The United States is such a large country that its citizens have a tendency to forget the rest of the world-until something major, for example, foreign competition, catches its attention for a while. That tendency is strongest in fields, like professional ethics, where the US still maintains a lead. Yet, even in professional ethics, the US is only a modest chunk of a large and lively world, a fact I only began to appreciate as I prepared this issue.

My first intimations came when I noticed that many of the announcements crossing my desk had return addresses outside the United States. There was, for example, the announcement of a Latin American School of Bioethics. One of its organizers was the Mainetti Foundation, working through its Institute of Medical Humanities, now more than twenty years old. Apparently, then, Argentina had been involved in bioethics-or, at least, medical humanities-for almost as long as the US. Yet, until reading that brochure, I had assumed quite without thinking-that bioethics had until the last few years been almost entirely a North American preserve (with other Anglo-Saxons participating now and then). I doubt I was alone in that prejudice.

This May I received an announcement that shook that prejudice in another way. Hulga Kuhse (Centre for Human Bioethics, Monash University Melbourne, Australia) wrote to announce an International Association of Bioethics. The new organization's office will be in Melbourne, about as far from the US as it is possible to go.

Bioethics is only one department of professional ethics. My education has gone well beyond that department. It seemed that I had only to raise the subject of professional ethics elsewhere to learn something interesting. For example, lunch with a few engineering faculty and Latin American students attending HT taught me that, since early in this century, India's engineering societies have been as effective in setting standards as their American counterparts (and more effective than their British counterparts), but that, though engineers as individuals have more prestige in Latin America than in the US, they have not been able to organize as effectively as engineers in India or the US.

The Center's Librarian, herself an Egyptian, not only told me a story about her country that first suggested the topic of this issue, she also found relevant articles. The most intriguing came from The San Diego Union (Saturday, December 30, 1989). The story was recently confirmed (or, at least, repeated) by the Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, June 27,1990). Beginning in 1981 with one Gerd Achenbach of Cologne, a few philosophers in the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark have been opening private practices. The Dutch philosopher, Ad Hoogendijk, described his practice in this way: "I try to help people answer very basic questions like: Who are you? What do you want? I don't try and fit a person into a preexisting theory but take what they say about themselves at face value." Apparently, then, Hoogendijk at least does what philosophers have always done, try to help people think through a problem clearly. He charges $50 an hour. Here is one field in which European philosophers are well ahead of philosophers here.

The five pieces included in this issue come from four countries: the USSR, England, Canada, and Australia (with the smallest country, Australia, providing two). They are representative only of those people who both agreed to write and got their work in by the deadline. Most are themselves Perspectives readers. Still outstanding are pieces from Egypt, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Sweden, Puerto Rico, and Costa Rica.

My hope is to do one or more additional issues on professional ethics around the world. I am still looking for volunteers, especially in Asia (including India, China, or Japan), Africa (especially south of the Sahara), and southern Europe (from France to Greece, from Romania to Portugal). This is a chance for readers of Perspectives to educate one another (and me).

What is most striking about the five pieces printed in this issue is the similarity of general concerns. For example, the Russian, Larisa Gromova, the Australians, M.W. Jackson and Michael Small, and even the English team of de Winter Hebron and de Winter Hebron mention political ethics, with the Australians and English reporting troubles of a sort familiar to us in Chicago.

But perhaps more interesting are the different emphases in different countries. For example, Harry Redner's piece on academic ethics in Australia stresses issues-as he notes-to which other countries, especially the US, seem to have paid little attention.

Though Americans have a tendency to annex Canada quite without thinking-what Michael McDonald reports is a country engaged in planning a national effort in applied ethics. Planning of any sort is likely to be something from which the US can learn. But, surprisingly, in applied ethics it at least appears to be something from which even the USSR can learn.

Readers will have noticed that this issue is twelve pages rather than the usual eight. This is a temporary expedient to allow room for everything we wanted to get in, including two items we had to leave out of past issues, Vivian Weil's "At the Center" and a Letter to the Editor.

We have also included the usual Announcements-about which I must give a word of explanation. A reader called to say that by the time he received Perspectives some of the announcements barely left him time to drive to the airport. I could blame the US Postal Service (which, according to a wholly unjustified rumor, still uses ox carts to move mail across Chicago). But the truth is that the tardy notice is at least in part the result of deliberate policy.

Perspectives is published only twice a year. Thus, its timeliness as a bulletin board is necessarily limited. In addition, we don't rush to press. We must therefore either print very few of the announcements we receive or view those we publish as a way to keep readers informed about what is happening, rather than about what they can attend. Knowing of a conference allows a reader to write for papers even if-as often happens-she could not attend for reasons having nothing to do with the tardiness of notice.

We do, however, generally draw the line at events that occur before we go to press. So, for example, I have before me notice of a conference, Confronting Tough Choice: Ethics with a Public Affairs Framework, July 17-18, 1990, Washington, DC. While this worthy event was scheduled too early to be announced in this issue, information about it arrived too late to be printed in the last issue. Perhaps, then, the ultimate source of the problem lies neither with the Postal Service nor with Perspectives but with those who announce conferences too close to the time they will occur. Conference planners take note!