CIAO DATE: 11/2013
Volume: 27, Issue: 3
Fall 2013
Hunger, Food Security, and the African Land Grab (PDF)
Richard Schiffman
If you were organizing dinner parties for the world, you would need to put out 219,000 more place settings every night than you had the night before.1 That is how fast the Earth’s population is growing. But global agricultural production is currently failing to keep pace. A June 2012 report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) sees trouble looming ahead, warning that “land and water resources are now much more stressed than in the past and are becoming scarcer.”
Nonproliferation: A Global Issue for a Global Ethic (PDF)
J. Bryan Hehir
A global ethic for the twenty-first century will be different from that of the twentieth century. While themes of normative and political continuity will exist, humankind’s main moral challenges have changed. Between the two centuries lie the end of the cold war, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the global financial crisis, and the double transformation of the structure of power in world politics and the norms of sovereignty and intervention. Nuclear weapons will remain high on the agenda of a global ethic, but they will not hold as dominant a place as they did in the past century. This essay, focused on the continuing moral challenge of nuclear weapons, recalls the intellectual and moral lessons of the last century and identifies three leading issues in nuclear ethics today: post-cold war challenges to nonproliferation and deterrence, the new challenges posed by the terrorist threat, and recent proposals for Going to Zero.
"Just Business: Multinational Corporations and Human Rights" by John Gerard Ruggie (PDF)
Ralph Steinhardt
Any analysis of the role that international human rights law plays—or ought to play—in the decisions of multinational corporations must confront a range of skepticisms. Among the most persistent is that every branch of international law is unenforced and unenforceable, and that, even when it works, international human rights law constrains the conduct of governments, not businesses. In the skeptic’s view, if companies have any legal responsibility, it is the obligation to maximize the return on shareholders’ investment, and doing well by that measure may have little to do with doing good. On those rare occasions when companies do announce an intention to abide by human rights law, skeptics see it as a public relations move and not as a genuine response to some legal or ethical obligation.
"The Human Right to Health" by Jonathan Wolff (PDF)
Joia S. Mukherjee
The modern day notion of human rights was shaped significantly by World War II and the subsequent Nuremberg Trials of 1948, which sparked a movement to codify a new standard of human dignity. The postwar campaign for a universal standard for all humans regardless of nationality, race, or religion produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). And while the Declaration itself does not have the legal weight of a treaty or covenant, it nonetheless has served as a yardstick against which rights are measured. Notably, the Declaration gives weight to two aspects of the rights paradigm of the twentieth century: the need for a government not to restrict the rights of or discriminate against its citizens, and the need for a government to deliver to its citizens a basic set of services, including education and health.
Alyssa Bernstein
Since the last decade of the twentieth century, Immanuel Kant has become central to academic discussions of international relations for various reasons, including the end of the cold war (which renewed many people’s hopes for worldwide peace and democracy) and the publication of writings by the prominent neo-Kantians Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls and their followers and critics, as well as by a number of Kant scholars writing about war, humanitarian intervention, democracy, international law, peace, and cosmopolitanism. Kant and the End of War, by Howard Williams, and Kant and Cosmopolitanism, by Pauline Kleingeld, are new books by two of the foremost contemporary scholars of Kant’s political philosophy, and the theme of international peace is central to both.