David C. Hendrickson, Colorado College
A significant portion of Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars is an argument "against realism." While applauding Walzer for his examination of the just war tradition, this chapter argues that Walzer has characterized the tradition of political realism in a misleading way. Not simply the moral atheism it is portrayed to be, realism recognizes the moral reality of war while emphasizing state security and independence as the most important factors for the protection of citizens and the continuity of political community. Indeed, this chapter identifies many "realist" aspects of Walzer’s own moral arguments. It takes issue, however, with Walzer’s treatment of intervention, self-determination, and the legitimate aims of war, stating that in these areas Walzer’s framework is excessively permissive and ambiguous.
2. The Slippery Slope to Preventive War
Neta C. Crawford, Boston University
3. Reckoning with Past Wrongs: A Normative Framework
David A. Crocker, University of Maryland
This chapter formulates eight goals that have emerged from worldwide moral deliberation on "transitional justice" and that may serve as a useful framework when particular societies consider how they should reckon with violations of internationally recognized human rights—these are as follows: truth, a public platform for victims, accountability and punishment, the rule of law, compensation to victims, institutional reform and long-term development, reconciliation, and public deliberation. These eight goals are used to identify and clarify (1) the variety of ethical issues that emerge in reckoning with past wrongs, (2) widespread agreements about initial steps for resolving each issue, (3) leading options for more robust solutions of each issue, and (4) ways to weight or trade off the norms when they conflict. The aim is to show that there are crucial moral aspects in reckoning with the past and to clarify, criticize, revise, apply, and diffuse eight moral norms. These goals are not a "one-size-fits-all" blueprint but rather a framework by which societies confronting past atrocities can decide—through cross-cultural and critical dialogue—what is most important to accomplish and the morally best means of doing so.
PART II: Grounds for Intervention
4. Humanitarian Intervention: An Overview of the Ethical Issues
Michael J. Smith, University of Virginia
Interventions in Bosnia, Rwanda, Haiti, and Somalia, for example, indicate a new willingness on the part of the international community to involve itself in the internal affairs of states. However, humanitarian interventions bring with them concerns of consistency and effectiveness, which require deep attention and careful response. Issues of state sovereignty versus moral imperatives continue to challenge external actors. This chapter discusses subjective and objective changes with regard to humanitarian intervention and examines intervention from realist and liberal theoretical perspectives. The chapter offers a new version of liberalism in which the historic guarantee of state sovereignty becomes subordinate to human rights claims, thereby supplying a justification for humanitarian intervention.
5. The Moral Basis for Humanitarian Intervention
Terry Nardin, National University of Singapore
This chapter discusses the moral principles underlying the idea of humanitarian intervention. The analysis is in two parts, one historical and the other philosophical. First, the chapter examines arguments made in late medieval and early modern Europe for using armed force to punish the violation of natural law and to defend communities from tyranny and oppression, regardless of where they occur. It seeks to understand how moralists writing before the emergence of modern international law conceived what we now call humanitarian intervention. In the context of international law, humanitarian intervention is usually understood to be an exception to the nonintervention principle. However, the natural law tradition regards international law as less important than the moral imperative to punish wrongs and protect the innocent. Second, the chapter considers how humanitarian intervention is justified within the reformulation of the natural law tradition displayed in recent efforts to theorize morality along Kantian lines. In this reformulation, humanitarian intervention is a product of the duty of beneficence and, more specifically, of the right to use force to protect the innocent. The chapter draws upon the biblical injunction "Thou shalt not stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor," which has become a centerpiece of the modern reformulation, and briefly explores its application to humanitarian intervention in the context of international relations today. This reformulation of natural law explains why, despite modern efforts to make it illegal, humanitarian intervention remains, in principle, morally defensible.
6. Responsibility to Protect or Trojan Horse? The Crisis in Darfur and Humanitarian Intervention after Iraq
Alex J. Bellamy, University of Queensland
What does the world’s engagement with the unfolding crisis in Darfur tell us about the impact of the Iraq war on the norm of humanitarian intervention? Is a global consensus about a "responsibility to protect" more or less likely? There are at least three potential answers to these questions. Some argue that the merging of strategic interests and humanitarian goods amplified by the intervention in Afghanistan makes it more likely that the world’s most powerful states will act to prevent or halt humanitarian crises. Others insist that the widespread perception that the United States and its allies "abused" humanitarian justifications to legitimate its invasion of Iraq has set back efforts to build a global consensus about humanitarian action. A third group argues that the "responsibility to protect" inhibits the potential for abuse and, as a result, consensus is likely to strengthen post-Iraq for precisely this reason. Through a detailed study of the international engagement with Darfur, I suggest that the latter two arguments have merit but need to be adjusted. I argue that the humanitarian intervention norm has changed in two subtle ways. First, while the strength of the norm itself has not changed, the credibility of the United States and United Kingdom as "norm carriers" has been significantly undermined. Second, while the "responsibility to protect" has been invoked to support international activism, it has also re-legitimated anti-interventionist arguments.
7. Ecological Intervention: Prospects and Limits
Robyn Eckersley, University of Melbourne
This chapter seeks to extend the already controversial debate about humanitarian intervention by exploring the morality, legality, and legitimacy of ecological intervention and its corollary, ecological defense. If the legacy of the Holocaust was acceptance of a new category of "crimes against humanity" and an emerging norm of humanitarian intervention, then should the willful or reckless perpetration of mass extinctions and massive ecosystem destruction be regarded as “crimes against nature” or "ecocide" such as to ground a new norm of ecological intervention or ecological defense? The chapter shows that the minimalist argument for ecological intervention—multilateral intervention to deal with environmental emergencies with major transboundary spillover effects—is the strongest and may be defended as ecological self-defense. However, "eco-humanitarian intervention" to prevent ecocide involving serious human rights violations has the same precarious status as humanitarian intervention and is unlikely to garner the support of developing countries. The most challenging case of all—the military rescue of nonhuman species—find moral support in environmental philosophy but conflicts with deeply entrenched international legal and political norms concerning state territorial rights.
PART III: Governance, Law, and Membership
8. The Legitimacy of Global Governance Institutions
Allen Buchanan and Robert O. Keohane, Duke University and Princeton University
This chapter articulates a global public standard for the normative legitimacy of global governance institutions. This standard can provide the basis for principled criticism of global governance institutions and guide reform efforts in circumstances in which people disagree deeply about the demands of global justice and the role that global governance institutions should play in meeting them. The chapter stakes out a middle ground between an increasingly discredited conception of legitimacy that conflates legitimacy with international legality understood as state consent, on the one hand, and the unrealistic view that legitimacy for these institutions requires the same democratic standards that are now applied to states, on the other.
9. On the Alleged Conflict between Democracy and International Law
Seyla Benhabib, Yale University
The period since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 has witnessed the rise of an international human rights regime. There has been a shift in international law from state-based treaty obligations to cosmopolitan norms whose subject is individuals and their rights and entitlements under international law. Along with the rise of cosmopolitan norms, conflicts between enactments by states, often through democratic legislatures, of laws and practices that may contradict these norms, has also intensified. The chapter focuses on one such set of cosmopolitan norms concerning the crossborder rights of immigrants within the context of the European Union. By examining a German Constitutional Court Case which denied long-term resident aliens voting privileges in local and district-wide elections, it illuminates the "paradox of democratic legitimacy." The rights of foreigners and aliens are an intrinsic aspect of the self-understanding of a democratic people. The demos can alter the boundaries differentiating it from nonmembers. The line between citizenship and alienage can be renegotiated through processes of democratic iterations. Cosmopolitan norms can become guidelines informing the will and opinion formation of democratic peoples.
10. "Saving Amina": Global Justice for Women and Intercultural Dialogue
Alison M. Jaggar, University of Colorado, Boulder
Western moral and political theorists have recently devoted considerable attention to the perceived victimization of women by non-western cultures. This chapter argues that conceiving injustice to poor women in poor countries primarily as a matter of their oppression by illiberal cultures presents an understanding of their situation that is crucially incomplete. This incomplete understanding distorts Western theorists' comprehension of our moral relationship to women elsewhere in the world and so of our theoretical task. It also impoverishes our assumptions about the intercultural dialogue necessary to promote global justice for women.
11. Who Should Get In? The Ethics of Immigration Admissions
Joseph H. Carens, University of Toronto
This chapter explores normative questions about what legal rights settled immigrants should have in liberal democratic states. It argues that liberal democratic justice, properly understood, greatly constrains the distinctions that can be made between citizens and residents. The longer people stay in a society, the stronger their moral claims become, and after a while they pass a threshold that entitles them to virtually the same legal status as citizens and eventually easy access to citizenship itself.
PART IV: Global Economic Justice
12. Models of International Economic Justice
Ethan B. Kapstein, INSEAD
Articulating and examining the likely consequences of different theoretical and policy approaches to economic justice serves to highlight potential trade-offs and conflicts among them, and helps us to think more carefully about these trade-offs and what their consequences might be. Some of us, for example, might support a liberal free trade regime because we believe it promotes greater income equality among countries. But we might also reasonably assert that such a regime exacerbates economic injustices within some countries by causing dislocation and unemployment, particularly among vulnerable socioeconomic groups such as unskilled workers. This chapter presents three models that seek to capture some of the central normative concerns that have been expressed by critics of economic globalization—communitarian, liberal internationalist, and cosmopolitan prioritarian. It indicate the kinds of economic models and data sets that are relevant to determining whether and to what extent greater openness to global trade poses a threat to economic justice as conceived by each of these approaches. Specifically, this chapter uses these analytical tools in order to relate changes in openness to foreign trade to other social and economic outcomes, particularly changes in income inequality and poverty, which have tended to draw the attention of nearly all theorists of economic justice. The chapter characterizes and critiques the approach to economic justice that has been (implicitly) adopted by the major international institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization. It conclude with some policy implications and suggestions for further research in the area of international economic justice.
13. The Invisible Hand of the American Empire
Robert Wade, London School of Economics and Political Science
In the field of interstate military affairs it makes sense to talk of an American empire; but not in interstate economic affairs where the world remains thoroughly multipolar. So says Joseph Nye. This essay disagrees with the second judgment. It proceeds by way of a thought experiment. Imagine you are an aspiring modern-day emperor in a world of sovereign capitalist states. What sort of framework do you create such that (a) it sets the context in which all states and firms have to operate if they are not to exclude themselves from the world economy; (b) it channels normal market competition so as to benefit your firms and citizens disproportionately; and (c) it allows your economic statecraft to operate with fewer constraints than it imposes on everyone else’s? The chapter argues that the United States has indeed created such a framework since the 1970s, based on dollar dominance and American-centered private (not public) international financial relations. The framework allows the United States to keep spending far more abroad than it earns there—to have more butter and more guns (including military bases)—to a degree that other states cannot; and allows the United States to make the dollar swing high or low in accordance with American conditions, regardless of the costs inflicted on others. This is the paradox of economic globalization: it looks like the "powerless" expansion of communications and markets, but works to enhance the ability of the United States to harness the rest of the world to its rhythms and fortify its empire-like power. Concerted action between Europe and China and the East Asia countries is a vent for hope.
14. Accountability in International Development Aid
Leif Wenar, King’s College London
Concerns over aid effectiveness have led to calls for greater accountability in international development aid. This chapter examines the state of accountability within and between international development agencies: aid NGOs, the international financial institutions, and government aid ministries. The investigation finds that there is very little accountability in these agencies, and that the accountability that there is often works against poverty relief. Increasing accountability, however, is not always the solution: increased accountability may just amplify the complexities of development efforts. Only those reforms with real promise to make aid more effective in reducing poverty should be encouraged. One such proposal is set out here.
15. World Poverty and Human Rights
Thomas Pogge, Yale University
16. Do We Owe the Global Poor Assistance or Rectification? Response to Pogge
Mathias Risse, Harvard University
17. Baselines for Determining Harm: Reply to Risse
Thomas Pogge, Yale University