There is much hand-wringing in the arms control trenches these days over the role and future of arms control in U.S. policy. Liberal supporters of arms control lament what they see as a decade of missed opportunities to pursue deep cuts in the world's nuclear arsenals and to strengthen the regimes for controlling the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Those on the right, perceiving grave weaknesses in Cold War–era arms control regimes, prefers to move ahead with “assertive isolationism,” happily unencumbered with the comprehensive test ban or soon, they hope, the Anti–Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. After a promising start in arms control at the beginning of the 1990s, both sides see U.S. arms control policy drifting in purpose and slackening in momentum, with arms control officials spread thin over a proliferating agenda.

The abstract for the International Studies Association panel that gave rise to this special section of Ethics & International Affairs referred to the “triumph” of just war theory. However, I think we ought rather to speak of just war discourse as occupying a particular niche. This is especially so with respect to discussions about policy: when and where governments should make use of military force, what type, and so on. In that context, appeals to the criteria of jus ad bellum and jus in bello complement (or sometimes compete with) thinking that draws on international law, various strategic doctrines (for example, counterinsurgency warfare, or COIN), notions of reciprocity between states, and a host of other considerations. The notion of “triumph” claims too much. At the same time, for advocates of the just war framework, the kind of recognition indicated by presidential and other official mentions of the idea is worthy of note. Some of these are due to constituency politics—that is, to the idea that “institutional” advocates of just war (say, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops) may influence blocs of voters. Other invocations are better interpreted as a recognition that the vocabulary of just war can serve (along with other ways of speaking) in the attempt to craft wise policy.

In a world increasingly both fragmented and globalized, there is a need for a normative framework of values linking individual and group concerns by means of a conception of collective human rights. Felice argues that individual human rights, which have proven to be of enormous value in the twentieth century, must be extended to communities ranging from the family unit to the entire human community.

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.”

In July 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched a Commission on Unalienable Rights, charged with a reexamination of the scope and nature of human rights–based claims. From his statements, it seems that Pompeo hopes the commission will substantiate—by appeal to the U.S. Declaration of Independence and to natural law theory—three key conservative ideas: (1) that there is too much human rights proliferation, and once we get things right, social and economic rights as well as gender emancipation and reproductive rights will no longer register as human rights; (2) that religious liberties should be strengthened under the human rights umbrella; and (3) that the unalienable rights that should guide American foreign policy neither need nor benefit from any international oversight. I aim to show that despite Pompeo's framing, the Declaration of Independence, per se, is of no help with any of this, whereas evoking natural law is only helpful in ways that reveal its own limitations as a foundation for both human rights and foreign policy in our interconnected age.

When on October 13, 2016, the General Assembly appointed by acclamation António Guterres of Portugal as the United Nations’ ninth secretary-general, there was a sense of excitement among the organization's 193 members. For once, so it seemed, they felt they had played an important role not only in choosing the secretary-general but also in appointing a man generally considered to be an outstanding candidate for a position memorably described as “the most impossible job on this earth.” The five permanent, veto-wielding members of the Security Council (Perm Five) still exercised the greatest power in the selection process, as they always had in the past. Yet the candidate chosen appears, surprisingly, not to have been the first choice of either the United States or Russia, two of the Perm Five that until then had effectively chosen the secretary-general between them in an opaque and outdated process. It is doubtful that António Guterres would have been appointed if the General Assembly had not embarked on a novel process to select him.

The world is in the early stages of what will be the greatest health crisis since the advent of modern medical technologies. Millions of people—particularly people in many of the world's poor countries—are infected with HIV. The vast majority of these people will go without modern medical intervention or substantial treatment, and will rapidly develop AIDS. The extent of this problem presents profound moral and ethical questions for the world's wealthy people and countries, for it is they who are most able to assist the poor in managing and reversing this human tragedy.

Since the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutes crimes of mass violence that are inherently political in nature, its actions will inevitably have political consequences about which the prosecutor and judges should be as well informed as possible. As some of the other contributors to this roundtable note, the ICC's actions and inactions may even have life-and-death consequences in the real world. It is ethically irresponsible for the ICC's officers to ignore those concerns. At the same time, the court's moral and legal authority derives entirely from its claim that it applies universal rules wherever it has jurisdiction. In order for the International Criminal Court to build legitimacy over time, it must both act and be seen to act in a neutral way that transcends political pressures. Rule-of-law courts do not derive their authority from their ability to command the use of force. Nor do they have the legitimacy of elected political officials who act as the representatives of a political community. The legitimacy of courts is a function of their claim to uphold universal rules of law that the community has chosen to adopt, regardless of whether doing so is popular or even prudent in a particular case with particular constituencies. Consequently, court officers in their formal actions—including prosecutorial requests for investigations, issuing arrest warrants, and filing charges, as well as in the judges' decisions on those questions—should always ground the rationale for their decisions in the pretense that they act only to uphold the law and without regard for political considerations.

This brief response cannot adequately address all of the challenging issues raised by Robert Meister in his reply, so I hope only to clarify our main points of contention that will likely continue beyond this exchange.

This essay critically assesses Anna Stilz's argument in Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration that legitimate states have a right to do wrong. I concede that individuals enjoy a claim against external interference when they commit suberogatory acts, but I deny that the right to do wrong extends to acts that would violate the rights of others. If this is correct, then one must do more than merely invoke an individual's right to do wrong if one hopes to vindicate a legitimate state's right to commit injustices. Of course, there may be distinctive features of legitimate states that explain why they enjoy moral protections that individuals lack, but I argue that the value of collective self-determination is not up to this task. And even if these arguments fail, self-determination would at most explain why legitimate states enjoy a right to commit injustices against their own citizens; it would provide them no moral protection when they violate the rights of outsiders.

This article discusses ways in which academics and concerned individuals committed to the faster eradication of extreme poverty might make a contribution. It argues that this discussion needs to be informed by examining the lessons of academics who have been working in the development field for many decades tell us about success and failures and possible ways forward. Following the introduction, section two attempts to draw out from the work of academics, researchers and policymakers in the “world of development” what we know and have learned about how best to accelerate the process of reducing extreme poverty in the world, and what “doesn't work”. Against this backdrop, the third section discusses different ways that academics from outside the professional development community might effectively contribute to the faster or more effective eradication of global poverty. It considers in particular some current knowledge gaps in the development field which might be bridged by academic from the fields of moral and political philosophy. Finally, section four provides a brief discussion of the types of anti-poverty organizations concerned individuals might support, providing a check-list of questions to help assess their approaches, strengths and weaknesses. It suggests that as the faster eradication of poverty requires a series of interventions on many different fronts, academics need to approach poverty eradication through a multifocal lens and prioritize support to effective and transparent anti-poverty agencies working at the local, national and international levels.

The principle of the responsibility to protect (RtoP) conceives of a broad set of measures that can be employed in preventing and responding to atrocity crimes. Nevertheless, the UN Security Council remains an important part of the implementation architecture, given what the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty referred to as its authoritative position in international society as the “linchpin of order and stability.” As part of the roundtable “The Responsibility to Protect in a Changing World Order: Twenty Years since Its Inception,” this review of the Council's role in fulfilling its responsibility to protect advances two somewhat contrasting arguments about the original ICISS report. First, it suggests that the commissioners may have underestimated the Council's potential contribution, by concentrating on the authorization of coercive means to address crises of human protection. Over the past two decades, the Security Council has not only employed various diplomatic, political, and humanitarian measures to address atrocity crimes but also adjusted the purposes and practices of peace operations to advance protection goals and more subtly shaped discourses and expectations about state responsibilities for protection. However, I also argue that the willingness of the ICISS to identify potential alternatives to the Security Council when its members are paralyzed appears in retrospect to have been both bold and forward looking, in light of the Council's failures to act in a timely and decisive manner to protect amid crises and the contemporary realities of geopolitical rivalry. The article concludes by suggesting that future efforts to protect populations from atrocity crimes should focus not only on the herculean task of trying to change the behavior of P5 members of the Council but also on encouraging a new institutional balance between the Security Council and other intergovernmental bodies.

Will we, by 2050, be able to feed a rapidly growing population with healthy and sustainably grown food in a world threatened by systemic environmental crises? There are too many uncertainties for us to predict the long-term evolution of the global agri-food system, but we can explore a wide range of futures to inform policymaking and public debate on the future of food. This is typically done by creating scenarios (story lines that vividly describe what different futures could look like) and quantifying them with computer simulation models to get numerical estimates of how different aspects of the global agri-food system might evolve under different hypotheses. Among the many scenarios produced over the last twenty years, one would expect to see the future advocated by the food sovereignty movement, which claims to represent roughly two hundred million self-described “peasants” (small farmers) worldwide. This movement defends a vision of the future based on relocalized, sustainable, and just agri-food systems, self-governed through direct and participatory democratic processes. Yet, food sovereignty is conspicuously absent from quantified scenarios of global food futures. As part of the roundtable, “Ethics and the Future of the Global Food System,” this essay identifies seven obstacles that undermine the creation of food sovereignty scenarios by examining two attempts at crafting such scenarios.

Ever since the Charter of the United Nations was signed in 1945, human rights have constituted one of its three pillars, along with peace and development. As noted in a dictum coined during the World Summit of 2005: “There can be no peace without development, no development without peace, and neither without respect for human rights.” But while progress has been made in all three domains, it is with respect to human rights that the organization's performance has experienced some of its greatest shortcomings. Not coincidentally, the human rights pillar receives only a fraction of the resources enjoyed by the other two—a mere 3 percent of the general budget.

Heilbroner challenges the concept that capitalism is purely an economic system and asserts it is rather a regime informed by social and political forces. The relentless pursuit of capital is the process by which the social order manifests its historical vigor. Within the regime of capitalism two realms of power and authority, the state and the economy, exist in a dialectic marked, in normal circumstances, by the concession of the incomparably more powerful state to the current interest of capital. However, the rise of international capitalism has changed this dynamic. Heilbroner describes this historical movement and ponders what capitalism will look like after its traditional form gives way.

Why do we need dialogue between ethical and legal perspectives on norms governing the initiation and conduct of interstate conflict? This essay will examine this question by first critiquing the 2013 Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare, which sought to apply existing legal frameworks that govern international violence to a new form of conflict. While the manual is for the most part ethically commendable, the first half of the essay will highlight several of its ethical shortcomings and will then extract general reasons why international law nevertheless must be informed by ethical analysis. The second part of the essay will affirm the importance of law for ethical analyses of justified responses to the burgeoning phenomenon of sublethal harms. While states have always used sublethal harms to weaken adversaries, technological developments have magnified the regularity and effectiveness of these practices, particularly against free societies. Responses to such attacks may include—in addition to defensive countermeasures—punishments that deter and reform, and may target “indirect participants” such as financial supporters. However, determining which responses are ethically justified will require insights gleaned from criminal and tort law.

Environmental problems were not among the core issues for the United Nations at its creation in 1945. In the 1970s, however, they created a crescendo of public concern as the threats posed by toxic chemicals, large-scale destruction of natural ecosystems, and the loss of species became visible and were obviously linked to human activity. Pollution, it was clear, did not stop at national borders and solutions required common effort. As part of the special issue on “The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward,” this essay explores how, as the only institution equipped to identify global problems and generate collective action toward their resolution, the UN became the platform for creating multilateral environmental agreements, convening global conferences, and mobilizing national and international effort through a progressively larger number of institutions at the national and international level to guide decisions and influence behavior. We have moved the environmental needle in terms of information, institutions, and awareness. Yet, many environmental problems persist, some are getting worse, and new challenges and, indeed, crises are emerging.

Over the last two decades a spate of books, led by the ones cited in this essay, have illuminated and debated the bristly questions confronting contemporary “humanitarianism.” The definitional or, one might say, foundational question is whether the adjective “humanitarian” should be limited to only those independent agencies that are engaged (without reference to a political context) in the impartial delivery of emergency relief to all those in existential need—or, in the unique case of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), engaged in monitoring the application of the Geneva Conventions to armed conflict. An answer in the affirmative could be considered the “classic” position of the humanitarian, and one still championed by the ICRC. Today, however, many NGOs, such as CARE, OXFAM, and Catholic Relief Services, which certainly regard themselves as humanitarian agencies, engage in a broad range of rehabilitative and developmental activities and continue to deliver emergency relief, and they are prepared to do so under circumstances where their work has conspicuous political implications. The same is true of such UN agencies as UNICEF, UNHCR, and the World Food Programme, which are not infrequently involved in complex peace operations that have clear political goals as specified by the Security Council. Further, well-known humanitarian activists and writers, notably Bernard Kouchner and Samantha Power, also reject the ICRC's definitional canon. The unsettled boundaries of what properly constitutes humanitarianism brings a number of difficult questions to the surface, including:

• • Should relief be provided even if it could prolong a conflict, or could indirectly assist a belligerent, or possibly identify the relief giver with a government's political ends? And should the nature of those ends influence relief efforts?

• • Should relief agencies also assist in addressing the causes of humanitarian emergencies by joining in efforts to resolve a conflict, foster economic development, rebuild state institutions, and strengthen the protection of human rights?

• • Should such agencies accept funds from governments where governments specify how the funds are to be used?

• • Where necessary, should they advocate armed intervention to protect their personnel as well as the recipients of their aid?

• • In terms of the way they organize and structure themselves, should nonprofit agencies dedicated to humanitarian relief follow private-sector models?

• • Can organizations dedicated to the effective provision of emergency relief pursue that end without creating a culture of dependence, without discouraging local initiative, and without violating the liberal “right” to participate in life-shaping decisions?

• • Finally, how does humanitarianism relate to human rights, the other leading expression of what I would call “the humanitarian impulse”?