Ethics for a Broken World

Imagine living in the future in a world already damaged by humankind a world where resources are insufficient to meet everyone's basic needs and where a chaotic climate makes life precarious. Then imagine looking back into the past back to our own time and assessing the ethics of the early twenty-first century. Ethics for a Broken World imagines how the future might judge us and how living in a time of global environmental degradation might utterly reshape the politics and ethics of the future. This book is presented as a series of history of philosophy lectures given in the future studying the classic texts from a past age of affluence our own time. The central ethical questions of our time are shown to look very different from the perspective of a ruined world. The aim of Ethics for a Broken World is to look at our present with the benefit of hindsight - to reimagine contemporary philosophy in an historical context - and to highlight the contingency of our own moral and political ideals.