Summer reading : Daniel Terris.

Saving the world is a dangerous business--especially for those whom we are trying to save. We spend a lot of time castigating ourselves for our indifference in the face of suffering. But some of our sharpest contemporary writers warn us that we should spend more of our moral capital on considering the consequences of the "good" that we do attempt.

Michael Ignatieff's Virtual War (Henry Holt, $23, 246 pp.) brings a reflective journalist's eye to the ongoing crisis in Kosovo. Ignatieff was and remains a strong hawk in the Balkans, a card-carrying member of the something-must-be-done brigade. Like other observers who covered the siege of Sarajevo and the ravages of the war in Bosnia, Ignatieff brought to the later conflict in Kosovo a conviction that this time the Western powers should intervene early and forcefully to counter Slobodan Milosevic's campaign of ethnic cleansing. Virtual War contains admiring profiles of diplomat Richard Holbrooke, NATO commander Wesley Clark, and UN prosecutor Louise Arbour--people, in Ignatieff's view, willing to take a hard line against Serbian violence. Supporters of human rights, Ignatieff tells us, need to get over their skittishness about military power.

Ignatieff's prescriptions will not satisfy everyone. NATO's bombing campaign inflicted its own damage on Serbians and Kosovars alike, and people will be arguing for a long time about whether military intervention exacerbated the conflict or provided an important check on Serbian power.

The real value of Virtual War, however, lies not in its prescription but in Ignatieff's probing analysis of the ethics of intervention--the consequences not for the Serbs or the Kosovars, but for the Western nations who were willing to wage an essentially gutless war. Kosovo involved a new kind of warfare: it required little mobilization or solidarity of purpose among the general population; lawyers monitored the military targets; precision bombing provided the illusion that intervention was not harming "ordinary" citizens; and protecting the lives of NATO soldiers was a higher priority than achieving military ends. The Kosovo war was "virtual" not only because it was fought on computer screens, but because the Western commitment to its goals was so shallow.

Virtual war is a product of cultures of comfort, a luxury of the powerful. Ignatieff himself would have preferred a more wholehearted military intervention in Kosovo, a more robust commitment to the protection of human rights. But even those of us who were more skeptical about the military intervention have much to learn from Ignatieff's probing analysis of the way bloodless modern citizenries operate. We take moral credit for our interventions, but we delegate the sacrifice.

The costs and consequences of our impulses to do good are a favorite topic of novelists as well. In Ian McEwan's Enduring Love (Anchor, $12, 262 pp.), the intervention is an unplanned impulse. A miscalculation in a hot-air balloon puts a young boy and his grandfather in danger, and a disparate group of men converge to try to save them. The child lives, the grandfather does not, but what interests McEwan is the strange and tragic bond that develops between those who run across the field to attempt the rescue.

McEwan's narrator, Joe Rose, finds himself torn between pride and guilt; more tellingly, he finds that the balloon accident has torn the fabric of the facade of his life. Lurking vulnerabilities suddenly emerge from beneath his steady success as a science writer, his loving relationship with his wife, and his pat convictions about the nature of the world. One of the other men involved in the balloon rescue begins to stalk Joe, believing that the accident had a higher purpose: to establish a divinely-inspired bond between the men. Caught in a web of feeling and confusion, Joe is drawn into ever deeper wells of irrationality as the aftermath of the incident unfolds.

Like Ignatieff, McEwan explores the abyss between middle-class lives shrouded in material comfort and the demands of sudden human suffering. Joe's actions at the rescue are impulsive, uncalculated, and even noble. But they are also out of step with the life he has lived. He is both deepened and endangered by his encounter.

Visions of the good are set against one another in deadly competition in an extraordinary series by Philip Pullman. Written for children, these novels possess a depth and complexity that will challenge the most sophisticated reader. In The Golden Compass (Knopf, $10, 399 pp.), the first in a trilogy that is nearing completion, the young Lyra Belacqua finds herself in the middle of a battle between powerful adults who have begun to unlock the secrets of the universe but wish to use their newfound power not to liberate people but to enslave them. In a story rich with elements of journey, fantasy, character, and drama, Pullman launches a deep moral assault on smug convictions of being right. His is a worthwhile caution in a time when our tools for repairing the world may be more advanced than our capacity to use them well.

Daniel Terris is director of the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University.