“Reimagining a global ethic” is a project worthy of Andrew Carnegie and of the Carnegie Council's upcoming commemoration of his founding gift in 1914. As a collaborative research project stretching forward over the next three years, it ought to be integrative and reconciliatory: that is, it must try to understand the globalization of ethics that has accompanied the globalization of commerce and communications and to figure out what ethical values human beings share across all our differences of race, religion, ethnicity, national identity, and material wealth. When human beings do disagree morally, the search for a global ethic becomes an attempt to elucidate by analysis what exactly people are disagreeing about, so that, after arguing out our differences, we can either agree to disagree or work together to find common ground. Finding common ground on large ethical matters and understanding more deeply why, in some instances, we remain at odds with each other is worthwhile in itself, but it might also further Andrew Carnegie's original goal in founding the Council, which was to reduce the amount of conflict and violence in the world.

[MacArthur] said that he had issued no orders or directives, and that he had limited himself merely to suggestions…. He stated that it was his belief, that it was his conviction, that a constitution, no matter how good, no matter how well written, forced upon the Japanese by bayonet would last just as long as bayonets were present, and he was certain that the moment force was withdrawn and the Japanese were left to their own devices they would get rid of that constitution.

—Recorded on January 29,1946, by Nelson T. Johnson, Secretary-General of the Far East Commission

In spite of the storm surrounding its first appearance, the cumbersomely named “Law of Administration for the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period” (TAL) has been surprisingly immune from criticism in the West since its initial signing on March 8, 2004. American officials, anxious to declare victories where they can, as well as journalists seeking newsworthiness have insisted on the more accurate and revealing term “interim constitution.” Its technocratic name, designed to neutralize (or hide) its constitutional significance, may partly explain why it has received little critical attention, but a more likely explanation is that many of its readers have rightly or wrongly viewed it as offering better protections for rights, including those of minorities and women, and more safeguards against newforms of authoritarian rule than other constitutions in Islamic countries, especially those in the Arab Middle East, including Iraq's own constitutional past. Commentators are apt to overlook the imposed character of the production of the document, perhaps because they suspect that a more genuinely negotiated and consensual product would very possibly have included fewer supposed protections for rights and safeguards against dictatorship, or at least the “tyranny of the majority.”

As part of the roundtable “The Responsibility to Protect in a Changing World Order: Twenty Years since Its Inception,” this essay examines the issue of norm entrepreneurship as it has been used in conjunction with the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP), twenty years after the emergence of The Responsibility to Protect report produced by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). It examines norm entrepreneurs with enough drive, motivation, and resources to keep RtoP on the international agenda in a changing world order, after Western middle powers, such as Canada and some European Union member states, had previously acted as indispensable norm entrepreneurs. An examination of both Western and non-Western entrepreneurship efforts to date reveals three key observations. First, RtoP champions are now facing additional challenges in today's transitional global order, where nationalistic foreign policy agendas are replacing liberal agendas, such as RtoP. Second, the drive and adaptability of non-Western norm entrepreneurs with regional ambitions mean that small states can emerge as rather-unexpected RtoP champions. Third, giving non-Western states a visible regional or international platform allows them to display leadership in reframing prevention under the RtoP framework. The last two observations point to the increasing role of non-Western states in global governance and in the promotion of prevention measures to protect the most vulnerable, which in turn increases the legitimacy of the RtoP norm itself.

The moral complexity surrounding intervention is influenced by a broad spectrum of both ethical and practical assumptions and considerations. “All these issues,” Smith writes, “affect one's ultimate position on intervention, and different assumptions lead, obviously, to different conclusions.” The bulk of this article is a useful survey of some of the key ethical issues of disagreement among contemporary authors who represent a variety of approaches to the subject: traditional and prudential realists, statists, cosmopolitans, ideologists. Smith's own view, clearly articulated in his concluding section, is what he labels “tempered nonintervention”: “a reaffirmation of the principle of nonintervention, tempered by the possibility of humanitarian intervention when undertaken with specific safeguards.”

Liberal internationalism is under the microscope as never before as it faces a world experiencing turbulence and anxiety. The specter of right-wing authoritarianism and even fascism haunt Western societies as struggles for recognition dominate domestic politics, while demands of (re)emerging states for international representation grow more compelling. Simultaneously, there is broader recognition of a growing legitimacy crisis of the American hegemon principally due to the mindsets and failures of its liberal hegemonic elites. Both developments are major advances in the understandings of how the West dominates “diversity regimes” and co-opts discourses universal in origin and character and of how the U.S. foreign policy establishment has brought the world to the current conjuncture. Yet, there are limitations still. Although central, the concepts of diversity, hierarchy, and elites need to be broadened out significantly, and rooted in corporate-class power, to fully comprehend the core crises of the international order today.

The growing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) raises questions about what comparative advantage, if any, human beings will have over machines in the future. This essay explores what it means to be human and how those unique characteristics relate to the digital age. Humor and ethics both rely upon higher-level cognition that accounts for unstructured and unrelated data. That capability is also vital to decision-making processes—such as jurisprudence and voting systems. Since machine learning algorithms lack the ability to understand context or nuance, reliance on them could lead to undesired results for society. By way of example, two case studies are used to illustrate the legal and moral considerations regarding the software algorithms used by driverless cars and lethal autonomous weapons systems. Social values must be encoded or introduced into training data sets if AI applications are to be expected to produce results similar to a “human in the loop.” There is a choice to be made, then, about whether we impose limitations on these new technologies in favor of maintaining human control, or whether we seek to replicate ethical reasoning and lateral thinking in the systems we create. The answer will have profound effects not only on how we interact with AI but also on how we interact with one another and perceive ourselves.

Global warming is indeed a difficult international environmental problem to address: it has tragedy of the commons characteristics, and problems of time horizons and uncertainty. But previous efforts at international cooperation on other environmental issues such as ozone depletion suggest that international cooperation should be possible–though difficult–on climate change. Cooperation on issues that involve long time horizons suggests that the present generation is not calculating utility quite so narrowly as game theorists posit. Experience also suggests that successful cooperation on climate change will start with measures so small as to seem inconsequential, but will set in place an institutional and scientific process that will ultimately result in much more significant cooperative efforts. Rather than representing a tragedy, the Kyoto Protocol (or something much like it) could represent the beginnings of a process in which current generations take the first steps at collective action that dramatically improve the lives of future generations. Those who are concerned about the weakness of the Kyoto Protocol should first focus on persuading the United States to join-since this is the best way to let the process work and avoid a tragedy of the commons.

In his address at West Point on June 1, 2002, President George W. Bush appeared to be signaling America's willingness to regard the mere possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by potential enemies as grounds for an anticipatory war. Historically, however, a clear distinction has been drawn between preemptive and preventive, or anticipatory, war, with the latter regarded as illegitimate. The National Security Strategy announced by the president on September 20, 2002, was more conventional in its approach to preemption, but doubts remain as to whether the old distinction can be preserved. And this discussion is taking place in the context of a specific problem, namely the apparent desire of Iraq to obtain WMD and the determination of the United States, and, less clearly expressed, the UN Security Council, to prevent this from happening.

The modern literature on responding to global poverty is over fifty years old and has attracted the attention of some of the most prominent analytical political theorists of the age, including Brian Barry, Charles Beitz, Simon Caney, Thomas Pogge, John Rawls, and Peter Singer. Yet in spite of this extraordinary concentration of brainpower, the problem of global poverty has quite clearly not been solved or, indeed, adequately defined. We are therefore entitled to ask two questions of any new contribution to this literature: first, what does it have to offer that past work does not; and second, what reason is there to think that, this time, it will truly make a difference. These questions will be posed below, but before undertaking this task it may be useful to offer an overview of the field, with particular attention to why the problem of global poverty seems so intractable.

The decline in organized violence in the period after World War II provides the promise of a more peaceful future. How can we move further in this direction? Democratic peace—the absence of armed violence between democracies and the domestic peace of mature democracies—may provide part of the answer. This phenomenon is a well-established empirical regularity, but its mechanisms and its limits remain a subject of continuing research. The key role of democracy in reducing violence has been challenged by alternative explanations, such as the liberal peace, the capitalist peace, the developed peace, the organized peace, the quality of government peace, the feminist peace, and the civil society peace—but also by realism. In this essay, part of the roundtable “World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It),” I argue that it is a social-democratic peace that provides the best basis for a lasting world peace. This formula includes democracy but incorporates additional elements, such as a market economy, an active and competent state, close international cooperation, and the reduction of discrimination and group-based inequality. Combining these elements would provide a solid basis for eliminating violence between, as well as within, states. The main limitation of such a program is its demanding nature. Few states and interstate relations as yet fulfill all these conditions, but the long-term trends are moving in the right direction.

As the father of the realist theory of international relations, Hans Morgenthau consistently argued that international politics is governed by the competitive and conflictual nature of humankind. Myers discusses the history of U.S. foreign policy and the ongoing debate over the continued relevance of realist thought in the post-Cold War era. He argues that despite vast changes in the international system, realism remains relevant as an accurate description of human nature and hence of the interactions among nations. Analyzing Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations, Myers provides a point-by-point discussion of his theory. He concludes by stating that the relevance of realism will be seen particularly in the search for a new balance of power in the post-Cold War world.

Extreme impacts from climate change are already being felt around the world. The policy choices that we make now will affect not only how high global temperatures rise but also how well-equipped future economies and infrastructures are to cope with these changes. The interests of future generations must therefore be central to climate policy and practice. This raises the questions: Who should represent the interests of future generations with respect to climate change? And according to which criteria should we judge whether a particular candidate would make an appropriate representative for future generations? In this essay, we argue that potential representatives of future generations should satisfy what we call a “hypothetical acceptance criterion,” which requires that the representative could reasonably be expected to be accepted by future generations. This overarching criterion in turn gives rise to two derivative criteria. These are, first, the representative's epistemic and experiential similarity to future generations, and second, his or her motivation to act on behalf of future generations. We conclude that communities already adversely affected by climate change best satisfy these criteria and are therefore able to command the hypothetical acceptance of future generations.

In War and Self-Defense David Rodin uncovers many flaws of current thinking about war. Rodin correctly points out that the justification of national self-defense goes beyond the justification of individual self-defense. He accurately rejects the standard notion of moral symmetry—the accepted view that both just and unjust warriors can permissibly kill enemies as long as they observe the laws of war. Rodin vindicates the right view: if a war is unjust, each and every injury caused by the unjust warrior is a criminal act. There are no morally justified killings by those who fight unjust wars. Further, Rodin rightly rejects various holistic theories of self-defense. Last but not least, he correctly denounces what I have called the Hegelian Myth, the idea that tyrannical governments are worth defending against interventions aimed at deposing them because they are protected by the principle of sovereignty.

Plato wrote in the Republic that quarrels between fellow countrymen are wont to be more virulent and nasty than those between external enemies. Sigmund Freud (and latterly Michael Ignatieff and Toni Erskine) have similarly cautioned of the malice and excess that can attend conflicts that are fuelled not by antithetical oppositions, but by the “narcissism of minor difference.” Bearing these warnings in mind, scholars of the ethics of war would be well advised to consider the implications of James Turner Johnson's acute observation in his contribution to this special section of Ethics & International Affairs that their field of study is currently beset not so much by external opposition as by divisions within the ranks. The principal antagonism within the field, at least as I understand it, is the rift that has emerged between what I shall call historical and analytical approaches to the subject. Laying my cards on the table, the work that I have done in the past connects more clearly with the former than the latter. However, it has struck me, as it must have struck others, that the historical approach has in recent years come to assume a rather scuffed and unfashionable, even outré, appearance. It has been the subject of numerous curt dismissals, but has also, more interestingly, been tarnished by a few powerful critiques. This article will elucidate four of the most hard-hitting charges levied at the historical approach, and evaluate its continuing utility in light of them. The question then is: Have the critics of this approach landed it a knock-out blow, or can the historical approach withstand the bricks and bats that have been hurled its way?

New democracies pose a particular challenge for journalists. They are vulnerable and sometimes shaky. One wants them to work and, therefore, one is seeking to define not just what constitutes high-quality and interesting journalism but also how one can best contribute to helping democracy take root. In South Africa, journalists by and large emerged from many years of fighting against state, corporate, and political pressures under apartheid in the 1990s with a fierce commitment to independence. This sentiment was often strongest, predictably, in those institutions that had suffered the most political interference, such as the state broadcaster and the Afrikaans press, both of which had served largely as mouthpieces for the apartheid government.

Far from rejecting the classicist approach, as Thomas Weiss claims, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) follows the fundamental principle of providing aid in proportion to need and without discrimination. Actions that on Weiss's political continuum would be termed solidarist are less an expression of political preference than a determination to claim and operate within humanitarian space as well as to maintain accountability to international civil society through testimony (témoignage) regarding mass violations of human rights. Although providing aid in conflict is implicitly political, involving humanitarian actors and aid in conflict resolution initiatives, as Weiss advocates, risks diluting the primary responsibility of humanitarian aid to alleviate suffering. It also further shifts the responsibility for conflict resolution and the respect of international legal conventions from accountable political institutions to the private sphere. Is this where we want to lead humanitarianism?