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 into the past - back to our own time - and assessing the ethics of the early twenty-first century.

In Ethics for a Broken World Tim Mulgan imagines how the future might judge us and how living in a time of global environmental degradation might reshape the politics and ethics of the future. 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 - the central ethical questions of our time are shown to look very different from the perspective of a ruined world. By looking into the future to revisit the present, Mulgan aims to reimagine contemporary philosophy in an historical context and, with the benefit of hindsight, highlight the contingency of our own moral and political ideals.