Ethics & International Affairs articles from October 2002

Ethics & International Affairs archives from October 2002

Editor's note.(Editorial)
October 1, 2002... If there was any doubt that international affairs must be understood as more than the relations among sovereign states, that doubt was erased one year ago. The terror attacks of September 2001 have riveted our attention on a nonstate actor, the...

The September 11 effect.
October 1, 2002... There is no single September 11 effect, if by "effect" we mean the way in which something--an event, for example--has influenced our lives. The simple fact is that last year's attacks have reorganized the world in which we live in many ways....

Challenges to humanitarian action.(Roundtable)
October 1, 2002... It is a commonplace to say that the world has changed since the tragic events of September 11. This also holds true for those dedicated to humanitarian action--to the prevention of death and the alleviation of suffering during crisis and...

Crafting a new alliance with the Muslim world.(Roundtable)
October 1, 2002... Most Muslims now live in democracies--a fact that is rarely acknowledged. The Muslim world has also elected five women heads of state in the past decade. (1) These two indicators are symbolic of the diversity within the Muslim world, and also...

Afghan women: recovering, rebuilding.(Roundtable)
October 1, 2002... The United States' foreign policy in Afghanistan has a long history of misguided plans and misplaced trust--a fact that has contributed to the destruction of the social and physical infrastructure of Afghan society. Afghans contend that after...

New priorities for philanthropy.(Roundtable)
October 1, 2002... The events of September 11 have forced institutions to reexamine their priorities and practices. Yet the first world war of the twenty-first century has left many wondering if there truly is a war, and what, if anything, different is demanded...

Promoting human rights.(Roundtable)
October 1, 2002... All wars--and the current war on terrorism is no exception--provide serious tests for the rule of law. The demands of armed conflict, with its instantaneous decisions of life and death, do not lend themselves easily to legal constraint. It is...

Health and global justice.(Special Section)
October 1, 2002... In a recent global survey commissioned for the Millennium Summit of the United Nations, people around the world consistently mentioned good health as what they most desired. This preeminent concern with health is due no doubt both to the value...

Public health or clinical ethics: thinking beyond borders.(Special Section)
October 1, 2002... Most work in medical ethics across the last twenty-five years has centered on the ethics of clinical medicine. Even work on health and justice has, in the main, been concerned with the just distribution of (access to) clinical care for...

Personal and Social Responsibility for Health.(Special Section)
October 1, 2002... AS we come to understand the multiple determinants of health, the list of agents whose actions have a role in its maintenance and restoration grows long--ranging from international organizations to states, communities, employers, insurers, and...

Access to medicines and the rhetoric of responsibility.(Special Section)
October 1, 2002... The story of the decade, and perhaps the century, has finally made it to the front pages: millions of people who could be saved are dying from AIDS. The reason for their unnecessary, premature, and often agonizing deaths is now becoming clear:...

Responsibilities for poverty-related ill health.(Special Section)
October 1, 2002... My view on justice in regard to health is distinctive in two ways. First, I hold that the strength of our moral reasons to prevent or to mitigate particular medical conditions does not depend only on what one might call distributional factors,...

International justice and health: a proposal.(Special Section)
October 1, 2002... In the ten healthiest counties in the United States, white men have a life expectancy above 76.4 years. By contrast, in the ten least healthy counties, African-American men have a life expectancy of between 61 (Philadelphia) and 57.9 years...

Human rights and the politics of victimhood.(Debate)
October 1, 2002... In the lexicon of rights, the concept of human rights can play a wide variety of roles. Human rights can be defined as substantive natural rights that transcend politics and culture or as the rights that underlie political and cultural...

Human wrongs and the tragedy of victimhood.(Response To Human Rights And The Politics Of Victimhood)(article by Robert Meister in this issue, p. 91)
October 1, 2002... About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. W. H. Auden (1) No serious student of...

The liberalism of fear and the counterrevolutionary project.(Reply to Catherine Lu)
October 1, 2002... Much of Catherine Lu's response resonates in tone and substance with my article. Like me, Lu speaks in the language of moral psychology and relies heavily on the later work of that preeminent moral psychologist among liberal theorists, Judith...

Liberals, revolutionaries, and responsibility.(Final Rejoinder)(response to article by Robert Meister in this issue, p. 118)
October 1, 2002... This brief response cannot adequately address all of the challenging issues raised by Robert Meister in his reply, so I hope only to clarify our main points of contention that will likely continue beyond this exchange. The most important...

The advantage to trade.(Free Trade Today & Free Trade Under Fire)(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... Free Trade Today, Jagdish Bhagwati (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 137 pp., $24.95 cloth. Free Trade Under Fire, Douglas A. Irwin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 267 pp., $27.95 cloth. In several respects...

The politics of economy.(False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy)(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, new ed. (New York: Verso Books, 2002), 809 pp., $45 cloth, $27 paper. In recent years, the contentious debates about the...

The values of the market.(George Soros on Globalization & Globalization and Its Discontents)(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... George Soros on Globalization, George Soros (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 191 pp., $20 cloth. Globalization and Its Discontents, Joseph E. Stiglitz, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 282 pp., $24.95 cloth. Whether "globalization" is...

"A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide.(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... Samantha Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 640 pp., $30 cloth. Joseph Stalin, mass-murderer extraordinaire, famously commented, "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." Stalin's cynical statement no doubt has a...

The Ethics of Destruction: Norms and Force in International Relations.(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... Ward Thomas (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 222 pp., $16.95 paper, $42.50 cloth. Ward Thomas's The Ethics of Destruction is an innovative attempt to reconcile ethical principles and power politics. Through an investigation...

Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam.(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... Gilles Kepel, trans. Anthony E Roberts (Cambridge: The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2002), 454 pp., $29.95 cloth. The atrocities of September 11 and the subsequent moves of the U.S. government to bring to account those...

Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India.(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... Ashutosh Varshney (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 384 pp., $45 cloth. Ashutosh Varshney's latest book is a welcome addition to the literature on religious conflicts in India, as well as to political science literature on ethnic...

Global Justice and Transnational Politics: Essays on the Moral and Political Challenges of Globalization.(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... Pablo De Greiff and Ciaran P. Cronin, eds. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 326 pp., $58 cloth, $22.95 paper. There is a studied avoidance of the term "international" in the title of this collection of essays because the contributors,...

Women, Gender, and Human Rights: A Global Perspective.(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... Marjorie Agosin, ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 340 pp., $60 cloth, $25 paper. This collection comprises thirteen more-or-less scholarly essays about historical as well as current efforts to secure human rights...

The Courage of Strangers: Coming of Age with the Human Rights Movement.(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... Jeri Laber (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 416 pp., $27.50 cloth. This book appears--with its ambiguous title--to promise an account of the human rights movement. Those who read it with this expectation will be disappointed, as the book...

Rethinking Humanitarian Intervention: A Fresh Legal Approach Based on Fundamental Ethical Principles in International Law and World Religions.(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... Brian D. Lepard (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 528 pp., $55 cloth. After the Cold War, as the resistance of powerful states to redefining sovereignty weakened, and as the traditional political obstacles...

Agency and Ethics: The Politics of Military Intervention.(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... Anthony F. Lang, Jr. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 242 pp., $66.50 cloth, $22.95 paper. Conventional wisdom holds that power politics is the dominant force behind international intervention; ideology, though often...

Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey.(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... Christine Sylvester (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 350 pp., $65 cloth, $25 paper. Christine Sylvester is a distinguished representative of those feminist scholars who have attempted to think in and around the discipline of...

Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography.(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... William Lee Miller (New York: Knopf, 2002), 515 pp., $30 cloth. Readers will benefit greatly from William Lee Miller's new book, Lincoln's Virtues. Lincoln biography is more than a cottage craft--it has become a light industry unto itself....

Fatal Choice: Nuclear Weapons and the Illusion of Missile Defense.(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... Richard Butler (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001), 200 pp., $22 cloth. Richard Butler, former Australian Ambassador to the United Nations and former chairman of the UN Special Commission to Iraq (UNSCOM), has written a book about the...

United States Economic Statecraft for Survival, 1933-1991: Of Sanctions and Strategic Embargoes.(six books on economic sanctions)(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... United States Economic Statecraft for Survival, 1933-1991: Of Sanctions and Strategic Embargoes Alan E Dobson (New York: Routledge, 2002), 384 pp., $95 cloth. Sanctions and the Search for Security: Challenges to UN Action, David Cortright...