CIAO DATE: 10/2014
Volume: 28, Issue: 3
Fall 2014
Western Pessimism, Asian Optimism: Three Perspectives on Global Governance
Sir Richard Jolly
As of 2007 the world economy has been caught in the worst crisis since the 1930s. Yet after two years of only partly successful efforts to mobilize and coordinate global action of financial control and stimulus, ending with the G-20 meeting of March 2009, responsibility for corrective economic initiatives has essentially been left to individual countries, supported by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union (EU). Moreover, such support has been usually conditional on countries following financial policies of tough austerity. The United States took some actions to stimulate its economy, but by many accounts these were insufficient. Most of Europe has not even attempted stimulus measures and has been in a period of economic stagnation, with falling real incomes among the poorest parts of the population. Although some signs of “recovery” have been heralded in 2013 and 2014, growth has mostly been measured from a lower base. There is little evidence of broad-based economic recovery, let alone improvements in the situation of the poor or even of the middle-income groups.
Trygve Throntveit
“This is what happens when democracies try to take advantage of their historical advantages,” writes David Runciman. “They mess up” (p. 273). In The Confidence Trap, Runciman draws on Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis of nineteenth-century American democracy to assess the strengths and diagnose the ills that have beset mature democratic societies from the early twentieth century to the present. The result is a clear and plausible articulation of democracy’s central dilemma, paired with a far less definite treatment of its implications for the conduct of public affairs, either in the past or today.
"The Vulnerable in International Society" by Ian Clark
Kalevi Holsti
In 1977 the Australian international relations scholar Hedley Bull published a seminal work, The Anarchical Society, an exploration of the sources of international order. While acknowledging that international politics are characterized by Hobbesian, liberal, and Kantian elements simultaneously, he argued that underlying them are elements of order, by which he meant a pattern of activity that sustains the elementary or primary goals of the society of states, or international society. The goals are the preservation of the system of states, the preservation of the independence of its members, and that members of the international society see peace as the normal rather than exceptional condition of their mutual relations.
"Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex World" by Philip Pettit
James Bohman
In Just Freedom, Philip Pettit undertakes significant revisions of some of his republican commitments. The book has many new and innovative ideas, but most of all this work sharpens Pettit’s thinking on the role of democracy in republicanism, and on the often positive interaction between the two. Above all, it seems to me that Pettit’s own account of basic freedoms has become broader and wider, and now includes a cosmopolitan conception of what we owe other human beings, whoever they are.
Who Are Atrocity's "Real" Perpetrators, Who Its "True" Victims and Beneficiaries?
Mark Osiel
Modern law's response to mass atrocities vacillates equivocally in how it understands thedramatis personae to these expansive tragedies, at once extraordinary and ubiquitous. Is there any principled order to this? If not, should we care?
A Call for a Global Constitutional Convention Focused on Future Generations (PDF)
Stephen M. Gardiner
The climate problem is usually misdiagnosed as a traditional tragedy of the commons, but this obscures two deeper and distinctively ethical challenges. We must call for a global constitutional convention focused on future generations.
The Dawning of an Earth Ethic (PDF)
Scott Russell Sanders
So far we have failed to act on the scale or with the urgency required to avert the unfolding disaster of climate change. Why are we failing? What keeps us from caring for the atmosphere as a shared, finite, and fragile envelope for life?
Ethical Enhancement in an Age of Climate Change (PDF)
Paul Wapner
The world is dashing toward greater and more devastating climate intensification. Nonetheless, opportunities for moral action abound. Embracing these opportunities may well come to define what it means to be fully human in an age of climate change.
Moral Collapse in a Warming World (PDF)
Clive Hamilton
When it comes to climate change, moral corruption prevails not because the situation is inherently murky, but because confusion has been deliberately sown.
Three Questions on Climate Change (PDF)
Clare Palmer
Climate change will have highly significant and largely negative effects on human societies into the foreseeable future, effects that are already generating ethical and policy dilemmas of unprecedented scope, scale, and complexity.
The Changing Ethics of Climate Change (PDF)
Daniel Mittler
Traditional framings of climate change action being about future generations or simply another dimension of the North-South divide in global geopolitics are not irrelevant today, but they are no longer sufficient.
A "Natural" Proposal for Addressing Climate Change (PDF)
Thomas E. Lovejoy
One of the fundamental challenges of climate change is that we contribute to it increment by increment, and experience it increment by increment after a considerable time lag.
Drones, Risk, and Perpetual Force (PDF)
Christian Enemark
In our headlong embrace of drone technology, we are forgetting to ask two basic questions: What is a drone? And what does it mean that the once obvious boundary separating human and machine intelligence is being diminished?