Recent years have seen immense, successive physical upheavals – tsunamis, cyclones and earthquakes – in the physical world. Comparable upheavals have occurred also in western society – though the drive to install abortion on demand and voluntary euthanasia, homosexual marriage and the dissolution of the biological nexus of parents and children through commissioned reproduction.

The difference is that ideology and legislation have normalized and smoothed the social convulsion as a “natural” development. Now, however, the rightfulness and reality of this socially-engineered tsunami is being challenged by a wide coalition of traditional, religiously based cultures. This coalition has come together to return society to the objective values or universal ethics, which have moored civilization for thousands of years.

Politics and Universal Ethics explores dimensions of universal ethics: its engagement of the ideology which opposes it, its involvement in legislative struggles, the compatibility of universal ethics with human freedom, creativity and diversity, and how a political culture of universal ethics may be forged.

Rabbi Dr Shimon Cowen, son of a former Australian Governor General, Sir Zelman Cowen, is Director of the Institute for Judaism and Civilization. This book arises out of his research into the universal ethics at the root of the world religions and his involvement with leaders of other faiths in the political struggles over these profound contemporary moral questions.