CIAO DATE: 07/02

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

Volume 16, No. 1, 2002

Roundtable
The New War: What Rules Apply?

• Identifying Limits on a Borderless Map
  Richard Falk

• The Law's Response to September 11
  Ruth Wedgwood

• The Laws of War: A Military View
  William L. Nash

• The "War" on Terrorism: A Cultural Perspective
  Fawaz A. Gerges

• The Style of the New War: Making the Rules as We Go Along
  George A. Lopez

Articles

• Comprehending "Evil": Challenges for Law and Policy
  Douglas Klusmeyer and Astri Suhrke

  In the aftermath of the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, the categories of "good" and "evil" have come to dominate the rhetorical response of the U.S. government. This article investigates the implications of using the concept of "evil" as a major public policy rationale. The article focuses on the Bush Administration's attempts to frame its policy around this term in the current campaign against terrorism, but also considers recent uses of the term in the growing literature on war crimes, genocide, and domestic repression. Because the concept of evil has deep roots in various theological understandings, we examine its religious meanings (largely within the Christian tradition) and the problems that arise when applying it in the secular context of government policy. In assessing these problems, we focus on Hannah Arendt's efforts to comprehend the evils of totalitarianism within a secular perspective.

  We argue that in contemporary policy discourse, "evil" is mostly invoked as a term of condemnation rather than an analytical concept, and that this usage tends to inhibit rather than encourage the search for explanation. It facilitates evasion of accountability within a secular framework of justice based on positive law. The alternative is to approach terrorism in the language of secular law, which rests on fixed criteria to regulate the use of force (in situations of war) and to prosecute and punish (in matters of crime). Such an approach complements and should encourage parallel efforts to comprehend events by examining their causes and historical context.

• Justice after War
  Brian Orend

  How should wars end? What counts as a just peace treaty? What does it mean to wrap up war in an ethical way? By drawing on the concepts and values of the just war tradition, this article seeks to develop a coherent, plausible and relevant account of jus post bellum. These war termination principles are applied to recent cases, including the Persian Gulf War, Bosnia and Kosovo, and the war against terrorism in Afghanistan. The article features a critical discussion of such topics as the vindication of rights in a peace settlement; proportionality and unconditional surrender; socio-economic sanctions and the protection of civilians in the post-war period; war crimes trials; fiscal restitution; and the rehabilitation of a country defeated in war.
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• The Moral Basis of Humanitarian Intervention
  Terry Nardin

  This article discusses the moral principles underlying the idea of humanitarian intervention. The analysis is in two parts, one historical and the other philosophical. First, the article 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 article 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 article 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.

• NGO Strategies for Promoting Corporate Social Responsibility
  Morton Winston

  This article describes and evaluates the different strategies that have been employed by international human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in attempting to influence the behavior of multinational corporations (MNCs). Within the NGO world, there is a basic divide on tactics for dealing with corporations: Engagers try to draw corporations into dialogue in order to persuade them by means of ethical and prudential arguments to adopt voluntary codes of conduct, while confronters believe that corporations will act only when their financial interests are threatened, and therefore take a more adversarial stance toward them. Confrontational NGOs tend to employ moral stigmatization, or "naming and shaming," as their primary tactic, while NGOs that favor engagement offer dialogue and limited forms of cooperation with willing MNCs.

  The article explains the evolving relationship between NGOs and MNCs in relation to human rights issues and defines eight strategies along the engagement/confrontation spectrum used by NGOs in their dealings with MNCs. The potential benefits and risks of various forms of engagement between NGOs and MNCs are analyzed and it is argued that the dynamic created by NGOs pursuing these different strategies can be productive in moving some companies to embrace their social responsibilities. Yet, in order for these changes to be sustainable, national governments will need to enact enforceable international legal standards for corporate social accountability.

• Corporate Codes of Conduct and the Success of Globalization
  S. Prakash Sethi

  This article focuses on the expanding role of multinational corporations (MNCs) in developing countries, within the context of globalization and free trade. It demonstrates that the current state of globalization does not conform to the conventional notion of free trade. Therefore, given the prevailing circumstances, MNCs have an unfair advantage in expropriating a greater share of gains from efficiency and productivity from international trade than would be possible if labor had greater mobility or more equitable bargaining power. The article presents evidence that the arguments advanced by MNCs in defense of their position are factually incorrect and logically flawed. Next, the article examines the efforts made by MNCs to ameliorate some of the adverse conditions arising from their overseas manufacturing and sourcing operations. The findings show that most of these efforts are more rhetorical than substantive. Finally, he outlines a framework that allows multinationals to undertake meaningful actions that would both minimize the adverse consequences of, and enhance the positive benefits emanating from their overseas operations. These actions must be independently verifiable and transparent if MNCs are to gain credibility and public trust. A failure to undertake meaningful reforms will retard or even reverse the process of globalization, thus depriving all concerned of globalization's attendant benefits. Even more ominously, such a failure would seriously undermine democratic values and erode the very foundations of political and economic freedom in large parts of the world that sustain private enterprise, property rights, respect for individual freedom, and protection of human rights.

Debate
Global Poverty Relief

• More Than Charity: Cosmopolitan Alternatives to the "Singer Solution"
  Andrew Kuper

  The history of poverty relief is littered with serious failures. Peter Singer, influential philosopher and controversist, claims to have a "solution." It is simple and severe: We, the relatively rich, have an obligation to give away every cent in our possession that is not devoted to buying "necessaries." For the average American household, that means donating all income over $30,000 to charities. Widespread donation of this kind would, Singer claims, end poverty. Singer and his critics then tend to debate: "Are we morally obliged to sacrifice so much?" The present article shifts the terms of the debate. It asks: "Would a charity-focused approach to alleviating poverty actually work?" The answer is no. At a global level especially, we interact with one another through a complex web of political and economic arrangements; the poor remain poor because these arrangements exclude them in important ways. Charity may at times help to redistribute wealth, but it is a very limited vehicle for improving people's situation on a sustainable basis. For that we need not merely charities and NGOs like Oxfam, but above all fundamental reforms to the rules and institutions of global order. We need to abandon the narrow language of "selfishness versus sacrifice" in favor of an approach that emphasizes "exclusion versus inclusion"; the real issue is how the poor can also come to benefit systematically from mechanisms of social cooperation.

  This approach sets an immensely complex challenge, and we cannot dispense with a political philosophy that helps to orientate reforms in the right direction—reforms in production, consumption, aid, and more. Drawing critically on the works of John Rawls and Karl Marx, the article explicates the three dimensions that would characterize an effective political philosophy of this kind. Contrary to Singer's view, there is no royal road to poverty relief. But it is possible to draw a map of many intersecting roads that together take us to a place without poverty.

• Poverty, Facts, and Political Philosophies: Response to "More Than Charity"
  Peter Singer

  Kuper's disagreement with me is not a fundamental one. He accepts that the interests of everyone ought to count equally, and he does not object to my claim that our obligations to assist those in need do not stop at the borders of our nation. Nevertheless he urges his readers not to act on my recommendation that we give much of our income to organizations like Oxfam or UNICEF. In my response I show that his counter-examples are often irrelevant to what I am advocating, and he has not substantiated his extraordinary claim that the approach I advocate would "seriously harm the poor." I also point out that the ethical argument I am putting forward does not tie me to any particular view of what is the best way to overcome poverty and starvation.

• Facts, Theories, and Hard Choices: Reply to Peter Singer
  Andrew Kuper

  People starve, suffer, and die because of political and economic arrangements. To address the causes of such exclusion, we need empirically grounded theories that enable us to go behind appearances. Singer dispenses with this need, asserting simply that his "solution" to global poverty (widespread charity) is established by "the facts." He provides no way to determine which facts matter and how. That is, he gives us no theoretical tools for understanding the nature and causes of poverty, or for developing multiple methods to tackle it. Again, we should not be against charity in all instances. Rather, drawing on more reliable development theory allows us to recognize that charity is not a cure-all. Chronic reliance on this one strategy can harm the poor. We must not depend on mere (irregular) assistance, where the rich are exhorted to dispense aid beneficently; rather, we must carefully reform relations and systems of cooperation, such that they benefit the poor on an ongoing basis. Only a wider range of institutional reforms and political strategies, derived from this cooperative approach, can generate sustained inclusion in governance and the global economy.

• Achieving the Best Outcome: Final Rejoinder
  Peter Singer

  In this brief response, I reiterate the central ethical claim of my argument and argue that, if we don't know how to make deep structural changes that will end desperate poverty, it is still better to help some people rather than none.

Review Essays

• Democracy, Diversity, and Boundaries
  P.E. Digeser

• Third Worldism Redux
  Paige Arthur

• Global governance and Genocide in Rwanda
  Anthony F. Lang, Jr.