CIAO DATE: 02/07

Ethics & International Affairs
Annual Journal of the
Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs

2005, Vol 19, No. 3

 

Articles

• Just Cause for War by Jeff McMahan (PDF, 21 pages, 500 KB)

  The central contention of this essay is that a just cause for war is a wrong that is of a type that can make those responsible for it morally liable to military attack as a means of preventing or rectifying it. This claim has many implications that conflict with assumptions of the currently orthodox theory of the just war. Among the implications explored in the text are that the requirement of just cause is logically and morally prior to all the other requirements of a just war, that this requirement governs all phases of a war and not just the resort to war, that it is thus impermissible to continue to fight a war once the just cause or causes have been achieved, that it is impermissible to fight at all in a war that lacks a just cause, that just cause is a restriction on the type of aim that may be pursued by means of war and is not a matter of scale, that a war that lacks a just cause may be morally justified even if it is not just, and that a belligerent can pursue both just and unjust causes in the same war, which may then have elements or phases that are just and other elements or phases that are unjust.

• Killing Naked Soldiers by Larry May

  Just war theorists contended that weapons are illegitimate unless they can be used in such a way so as to distinguish combatants from noncombatants. Contemporary international legal theory also draws heavily on the principle of discrimination. The Geneva Convention (IV), as interpreted in the Second Protocol of 1977, says: "The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack...Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited." In both the Just War tradition and contemporary international law, the main justification for such a principle has to do with noncombatant immunity, the idea that only those who are combatants can legitimately be attacked in war. The principle of discrimination also relies on the idea that it is possible to distinguish, in a morally significant way, those classes or groups of people who participate in wars from those who do not. The categories of "civilian" or "soldier, combatant" or noncombatant, are thought to be stable. Yet, the case of the naked soldier taking a bath challenges such stability in a way that illustrates the serious conceptual and normative problems with identifying such social groups. In this paper I argue that, because of these problems, the traditional principle of discrimination offers no clear, morally relevant, line between those who fight and those who do not. Nonetheless, I argue that a distinction of this sort should be maintained, although one that will restrict tactics in war far more than is normally recognized.

• The Irony of Environmentalism: The Ecological Futility but Political Necessity of Lifestyle Change by Paul Wapner, John Willoughby

  Environmentalists argue that we need to reduce population and consumption to protect the environment, and that this is something we can all do by individually choosing to have smaller families and buying fewer products. This article questions the ecological effects of such choice. When people have fewer children or reduce their consumption, they save money. What they then do with this money is crucial to the consequences of their actions. If they place it in conventional financial mechanisms, such as banks or stocks, they merely shift the locale of environmental harm since these mechanisms, within a capitalist economy, redeploy savings into further investment and productivity. For individual lifestyle choices to make a difference, environmentalists must find ways of linking such choices to efforts aimed at changing the nature of capitalist economies. If we had effective public policies that redistributed income, forced polluters to pay for the harm they cause, mandated more environmentally friendly technologies, and reduced the workday in the richer parts of the world, we could alter the way we live our material lives.

• Whats Wrong With Preventive War? The Moral and Legal Basis for the Use of Preventive Force by Whitley Kaufman

  The question of the legitimacy of preventive war has been at the center of the debate about the proper response to terrorism and the legitimacy of the Iraq War. One side has argued that preventive war is a legitimate and necessary tool for nations to use in defense against terrorists; the other side has claimed that war is permissible only in self-defense, and that therefore the preventive use of military force is unjustified both legally and morally.

  In this essay I attempt to clarify the terms of this debate by demonstrating that neither side is precisely correct. Both under Just War Doctrine and common sense morality, preventive war is indeed justifiable, so long as it satisfies the basic requirements for going to war such as necessity and proportionality. However, under the current international law regime governed by the United Nations Charter, the use of preventive international force is restricted to the Security Council alone. Individual nation states are permitted to use international force only in self-defense. The rise of international terrorism does not by itself change this situation; preventive force against terrorist organization is permissible and appropriate, but it must be authorized by the Security Council in order to be legitimate. Only if the Council proved wholly ineffective in exercising its authority would the right to preventive war revert to individual nations. For all the shortcomings of the United Nations, however, I argue we have not reached a state of total breakdown of international authority sufficient to justify a return to the legitimacy of unilateral preventive war.

• Saving Amina: Global Justice for Women and Intercultural Dialogue by Alison Jaggar

  Western moral and political theorists have recently devoted considerable attention to the perceived victimization of women by non-western cultures. In this paper, I argue 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.

Book Reviews

Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects - by Arun Agrawal

Reviewed by Joanne Bauer

Agrawal's carefully constructed arguments create a framework for environmental policy analysis. One only wishes the message were in a language and form that would draw in policy and advocacy readers, not just scholars.

Strong Medicine: Creating Incentives for Pharmaceutical Research on Neglected Diseases - by Michael Kremer and Rachel Glennerster

Reviewed by Rekha Nath

The authors suggest creating a scheme that offers new incentives for research on diseases disproportionately affecting the poor, with the goal of making development of neglected disease vaccines a lucrative endeavor for pharmaceutical companies.

REVIEW ESSAY

• Coming to Terms with Iraq
  Omar G. Encarnacin

RECENT BOOKS ON ETHICS AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

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