Unlike other animals, which are born with strong instincts, we humans must learn how to live socially—and we learn from the people around us. As a result, we’re closely linked to the community we’re raised in. Our daily lives and identities are affected by the common experiences shared with the people in our community. We learn the community’s values, history, and rules. When we become part of a community, it becomes part of us. Citizenship is the state of being an active, engaged, and productive member of a community. As citizens, we get certain rights, but also certain responsibilities. To be good citizens, we must live up to these responsibilities. That’s because we share our future with the other individuals in our community. Our actions affect them, and theirs affect us. A community can only grow and flourish through time if good citizens do their best to improve it. We all have a sense of right and wrong, but we don’t always follow our better judgments—good citizens must also live ethically, or morally. Whenever we decide not to live ethically, we risk hurting the people around us and ourselves. Being a good citizen has immediate rewards. Ethical living and good citizenship can improve your academic and social success, your happiness and quality of life, and your future prospects for professional success. By being good citizens and living ethically, we encourage others to do the same. This book provides ten tips on how to be a good citizen and live ethically—ethics 101, consider the consequences of your actions, be a good neighbor, take every opportunity to make friends, be respectful, obey the law, know and stand up for your rights, know your rights, stay informed, and get involved. The book also provides reasons why readers should care, and how they will benefit their community and self by being a good citizen and living ethically.

In the first full length examination of the topic, Ethical Citizenship rediscovers a significant and distinctive contribution to how we might understand citizenship today. Leading international scholars bring together theory and practice to explore its historical roots, contemporary relevance and application to international politics.

Scholarship is a multi-generational collective enterprise with a commitment to advancing knowledge, inspiring reflection, and facilitating stronger neighborhoods, cities and countries. This book explicitly adopts this lens as a recognition of the contributions of Prof. Terry Cooper to scholarship and practice, and as a mechanism to connect the past to the present and ultimately the future of scholarship in public ethics and citizen engagement. This “multi-generational” approach is designed to reveal the persistent and future ongoing need to engage as a scholarly and practitioner community with these questions. The book is broken into three main sections: citizenship and neighborhood governance, public service ethics and citizenship, and global explorations of citizenship and ethics. Unique in this collection is the explicit linkage across the main focus areas of citizenship and ethics, as well as the comparative and global context in which these issues are explored. Cases and data are examined from the United States, Chile, Thailand, India, China, Georgia, and Myanmar. Ultimately, it is made clear through each individual chapter and the collective whole that research on citizenship and ethics within public affairs and service has a rich history, remains critical to the strengthening of public institutions today, and will only increase in global significance in the years ahead.

This collection of essays offers thoughtful discussions of major challenges confronting the theory and practice of citizenship in a globalized, socially fragmented, and multicultural world. The traditional concept of citizenship as a shared ethnic, religious, and/or cultural identity has limited relevance in a multicultural world, and even the connection between citizenship and national belonging has been put in jeopardy by increasing levels of international migration and mobility, not to mention the pervasive influence of a global economy and mass media, whose symbols and values cut across national boundaries. Issues addressed include the ethical and practical value of patriotism in a globalized world, the standing of conscience claims in a morally diverse society, the problem of citizen complicity in national and global injustice, and the prospects for a principled acceptance by practising Muslims of a liberal constitutional order. In spite of the impressive diversity of philosophical traditions represented in this collection, including liberalism, pragmatism, Confucianism, Platonism, Thomism, and Islam, all of the volume’s contributors would agree that the crisis of modern citizenship is a crisis of the ethical values that give shape, form, and meaning to modern social life. This is one of the few edited volumes of its kind to combine penetrating ethical discussion with an impressive breadth of philosophical traditions and approaches. Chapters “What is the use of an Ethical Theory of Citizenship?” and “An Ethical Defense of Citizenship” are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.