Ethics & International Affairs articles from April 2004

Ethics & International Affairs archives from April 2004

The preventive use of force: a cosmopolitan institutional proposal.
April 1, 2004... Since September 11 fears of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction have fueled a vigorous worldwide debate about the preventive use of force. Preventive use of force may be defined as the initiation of military action in anticipation of...

The global warming tragedy and the dangerous illusion of the Kyoto Protocol.
April 1, 2004... Now we can go home and look our children in the eye and be proud of what we have done. --Margot Wallstrom Commissioner for the Environment, European Union (1) Little attention was paid to intergenerational justice as compared to...

Global warming: more common than tragic.(Response To The Global Warming Tragedy)
April 1, 2004... Global warming (often called climate change, to represent the broader types of changes an increased average global temperature would cause) is indeed a difficult international environmental problem. Moreover, it is not clear that the Kyoto...

Sharing the riches of the earth: democratizing natural resource--led development.
April 1, 2004... For most of the many poor countries that depend on the oil and mining industries to drive their economies, globalization has been disastrous. With few exceptions, economic liberalization and restructuring of the oil and mining sectors in these...

War and Self-Defense.(Symposium *)
April 1, 2004... When the Bush and Blair administrations justified the 2003 war on Iraq as an act of preemptive self-defense, this was greeted in many quarters with understandable skepticism. How can the right of self-defense be legitimately invoked when no...

Self-defense and the obligations to kill and to die.(Response To War And Self-Defense)
April 1, 2004... Questions of whether the wars of states reduce to the self-defense of individuals are not idle speculation. They inform which wars we fight as well as how we fight them. Consider, for example, the issue of how states procure soldiers. In the...

War as self-defense.(Response To War And Self-Defense)
April 1, 2004... First imagine a case in which a person uses violence in self-defense; then imagine a case in which two people engage in self-defense against a threat they jointly face. Continue to imagine further cases in which increasing numbers of people act...

Innocent attackers and rights of self-defense.(Response To War And Self-Defense)
April 1, 2004... Imagine that a neighboring state drafts an army of ignorant soldiers, makes them falsely believe that your state poses an imminent threat to their survival or political independence, and then launches them across your border. As a soldier,...

Self-defense in international law and rights of persons.(Response To War And Self-Defense)
April 1, 2004... In War and Self-Defense David Rodin uncovers many flaws of current thinking about war. (1) Rodin correctly points out that the justification of national self-defense goes beyond the justification of individual self-defense. He accurately...

Beyond national defense.(Reply To The Critics)
April 1, 2004... In War and Self-Defense I attempt to generate a dilemma for the just war theory by arguing that the right of national defense cannot be reduced to personal rights of self-defense, nor can it be explained through an analogy with them. (1) My...

Just War against Terror: the Burden of American Power in a Violent World.
April 1, 2004... Jean Bethke Elshtain (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 256 pp., $23 cloth. Elshtain, a prominent Christian social ethicist who holds a chair in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, has written a book that is both polemical and...

The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force.
April 1, 2004... Martha Finnemore (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 192 pp., $26 cloth. In The Purpose of Intervention, Martha Finnemore probes how shifts in the international normative context have shaped state action, even in an area where...

The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not Affluence, is the Environment's Number One Enemy.
April 1, 2004... Jack M. Hollander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 251 pp., $27.50 cloth. Poverty is the cause of the real environmental crisis, according to lack Hollander. Affluence is the environment's friend, not its enemy. Rather...

Order and Justice in International Relations.
April 1, 2004... Rosemary Foot, John Lewis Gaddis, and Andrew Hurrell, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 328 pp., $72 cloth, $24.95 paper. From the time of Plato and Aristotle, the balance between justice and order in organized political...

The Moral Foundations of Politics.
April 1, 2004... Ian Shapiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 289 pp., $25 cloth. Ian Shapiro's book The Moral Foundations of Politics is an impressive addition to his list of distinguished publications on democracy and political theory. The...

Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Miracle or Model?
April 1, 2004... Lyn S. Graybill (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002), 231pp., $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is arguably the most discussed and controversial such body to investigate and...

Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor.
April 1, 2004... Paul Farmer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 419 pp., $27.50 cloth. In Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, Paul Farmer documents the linkages between structural violence and human...