I recently read Peter Singer’s One World: The Ethics of Globalization, which was originally delivered as a series of lectures in 2000. I had a longish post in the hopper about national loyalties and obligations to strangers, but it didn’t really go anywhere so I junked it. Suffice it to say, I don’t always agree with Singer’s reasoning or his conclusions, but this is a very lucid and well-argued overview of some of the major issues facing the world: global warming, international trade, international law and humanitarian intervention, and poverty. Singer thinks we need a more cosmopolitan outlook as well as instruments of global governance, but his prescriptions are tempered with pragmatism and realism about what’s possible. He also marshals actual facts about the various subjects at hand (the discussion of international aid is well worth the price of admission alone) and is willing to follow that evidence where it seems to lead (he is undogmatic about economic globalization for instance, recognizing that it’s very difficult to say, based on the available evidence, whether it has been a net benefit, particularly for the world’s poor). In each case I was forced to carefully re-think my existing views. (I think I’m more of a nationalist and less of an interventionist than Singer would like me to be.)

By way of criticism, I don’t think we need as big a revolution in our moral outlook as Singer thinks we do to tackle these problems. This is similar to my view of his writing about animals; I think we can reduce the exploitation of non-human animals without necessarily giving up our partiality for human interests. Likewise, I think we can take major steps toward discharging our obligations to the rest of the world without denying that we have special duties to our own compatriots. Elevating the status of one group doesn’t mean downgrading another’s. I readily agree, for instance, that we have a duty to increase foreign aid to alleviate severe poverty and still think that I have special ties to my own country and its citizens. On the other hand, Singer is probably right that in our world speciesism and nationalism carry far more weight than their opposites, so maybe a shove in the other direction is necessary. Reservations aside, this is a model work of accessible, practical philosophy.