CIAO DATE: 02/2014
Volume: 27, Issue: 4
Winter 2013
The Ethical Imperative of Curbing Corporate Tax Avoidance (PDF)
David Scheffer
If the future of human rights is dependent on the capacity of the state to fulfill them, then one must focus on how the private sector interfaces with public values—an interface that directly affects how billions of people survive both economically and with dignity. During the last few years reports about multinational corporations shielding phenomenal profits from meaningful taxation have troubled governments and individual taxpayers alike. But there has been little effort to associate such tax avoidance schemes with corporate abdication of responsibility for advancing critical societal goals. Instead, much of the ensuing debate has centered on how to tax corporate profits fairly and more efficiently. While the ideas being marketed in this area are enlightening, there has been less discussion about why corporate taxation is a worthy public goal or what corporations should do voluntarily. The linkage between corporate tax avoidance and “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) has not yet been clearly drawn, but the moment has arrived to bridge the gap. That task may necessitate changing, fundamentally, the ethical framework within which corporate officers, boards of directors, shareholders, tax advisers, and stakeholders in general operate.
Ad Fontes: The Question of Rebellion and Moral Tradition on the Use of Force (PDF)
James Turner Johnson
“Stab, smite, slay!” These are not the words of Bashar al-Assad telling his forces how they should deal with the Syrian rebel movement, or indeed those of any other contemporary political leader, but rather the words of Martin Luther exhorting the German nobility to a harsh response to the peasants’ rebellion of 1524–1525.1 His writings show that he sympathized with many of the peasants’ grievances so long as these did not issue in rebellion, but when they turned to force of arms, he responded sternly. This was not a peculiarity of Luther. Consider the following from an English courtier, Thomas Churchyard, writing admiringly of the treatment of Irish rebels in 1579 by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, commander of the English army sent to put down the rebellion:
Muslim Discourse on Rebellion (PDF)
John Kelsay
Within Islamic thought, the judgments pertaining to rebels constitute a subset of the larger category of “judgments pertaining to armed struggle” (ahkam al-jihad). Indeed, one might refer to the latter as the overarching name for a Muslim war convention, which would then include judgments pertaining to military actions intended to: (a) extend or enhance the territory in which Islam provides governance or serves as the established religion of state; (b) defend the Islamic territory against invaders; and (c) regulate the relations between various groups within the territory of Islam, including (i) ahl al-dhimma, the “protected” class of non-Muslims (Christians, Jews, and others), (ii) apostates (Muslims who stand accused of abandoning Islam), (iii) highwaymen and other renegades, and (iv) secessionists and rebels (ahl al-khawarij wa al-bughat).
Christian Just War Reasoning and Two Cases of Rebellion: Ireland 1916–1921 and Syria 2011–Present (PDF)
Nigel Biggar
The contemporary West is biased in favor of rebellion. This is attributable in the first place to the dominance of liberal political philosophy, according to which it is the power of the state that always poses the greatest threat to human well-being. But it is also because of consequent anti-imperialism, according to which any nationalist rebellion against imperial power is assumed to be its own justification. Autonomy, whether of the individual or of the nation, is reckoned to be the value that trumps all others. I surmise that it is because in liberal consciousness the word “rebel” connotes a morally heroic stance—because it means the opposite of “tyrant”—that Western media in recent years have preferred to refer to Iraqi opponents of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and Taliban opponents of the ISAF in Afghanistan not as “rebels,” but as “insurgents.” The Christian tradition of just war reasoning, however, is more discriminate. It is not mesmerized by the problem of excessive state control and coercion. It is capable of recognizing that a too weak state can be quite as threatening to political health as an overbearing one. This is because the tradition predates the formation of strong nation-states in the late middle ages, and so remembers the terrible woes of anarchy, when powerful regional barons were wont to trample on the king’s fragile peace in pursuit of private quarrels or ambitions. If twenty-first century Westerners find, for example, Thomas Aquinas’ general prohibition of sedition to be reactionary, it is only because they luxuriate unreflectively in the peaceful order that their forbears spent sweat and blood in constructing—and because, not withstanding the many hours spent in pious cultural devotion to Shakespeare, they have failed to imagine themselves into the turbulent world of his history plays.
Why We Need a Just Rebellion Theory (PDF)
Valerie Morkevicius
While broad political support was voiced for uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen, the responses to protests in Bahrain and Morocco were muted. The swift decision to intervene in Libya stands in marked contrast to the ongoing hand-wringing on Syria. While political realists might see these contradictions as evidence that geopolitical concerns determine foreign policy, from an ethical point of view these responses also reveal a fundamental tension in Western thinking about rebellion. On one hand, rebellion is viewed with a distrustful eye—as a disruptive, chaotic force that threatens to destroy the day-to-day order on which civilization is built. On the other, rebellion is perceived more optimistically—as a regenerative, creative force that can leave a better civilization in its wake. These two radically disparate ways of thinking about rebellion have deep philosophical and theological roots. The pessimistic view has historically dominated just war thought, as James Turner Johnson’s contribution to this roundtable illustrates; whereas the perspective of Enlightenment liberalism offers a more optimistic judgment, as found, for example, in the works of Locke and Rousseau. Because these two influential streams of thought are in such tension with each other, our thinking about rebellion in the West tends to be piecemeal, driven more by gut reactions than by philosophical reasoning and careful political analysis. As a result, our responses to rebellion are scattered, unpredictable, and unfortunately often tragically misplaced.
Sovereign Wealth Funds and Global Justice (PDF)
Chris Armstrong
Insofar as ethical debates have begun to touch on how the assets of sovereign wealth funds should be distributed, they have tended to ask how these should be distributed internally, to citizens of the countries in question. Sovereign wealth funds are the creation of sovereigns, after all, and we might think that the first duty of a sovereign is to its people. What, though, of the claims of global justice?
On Rights to Land, Expulsions, and Corrective Justice (PDF)
Margaret Moore
This article examines the nature of the wrongs that are inflicted on individuals and groups who have been expelled from the land that they previously occupied, and asks what they might consequently be owed as a matter of corrective justice. Such cases-in which individuals and groups are expelled, their property is expropriated, and their land is subsequently settled by other people-are not unusual. They include the expulsion of Germans from the Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1947; the expulsion of (mainly) Greek Cypriots from the north of Cyprus following the Turkish invasion there in 1974; and the expulsion of Muslim Bosniaks from what is now called the Republic of Srpska, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, between 1991 and 1995. Historically, there are numerous other cases of "ethnic cleansing" and border redrawing. The injustice with which this article is concerned is also foundational to the current dominant societies in the Americas and Australasia.
The Touch of Midas: Money, Markets, and Morality
Edward Skidelsky
Money has always inspired obsession, both in those who amass it and in those who think about it. “Man will never be able to know what money is any more than he will be able to know what God is,” wrote the French financier Marcel Labordère to his friend John Maynard Keynes. The analogy is apt. Money, like God, injects infinity into human desires. To love it is to embark on a journey without end. Three new books testify to money’s enduring power to fascinate and horrify. The most scholarly of them, The Invention of Market Freedom by political theorist Eric MacGilvray, traces the emergence of the distinctively modern or “market” conception of freedom out of its “republican” predecessor. The general story is somewhat familiar, but MacGilvray complicates it by showing that market freedom did not vanquish its republican competitor in open combat but subverted it from within, like a parasite devouring its host.
Stephen M. Walt
Special Responsibilities: Global Problems and American Power, Mlada Bukovansky, Ian Clark, Robyn Eckersley, Richard Price, Christian Reus-Smit, and Nicholas Wheeler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 290 pp., $29.99 paper. Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright famously described the United States as the “indispensable nation,” entitled to lead because it “sees further than others do.” She was one of the many government officials who believed their country had “special responsibilities,” and was therefore different in some way from other states. Such claims are sometimes made to rally domestic support for some costly international action; at other times they are used to exempt a great power from norms or constraints that weaker states are expected to follow.
A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change by Stephen M. Gardiner
Paul Wapner
Climate change is the most intractable environmental issue, and Stephen Gardiner has written extensively about it, especially from an ethical perspective. He recognizes that climate change is not merely a technical, economic, or political challenge but fundamentally a moral one. It comes about because people—especially the rich and powerful—are unwilling or unable to care about those on the receiving end of climate hardship. This insensitivity generates complacency, or at least confusion, about how to build institutions and shape widespread behavior in the service of climate protection. A Perfect Moral Storm is Gardiner’s most extensive and detailed statement to date on this theme.
Recovering International Relations: The Promise of Sustainable Critique by Daniel J. Levine
Richard Shapcott
One of the virtues of International Relations (IR) as a discipline is that it periodically engages in bouts of reflection upon its methods and directions. Daniel Levine’s book is a contribution to this self-reflective practice. Like P. T. Jackson’s recent work, The Conduct of Enquiry, Levine’s Recovering International Relations seeks to acknowledge the diversity and strengths of various approaches to the study of IR and to simultaneously build something constructive out of this pluralism— in other words, to be both critical of the status quo and yet not reject it altogether. Levine’s goal is to “recover” IR’s original vocation, or calling, and to reinvigorate it via the idea of “sustainable critique”—a project inspired by the work of Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School.
On Complicity and Compromise by Chiara Lepora and Robert E. Goodin
Hugo Slim
Chiara Lepora, an Italian doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières, and Robert Goodin, an American philosopher based at the Australian National University in Canberra, have joined forces to produce an elegant and exceptional book. With humanitarian ethics as its starting point, On Complicity and Compromise elaborates a sophisticated and practical approach to complicity that will be profoundly useful to a much wider audience than humanitarians alone. The rigor and simplicity of this book will be of real value to anyone grappling with difficult ethical choices in politics, business, diplomacy, policing, or social services.