As part of the roundtable, “Ethics and the Future of the Global Food System,” this essay discusses some of the major challenges we will face in feeding the world in 2050. A first challenge is nutritional: 690 million people (9 percent of the world's population) are currently undernourished, while 2.1 billion adults (28 percent of the population) are overweight or obese. The current global food system is insufficient in ensuring that the nutritious foods that make up healthy diets are available and accessible for the world's population. Moreover, by 2050, as the global population increases, food demand will increase by 50–60 percent. A fundamental challenge is meeting this demand while not wreaking irreversible havoc on natural resources, the environment, and planetary systems. A body of scientific research has coalesced around the need to reduce food loss and waste, adopt environmentally sustainable production practices, and shift toward plant-dominant diets. Other long-standing food system problems include deficits in providing fair wages and decent working conditions for food system workers, threats to smallholder farmer livelihoods, and tens of billions of animals kept in welfare-deficit confinement conditions. These food system challenges are bad states of affairs that matter from a variety of moral perspectives. In other words, there is a robust moral case for addressing these challenges. Yet concerted policy action in this area is insufficient and largely absent, pointing to the underlying challenge and complexity of political inertia.

The notion that some means of waging war are mala in se is a confronting one. Surely, any weapon can be used for good or ill? Philosophers often try to justify the category of mala in se by suggesting that some weapons are inherently incapable of being used in accordance with the just war principles of distinction and proportionality. This line of argument faces two obvious objections. First, claims about the limits of particular weapons typically fail to consider the different contexts in which they might be used. For example, anti-personnel mines can be used as defensive measures for fixed installations in marked locations that are fenced off from civilian intrusion. Second, deriving the category of mala in se from the principles of distinction and proportionality makes it redundant. The argument that some weapons cause disproportionate suffering is more persuasive, but it falters if one conducts an honest appraisal of the nature and extent of the suffering caused by weapons that are not held to be mala in se.

In response to Charles Taylor's book Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Becker defends the Western view of ethical conceptions based on our unique identity, reasoning, and historical heritage. Taylor presents a vision of transcultural universal ethical principles that cannot be grounded on cultural idiosyncrasies, and he criticizes Western cultural convictions of beliefs and values leading to unequivocally individualistic and personalized perceptions of ethics. Becker notes the uniqueness of the person and the “awesomeness of human life,” which are directly linked with our respect for rational evaluation of ethics and the crucial importance of the ability of the individual to search for his/her human identity. Our “moral vision” is precisely based on “the good life in terms of respect for humanity and all its diversity,” therefore establishing ethics on personal selfhood and individuality. The author concedes that Taylor's motivations for the belief in creating a vision of the common good are plausible, but criticizes him for failing to account for the historical context of our values.

Nolan reviews three works describing the influence of ethics on modern international relations, namely Code of Peace: Ethics and Security in the World of the Warlord States (Dorothy V. Jones); The Age of Rights (Louis Henkin); and Morality and American Foreign Policy: The Role of Ethics in International Affairs (Robert W. McElroy). All present timely academic and historical arguments for existing opportunities to bring ethics into world politics. Jones and Henkin concern themselves most with moral principles involved in establishing international law and organizations, while McElroy discusses the same issues from the unique perspective of U.S. foreign policy. Nolan gives full recognition to the traditional role of democratic states, particularly the United States., in shaping the moral norms of the international system in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through ethics that are Western in origin but certainly not in their inherent content.

In a brief summary of a poll conducted by the Carnegie Council, Myers outlines the American public's views on issues ranging from foreign policy/peace issues to economic security, defense, and human rights. The underlying perception of the United States as the “moral nation” raises a fundamental question: How deeply imbedded is the distinction between words and deeds in American foreign policy? Some results of the survey defied explanation. “Why are Americans so avid about human rights abroad, yet so reluctant to commit foreign aid, and so indignant about the U.S. dollars that are spent on NATO and Japanese security? Logic and sentiment remain interwoven,” concludes Myers.

Review essay of “Diplomacy,” by Henry Kissinger; “Truman,” by David McCullough; and “The Downing Street Years,” by Margaret Thatcher.

In Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration, Anna Stilz argues that legitimate political authority requires the actual—rather than hypothetical—consent of the governed. I argue, however, that her analysis of that consent is inconsistent, in the weight it ascribes to the felt desire to refrain from doing politics with some particular group of people. In the context of secession and self-determination, the lack of actual consent to shared political institutions is weighty enough to render such institutions presumptively illegitimate. In the context of migration, however, a lack of actual consent to the presence of newcomers is ascribed nearly no weight, and instead is taken as evidence of irrationality or immoral preferences. I argue that this apparent contradiction must be clarified before Stilz's overall account of self-governance can be accepted.

Belonging. The subject conjures up a realm of emotions. In today's world, where increasing numbers of people are on the move, whether voluntarily or forced, it captures the nostalgia one feels for a home left behind or the yearning one has for acceptance in a new community. It can produce feelings of joy or loss even from a distance, as when one follows political, sporting, or family events from afar. It encompasses sentiments of anguish, fear, and resentment when those who wish to belong are rejected or when those within a group feel threatened by those from without. For all the talk today of an interconnected, globalizing world where borders are “not just permeable, but . . . shot through with large holes,” most of us still expect our national borders—the borders of the state where we belong—to be impenetrable, except through the preapproved legal channels.