LORDS OF SECRECY is one of the finest books I've read on national security “creep.” Scott Horton manages to retain at least some distance from obvious bias, but some of the information he lays out would cause any legitimate American citizen clenched teeth and a few well-placed emphatic comments.
The three best things I can say about this volume:
1) A heroic work that carefully selected important essays on global ethics from the past 40 years (the book itself, Australian in origin, is published for the first time in 2008).
2) Part of a Paragon Series on Philosphy that is utterly mind-boggling–if only they would make it digital and provide some visualization tools and navigation tools, they could be on to something HUGE.
3) The editors make a very substantive case to the effect that poverty is the central ethical issue of our time. This corresponds to the United Nations High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Opportunities, whose report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, concluded that poverty was the greatest threat to humanity, easily rising above infectious disease, environmental degradation, inter-state conflict, civil war, genocide, other atrocities, proliferation, terrorism, and crime.
Other aspects of this book that captured my attention and tie in elsewhere: