Justice, Sustainability, and Security: An Introduction

The importance of ethical issues in global affairs is self-evident, given the prevalence of human suffering around the world today. According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), about one billion people across the globe are living in extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1 per day, while according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), in 2009, about 25 thousand children under the age of five died each day from preventable causes related to poverty. 1 While important progress has been made in the area of “human development” in recent decades, reflecting aggregate improvements in life expectancy, education, income, and literacy, inequality between rich and poor countries continues to deepen, as it does between rich and poor individuals living in almost all of these countries. 2 Furthermore, environmental degradation continues to be a vitally important issue of international affairs as we continue into the twenty-first century, as the poor and disadvantaged are the most vulnerable to the effects of environmental harm. Thus, the UNDP reports that the “continuing failure to reduce the grave environmental risks and deepening social inequalities threatens to slow decades of sustained progress by the world’s poor majority—and even to reverse the global convergence in human development.”