Biofuels and the ethics of global governance

As the introduction to this thematic section suggests, critical thinking about the global economy is often rendered according to either systemic ‘or’ everyday ontologies of international political economy (IPE). ¹ Within global ethics, a similar divide between the universal and the particular basis of moral reasoning has often accompanied debates about global justice, human rights, and cosmopolitan democracy. ² However, also pronounced in existing global ethics debates is a tendency to adopt ‘middle-way’ positions; that is to say, even the most ardent cosmopolitan approach to global governance is willing to foreground the role of states and the importance of community in practice. ³ Likewise, theorists of communitarian ethics are keen to explore the possibility of speaking beyond the ‘cave’, as it were. ⁴