s Universal Ethics and the Global Ethics Project). These attempts, representing global ethics as the search to move beyond relativism towards a renewed conception of ethics for late-modern society, have developed within a wide range of academic (e.g. interreligious and intercultural studies) and non-academic (e.g. within the UN) disciplines. Besides these general proposals, new, concrete issues with global scope have become prominent and have been analysed from a multi-disciplinary perspective, ending up in new academic disciplines, such as development ethics and global justice studies.