The findings reported in the article “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants,” by Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino, are indeed disturbing, but I am not convinced that they tell us all we need to know about public attitudes. Different questions, those that invite respondents to reflect on the reciprocal nature of practical morality (exemplified by the golden rule: “Do unto others . . .”), might reveal very different views of justified and unjustified conduct in war. I believe that these views, regarding, for example, the treatment of prisoners of war, would probably support the idea of the moral equality of soldiers on the battlefield.

Should Germany be prosecuting crimes committed in Syria pursuant to universal jurisdiction (UJ)? This article revisits the normative questions raised by UJ—the principle that a state can prosecute serious international crimes such as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed by foreigners outside of its territories—against the backdrop of increasing European UJ proceedings regarding Syrian conflict–related crimes, focusing on Germany as an illustrative example. While existing literature justifies UJ on the basis of universal prohibition of certain atrocities, this creates residual normative issues. Alternatively, this article applies the “two-tiered test” derived from the “dual foundation” thesis of the Eichmann judgment, in which the normative appropriateness of UJ is evaluated against both accounts of universal prohibition and the specific politics surrounding the prosecution. It contends that the large number of Syrian refugees in Germany means that Germany, in particular, should initiate Syrian conflict–related UJ proceedings to prevent continued harm and recognize the political agency of refugees. Ultimately, the article suggests UJ should normatively be thought of as a domestic, rather than international, political event.

Debates over how best to ensure appropriate conduct in battle typically draw a binary distinction between rule compliance and rule violation. This framing is problematic, excluding a critical third element of battlefield conduct, supererogation—that is, positive acts that go beyond what is demanded by the explicit rules of war. This article investigates this moral category of action; specifically, situations in which combatants refrain from taking the life of an enemy despite their moral and legal license to do so. It first considers the moral tension between the duty of combatants to kill and battlefield mercy, and goes on to explore the factors that motivate the latter. The article then shifts to consider the significance of supererogation to the ongoing efforts to moderate the conduct of contemporary war. As the article illustrates, supererogatory restraint is constituted by values that when cultivated also incentivize adherence to the more explicit rules and standards of the battlefield. This is demonstrated through analysis of the conduct of Western special forces. The concept of supererogation is of further use when evaluating the origins and implications of “moral injury.” This is verified empirically in the context of armed unmanned aerial vehicles.

Any threat to use nuclear weapons inherently carries the possibility of escalation to a level such that both parties in a conflict, and likely many others, would be destroyed. Yet nuclear weapons are also seen as necessary for securing the very things that would be destroyed if the weapons were ever used. The fix for this nuclear dilemma relies on the strategy of deterrence. Deterrence provides a rationale for why nuclear weapons are necessary, even though they may seem dangerous. But the practice of deterrence involves less intentionality and agency than is usually assumed. The success of deterrence relies partially on luck as well as unrealistic assumptions about human behavior. Rather than a strategic necessity, deterrence may be an institutionalized behavior, accepted because it has always been practiced rather than because it makes sense. Assessing the ethics of deterrence and nuclear weapons requires engaging with these issues.

In their article “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants,” Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino have revealed a wealth of information about the views of contemporary Americans on the ethics of war. Virtually all they have discovered is surprising and much of it is alarming. My commentary in this symposium seeks mainly to extract a bit more from their data and to draw a few further inferences. Among the striking features of Sagan and Valentino's data are that the views of Americans tend to cluster at the extreme ends of the spectrum of possible views about the ethics of war, that an apparent sympathy for pacifism coexists with harshly punitive views about the treatment of soldiers, and that few of those surveyed appear to have given any thought to the implications of the views they expressed for what it might be permissible for enemies of the United States to do to captured American soldiers. The commentary concludes by arguing that Sagan and Valentino's findings do not, as they argue, support the fear that is sometimes expressed that a wider acceptance of revisionist just war theory, and in particular its incorporation into the law, would make the practice of war even more barbarous than it already is.

Four recent books, taken together, offer a wealth of important insights on how we might effectively tackle corruption. All of the books’ authors agree that there is something akin to a universal understanding of what corruption is, and all dispute the idea that corruption may simply be in the eye of the beholder. However, there are also sharp disagreements—for example over whether corruption is best eliminated from the top down, or whether bottom-up approaches are more effective. If the books share one weakness, it is that they do not sufficiently emphasize the importance of getting people to believe and feel that they have fair opportunities for good lives, even after institutional and legal reforms are made. Tackling corruption involves taking seriously the substantive link between actual fair treatment and the belief that fair treatment prevails. This will require further research examining how to shift and update people’s deeply held sentiments.

The conflict in Ukraine indicates some of the features of a potential post-liberal order and raises several potential ethical issues that may arise for international interventions as the world changes. What types of interventions, if any, are justifiable in response to situations such as the one in Ukraine? Can interventions be permissible given the potential undermining of universalist claims that are often used to support them? How should states prioritize between situations if there is an even greater number of global challenges in a post-liberal order? Three new books—Solferino 21 by Hugo Slim, Decolonizing Human Rights by Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim, and Promoting Justice across Borders by Lucia Rafanelli—can help to navigate these questions. Drawing on their insights, this essay argues that reform interventions can be justified to defend the liberal international order, that intervention can be defended from a relativist basis, and that socioeconomic rights should be given greater priority.

Over the past seventy-five years, the UN has evolved significantly, often in response to geopolitical dynamics and new waves of thinking. In some respects, the UN has registered remarkable achievements, stimulating a wide range of multilateral treaties, promoting significant growth of human rights, and at times playing a central role in containing and preventing large-scale armed conflict. As part of the special issue on “The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward,” this essay argues that the organization has been the most impactful in three areas: producing, shaping, and driving key ideas, particularly on development and rights; generating such effective operational agencies as UNICEF and the World Food Program; and, especially in the immediate post–Cold War period, addressing major conflict risks through the Security Council. Since then, however, the UN has struggled to meet emerging challenges on many fronts and been increasingly hampered by internal ossification and institutional sprawl as well as internecine dysfunction. The twenty-first century has confronted the UN with further challenges relating most notably to climate change; to risks arising from new technologies; and to the increasingly fraught relationships between China, Russia, and the United States. If the past seventy-five years can offer one lesson, it is that new thinking and new ideas will need to drive the organization to evolve still further and faster, or else risk irrelevance.

As part of the special issue on “The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward,” this essay looks at the UN's human rights efforts through the lens of the ethics of survival, normative ethics, the ethics of protection, institutional ethics, and the ethics of the human predicament in the face of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The essay finds that while the consecration of the right to life has made a contribution to the ethics of human survival, the overall impact of the human rights program has been marginal. Normative ethics shows the UN performing magisterially in drafting and adopting a body of international norms for the universal protection of human rights. However, when it comes to the ethics of protection, the UN performs poorly because of the numerous oppressive governments that control the world body. On the ethics of the human predicament, this essay finds that SDG 16, which is devoted to development, peace, justice, and strong institutions, has so far had little practical impact. Gross violations of human rights continue to take place in numerous parts of the world.

In this essay, I reflect on the divergent arguments about limited force made by Daniel R. Brunstetter and Samuel Moyn in their respective monographs. Arguing that their positions can be reconciled, I agree with Brunstetter that limited force has a role to play in establishing and maintaining a just world order. At the same time, however, I am mindful of Moyn's warning that limited force may lead to perpetual war. The way to ensure that limited force both works toward justice and does not result in perpetual war, I argue, is to focus more on considerations of jus ante bellum (right before war) and jus post bellum (right after war), the so-called “growing edges of just war theory.” I hold that the responsible use of statecraft, which just war thinking seeks to inform, accepts that limited force constitutes a legitimate tool to facilitate order, justice, and peace. However, any justifiable use of force must be restrained and limited and aim for a just peace. The embrace of limited force should thus be complemented with an effort by state leaders to bolster the edges of just war in order to facilitate a security environment that requires the use of limited force less frequently.

From British debates over the 1832 New Poor Law to the near present, the notion of “desert” has long had a clear referent in discussions of social welfare policy. The designation “deserving poor” was reserved for those with legitimate grounds for not supporting themselves through paid employment. Invariably among them were the very young, the very old, and the mentally and physically very disabled—people who literally could not work for a living. Also included were various categories of people who, according to the varying conventions of the day, were socially excused from paid labor—widows in the Victorian era, students in the postwar era, and so on. Anyone who could and should work for a living but refused to do so was traditionally deemed to be among the “undeserving poor.” Those were the people whose “welfare dependency” has long been the target of welfare reformers, most recently Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.

Evaluating the role of international organizations (IOs) in promoting social justice in a globalizing international political economy, this essay presents and defends four propositions:

IOs are in a different, and more vulnerable, political space vis-à-vis globalization than are nation-states, firms, nongovernmental organizations, or labor unions;

Central perceptions about problems of social justice in the context of globalization common to many IOs are a product of the history and intellectual trajectory in which these organizations have evolved;

As a result, there is a common theme and a core set of objectives at play, having to do with promoting and sustaining liberalization. That is obviously not the same thing as social justice, although in some intellectual frameworks there is a tight relationship; and

The ability of IOs to promote these goals has been challenged and will continue to be challenged by globalization.

The essay concludes by arguing that IOs are suffering a loss of legitimacy, and that both social and technological changes associated with globalization will make it harder for IOs to recapture the power to affect the behavior of other actors in world politics.

In the lead essay of this symposium, Michael Ignatieff offers a characteristic blend of philosophical acuteness and political good sense on a topic that, we can all agree, is central to many of the most important questions on the contemporary political and international agenda. His analysis is prescient, challenging, and deserves pondering at some length; thus, in this short response I cannot deal with it in anything like the detail it deserves. But the enforced brevity is perhaps an advantage as well, in that it forces me to concentrate on where I differ from Ignatieff and on my own sense of what we might imply when we use such a term as “a global ethic.”