This book is published in the Palgrave Macmillan “Asia Today” series under editors Takashi Inoguchi and G. John Ikenberry. The series examines Asia as “the geopolitical epicentre for the global system,” with intellectual as well as economic and political impacts on global politics. Author Kenneth Winston, long associated with the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), is an accomplished expert in the field of public ethics, with important things to say about “ethics in public life” in different global settings.

Here, Winston examines the impact that “a rising Asia” could have on global concepts of public ethics. The book might be about Asia but it is not solely for Asia: He wants readers globally to think through the application of his Asian-derived examples of public ethics to governance globally. For specialists in the political art of practical reasoning, as Winston is, Ethics in Public Life presents a wide variety of fascinating examples of practical reasoning by Asian governance practitioners. But the author goes many steps further: He provides a challenging restatement about global values in public ethics, with more than a hint of criticism of U.S. practices of good governance.

In several passages, Winston is critical of the public ethics of the United States when engaging with global differences in politics and morality. The balance, however, is his generous use of HKS experts and resources to inform his friendly criticism of the way we can understand public ethics as a feature of global governance. Winston’s main claim is that Asia can teach us much about public ethics. This teaching comes from the drama of official disagreement, rather than the dogma of official doctrine. Four of the five numbered chapters are case studies of official disagreements managed by reflective practitioners who protect vulnerable interests against powerful dominating interests. The three remaining non-numbered chapters provide more theoretical accounts of contemporary public ethics, often based on HKS research papers on integrity in governance. The case chapters are rich with the names of many traditional Asian codes and practices, but the theoretical chapters revolve around the names of a small number of political philosophers who construct the framework of public ethics celebrated by Winston: notably, such Harvard giants as the philosopher John Rawls, the political scientist Joseph Nye, and the legal scholar William P. Alford.

Winston’s case-study picture blends Asian and Western principles of public ethics in an interesting variety of forms, as different national traditions adapt or modify Western ethics to reshape and modernize Asian ethics. The book provides a gallery of case studies of Winston’s “good practitioners” of governance, who promote quite different types of public ethics reflecting the practitioners’ own judgments about how best to balance the competing ethical responsibilities. If the author has a personal or preferred model of cross-cultural public ethics in a rising Asia, this does not distract readers from the simple but compelling task of soaking up the specifics displayed by the assembled good practitioners. Not all of these good practitioners achieve the good they set out to promote. Some even have setbacks or failures, which Winston uses to help readers reflect more deeply on the surprising limits of what he terms “absolutes” in public ethics—be they Asian beliefs or Western values. The “good” in good practitioner refers to their skill in the hard-won but messy practice of governance, and not to their abstract moral virtue or off-the-job personal excellence.

This book is not a theory or even a framework of Asian governance or public ethics but a very readable review of turning points in public governance experienced by practitioners known to Winston. Many of the case studies highlight the professional careers of former students at the HKS whose political and cultural circumstances Winston has had the opportunity to look at closely through his Asian field trips. The countries that emerge in the case studies are Singapore, Cambodia (twice), China, India, and a very corrupt “Kalanistan,” which is not revealed under its own name. Each case study shows a midcareer practitioner using their own professional judgment to interpret the right ethical balance among many competing demands. The cases are similar in that each practitioner knows the limitations of strict compliance with the norms of prevailing local traditions or of Western modernity, yet each devises their own workable balance—given the demanding circumstances of governance they must work through.

The reference to “good practitioners” reflects Winston’s core argument that emerging across Asia are exemplars of good governance who are departing from Asian traditionalism but not fully accepting Western democracy as a universal political norm. Part of the “goodness” of these exemplars is the encouragement they give to Winston to value new forms of public ethics free from the mainstream models promoted in Asian and Western political systems. Advocates of public ethics might be surprised by his defense of “dirty hands” as a core component of leadership ethics. By stepping away from the dry formality of virtue ethics, Winston invites readers to wonder about the nature of public ethics he attributes to Machiavelli in his introductory analytical framework.

Near the center of the book is an unusual 20-page “Addendum” to the 35-page third chapter called “Missionaries in China,” Chapter 3 resembles a case study in that it examines the historical role of Matteo Ricci, the famous Jesuit missionary who lived in China from 1583 until 1610. Winston argues that these early Jesuits practiced a form of “accommodation” by speaking, dressing, and styling themselves as Chinese—in order to gain greater influence in their quest to transform China into a Christian country. The Addendum compares the early missionaries to contemporary rule-of-law exporters who promote a type of modern democracy, frequently based on U.S. norms and institutions, to the developing world. This Addendum has little of praise to say about the “triumphalism” and contemporary anti-accommodation that preaches about, but displays so little of, public ethics.

Several names tend to recur in Winston’s analysis. One is John Dewey, whose democratic pragmatism is often used to identify the importance of due process and of informed judgment in the role of governance. Surprisingly, Winston makes no reference to Dewey’s lengthy visit to China in 1919–21. Another name is Selznick, whose study of the arts of institutional leadership helps give Winston valuable perspective when he is searching for lessons in his Asian case studies. Selznick’s place here clarifies what Winston means by the term “professional” as one with an art or style of practical decision making promoting the public or social institution being served. A third name is Machiavelli, who plays a prominent role as a coach or tutor in practical reasoning, even for those promoting public ethics. Machiavelli’s high respect for the low craft of dirty hands is used by the author to warn readers off the misguided formalism of virtue ethics, which is marginalized here as a formula for personal, as distinct from public, ethics.