Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a tour de force—a compelling and accessible read that presents an eloquent and convincing warning about the future of capitalism. Capitalism, Piketty argues, suffers from an inherent tendency to generate an explosive spiral of increasing inequality of wealth and income. This inegalitarian dynamic of capitalism is not due to textbook failures of capitalist markets (for example, natural monopolies) or failures of economic institutions (such as the failure to regulate these monopolies), but to the way capitalism fundamentally works. Unless the spiral is controlled by far more progressive taxation than is now the norm, the political fallout could undermine the viability of the successful “social state” (p. 471) in the advanced economies, putting the democratic state itself at risk.

Steven Lee offers a probing and fair minded critique of our effort to show that the preventive use of military force could be justified if the decision to undertake preventive action was reached through an appropriate institutional process. Our responses to his thoughtful criticisms will help to clarify both the moral-philosophical arguments and the institutional proposal presented in our earlier paper.

Until recently, the history of environmentalism was primarily a history of attention to place. In the United States, environmentalists have gotten rather good at protecting and managing particular places such as mountains, forests, and watersheds and specific resources such as trees, soil, wildlife, air, and water. Environmentalism has become an enormously popular social movement, with, by some measures, more than 80 percent of Americans considering themselves environmentalists. Thousands of organizations, ranging from local volunteer groups to national nonprofits, address issues as diverse as open space, air and water pollution, biological diversity, environmental justice, and environmental effects on human health. The successes of this movement have been striking. Our National Parks, National Forests, and wilderness areas are touted as models for the world and are well complemented by state, municipal, and private protected areas. The Endangered Species Act successfully resolves many conflicts between rare creatures and development. Rivers have been cleaned up, and once-spurned urban waterfronts now draw real estate and tourism development. Americans drink cleaner water and breathe cleaner air than much of the rest of the world, and attempts to weaken regulatory frameworks are consistently met with public disapproval.

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. As a consequence, it is very difficult to see what we are doing to ourselves, to future generations, and to the living planet as a whole. There are monumental ethical issues involved, but they are obscured by the incremental nature of the process and the long time frame before reaching the concentration of greenhouse gases and the ensuing accumulation of radiant heat—and consequent climate change—that ensues.

This article is based upon Rousseau's vision of interdependence being a habitual source of conflict among nations. Today's version of collective security, in contrast to Woodrow Wilson's advocation of exclusive use of political and economic sanctions, often demands military action. Collective security offers inherent contradictions: Does multilateral action, for example, usually led by the United States, indicate international accord on countering the ‘aggressor’? The authors' answer is “no” because smaller nations may be joining the crusade for completely different reasons, for example, so as not to offend the larger partner. Does multilateral action always succeed in creating a Pax Universalis? No, on the contrary it may lead to war. Generally offering arguments from the U.S. perspective and examples from the Gulf War, Hendrickson sees neither collective action as necessarily a good thing nor unilateral action as necessarily a bad thing. However, he does urge reconsideration of the advantages of collective security as an all-powerful preventor of conflict.

Despite conservative opposition, in the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter turned the tide in favor of the Helsinki Accord by taking a strong stand in fostering U.S. participation in it. Korey focuses on the U.S. delegation to the Commission on Security and Cooperation (CSCE) in Europe and credits the success of the Helsinki Accord to U.S. adroit negotiation strategies, beginning with the Carter administration. By 1980, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev came to embrace the “humanitarianism” of the treaty. The Vienna review conference's (1986–89) effort peaked when a milestone was reached in the human rights process, linking it directly to security issues equally pertinent to the East and the West. The author contends that the United States' ardent participation in the monitoring of compliance was particularly effective in putting pressure on the Soviet Union to uphold the agreement within its territory, yielding enormous progress in human rights

Pope John Paul's great vision of communitarianism and a New Global Order has yet to receive the recognition it deserves in furthering the understanding that humanity is built on religious values, without which transformations in totalitarian regimes would have been impossible. The essence of communitarianism, as put forth by the Vatican, consists of seeking middle ground between Marxist collectivism and rigid individualism and capitalism. Phillips traces the history of communitarianism through Aristotelian and Judeo-Christian writings, clarifying the proper function of the community in helping individuals help themselves by mobilizing church resources and countering anti-religious movements such as Nazism and communism. Communitarianism presents an encouraging universal notion of freedom, transcending the one-sided stances of Marxism and libertarian capitalism and promoting the vision of a unified human destiny.

The pervasiveness and magnitude of AIDS require that it be addressed on an international, global scale. However, the issues of testing for the virus, and controlling its propagation raise questions of civil rights. Brenda Almond examines different countries' policies and ways of attempting to deal with AIDS, focusing on their positions in regard to rights. Almond makes the case that while discrimination should be avoided and fought, that recognition of the primary right, that of life, demands that public health and civil rights be considered in a less oppositional way. Ultimately, however, the possibility of defeating AIDS lies not in law and regulation but in moral education.

What are the philosophical arguments justifying limited strikes? This essay, as part of the roundtable “The Ethics of Limited Strikes,” adopts a French perspective both because France is, along with the United States and the United Kingdom, one of the states that launched such limited strikes in recent years, and because it developed a limited warfare ethos. There is something specific about such an ethos that makes it particularly receptive to the jus ad vim framework and, therefore, to the issue of limited strikes. This essay also builds on the case of the use (or threat) of limited force in Syria as a response to the country's use of chemical weapons between 2013 and 2018. Presented as a way to “punish” the Syrian regime as much as to “deter” it from using chemical weapons again, these limited strikes are a good illustration of the traditional retributive/preventive dichotomy of penal philosophy. I argue that the moral justification of those strikes should be guided by a consequentialist ethic, preventive rather than retributive. From a consequentialist perspective, limited strikes are justified when they “work”—that is, when they have a deterrent/compellent effect. For that to happen, they need to be credible and imply the potential of an escalation; the challenge being to keep the escalation under control. Carrying the risk of inefficacy at one end of the spectrum and of escalation at the other, limited strikes are indeed a matter of balance.

Patti Tamara Lenard assesses the justifications given for the right to revoke citizenship in democratic states and concludes that this practice is inconsistent with a commitment to democratic equality. She provides three normative reasons for the mismatch between democratic principles and revocation laws: that the practice of revocation discriminates between different citizens within each state; that it provides differential penalties for the same crime; and that it does not provide transparent justification or due process for this harsh punishment. Although I too am repulsed by this practice, I do not think it is necessarily undemocratic. Moreover, such analysis overlooks one legitimate motivation behind expatriation: the aim to regulate national allegiance. The new revocation initiatives act as a powerful symbolic tool in reinforcing a world order based on sovereign nation-states.

Suppose it is foreseeable that you will soon encounter a drowning child, whom you will only be able to rescue if you learn to swim. In this scenario we might think that you have a “prospective duty” to take swimming lessons given that this will be necessary to perform the future rescue. Cécile Fabre argues that, by parity of reasoning, states have a prospective duty to build and maintain military establishments. My argument in this essay pulls in the opposite direction. First, I emphasize that learning to swim is only a prospective duty under very specific circumstances. Normally there is no such duty; hence, we do not normally think that people deserve moral censure for choosing to forego swimming lessons. I then argue that, similarly, while a prospective duty to build a military can arise under some conceivable circumstances, these are not the circumstances that most states today find themselves in. I then suggest a more fitting domestic analogy to guide our thinking about this issue: Maintaining a standing army is less like learning to swim and more like keeping an assault weapon in the home “just in case.” This analogy supports a defeasible presumption against militarization.

Nuclear weapons are different from every other type of weapons technology. Their awesome destructive potential and the unparalleled consequences of their use oblige us to think critically about the ethics of nuclear possession, planning, and use. Joe Nye has given the ethics of nuclear weapons deep consideration. He posits that we have a basic moral obligation to future generations to preserve roughly equal access to important values, including equal chances of survival, and proposes criteria for achieving conditional or “just deterrence” to minimize the risk of nuclear use and help preserve these values. While Nye's conditions are laudable, they are not achievable. They rely on flawed assumptions about the nature of nuclear weapons and the inherent risks of the nuclear deterrence system. Since the Cold War ended, the strategy and practice of nuclear deterrence has grown riskier, more urgent, more dangerous, and less stable. It is time to rethink how we manage nuclear risks. A new nuclear security system must be built on the design principle that the consequences of system failure cannot threaten to end or fundamentally disrupt civilization. We owe the future a new nuclear security strategy that can prevent an existential global nuclear event.

In his definitive book A Perfect Moral Storm, ethicist Stephen Gardiner argues that the way forward in a climate-changed world is so difficult in part because we “do not yet have a good understanding of many of the ethical issues at stake in global-warming policy.” We remain confused about such vital questions as who should take responsibility for the current condition, how to preserve equity between generations, and how best to think about our responsibility toward nonhuman animals. The resistance of governments to taking action, attempts by various players to throw sand in the eyes of the public, and specious arguments used to justify an unwillingness to do what is necessary all add to our moral bafflement.