Introduction

‘Global ecology’ and ‘global economy’ are frameworks for describing what is happening in our world. But we have no guide to public action without ‘global ethics’. Ethics tells us what we should do, how we should act. When we act together as a community or a society, then we need political ethics, as Aristotle explained (1976 edn). Since the 1970s our growing consciousness of the ecological crisis has confronted us with the need for global as well as local political action at the intersection between ecology and economy. This kind of action demands an ethic of the public sphere—the political, as well as the personal.¹