Asset freezes are sometimes viewed as the quintessential form of targeted sanctions—relatively effective in achieving their goals, while affecting only the individuals and companies that are “bad actors.” However, as part of the roundtable “Economic Sanctions and Their Consequences,” this essay argues that there are significant ethical problems raised by asset freezes and other forms of targeted financial sanctions. Sanctioners (specifically, the United Nations Security Council and the U.S. government) have long been criticized for targeting individuals and companies for arbitrary reasons or without adequate due process. However, there is a second concern that is less well known. Asset freezes and other targeted financial sanctions may be imposed on government officials, government agencies, or private companies that hold a critical role in the target country's economy. A country's central bank, national oil company, or national shipping line, for example, may be severely compromised as a result of its inclusion on a financial blacklist. In addition to the explicit prohibitions imposed by targeted financial sanctions, there is a chilling effect as well. This can be seen when international banks and corporations withdraw from the target country altogether because the burden of compliance with these measures is so great, and the potential penalties so high.

Worldwide, growing numbers of refugees are pushed from their homes. At the same time, fewer and fewer are able to access so-called “durable solutions” to their displacement. This has prompted a flurry of efforts to repair the foundering refugee regime. Many such efforts attempt, implicitly or explicitly, to resolve tensions between legal principles, moral duties, and national interests surrounding refugees. As part of a roundtable on “Balancing Legal Norms, Moral Values, and National Interests,” this essay questions the drive toward oversimplification that has characterized these debates, recognizing that some such tensions are “baked into” the problem of refugeehood. While debates have typically focused on the obligation to admit refugees, and on “responsibility sharing,” I advance the conversation by exploring how law, morality, and national interests are entangled in efforts to support durable solutions for refugees, focusing on voluntary repatriation. What does recognition of the intrinsic and in some senses irreconcilable tensions in the refugee regime mean for efforts to support solutions? I argue that advancing durable solutions, however imperfect, for refugees does not mean definitively overcoming these tensions, but rather navigating them to identify context-specific opportunities to reposition refugees as full and equal citizens as a critical step toward reducing their precarity.

How will emerging autonomous and intelligent systems affect the international landscape of power and coercion two decades from now? Will the world see a new set of artificial intelligence (AI) hegemons just as it saw a handful of nuclear powers for most of the twentieth century? Will autonomous weapon systems make conflict more likely or will states find ways to control proliferation and build deterrence, as they have done (fitfully) with nuclear weapons? And importantly, will multilateral forums find ways to engage the technology holders, states as well as industry, in norm setting and other forms of controlling the competition? The answers to these questions lie not only in the scope and spread of military applications of AI technologies but also in how pervasive their civilian applications will be. Just as civil nuclear energy and peaceful uses of outer space have cut into and often shaped discussions on nuclear weapons and missiles, the burgeoning uses of AI in consumer products and services, health, education, and public infrastructure will shape views on norm setting and arms control. New mechanisms for trust and confidence-building measures might be needed not only between China and the United States—the top competitors in comprehensive national strength today—but also among a larger group of AI players, including Canada, France, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.

In their article “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants,” Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino argue that the American public evaluates soldiers’ wartime actions more according to whether the war they are fighting was initiated justly, than on their actions during warfare. In this respect, their views are more similar to those of revisionist philosophers than to those of traditional just war theorists. Before leaping to broad conclusions from their survey, it should be replicated. If the findings hold in the replication, intriguing questions could be asked about comparative cross-national attitudes and about the relationship between democracy and war.

The analytical tension between legal norms, moral values, and national interests seems no uncharted territory in political science, but has found very little interest in legal academia. For lawyers, moral values and national interests are largely “unknowns,” dealt with by other disciplines. Looking a bit deeper, the picture becomes more nuanced, however. As part of a roundtable on “Balancing Legal Norms, Moral Values, and National Interests,” this essay argues that norms, values, and interests are not different universes of legal normativity, morality, and specific interests, but are interrelated concepts. Values clearly influence norms and often underpin them, while seemingly concrete norms (rules) are themselves often fragile constructs trying to balance competing interests. Value systems are quite diverse within societies, and this is even truer for interests; each society is a dynamic system of social interaction where conflicting interests are constantly playing out. In a way, underlying conflicts of values and interests are constantly being renegotiated in the legal system, with the norms enshrined in the text of statutes and treaties serving to constitute transitory reference points.

In their contributions to the symposium “Just War and Unjust Soldiers,” Michael Walzer, Jeff McMahan, and Robert O. Keohane add greatly to our understanding of how best to study and apply just war doctrine to real-world conflicts. We argue, however, that they underestimate both the degree to which the American public seeks revenge, rather than just reciprocity, and the extent of popular acceptance of violations of noncombatant immunity by soldiers perceived to be fighting for a just cause. We call on empirical political scientists, lawyers, psychologists, and historians to engage with moral philosophers and political theorists in debates about the influence of just war theory and the laws of armed conflict.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reaching into every aspect of global health. In this essay, I examine one example of AI's potential contributions and limitations in global health: the prediction, treatment, and containment of a global influenza outbreak. The potential advantages are clear. AI can aid global influenza surveillance platforms by improving the capacity of organizations to look for novel influenza outbreak strains in the right places, to identify populations most likely to spread influenza, and to produce real-time information about the disease's spread by monitoring social media communications to track outbreak events. There are also very real limitations to what AI can do, and it is crucial that AI not be used as an excuse not to invest in strengthening health systems and other traditional components of global healthcare. AI may also be able to improve our understanding of who should receive a vaccine and what is most effective for large-scale vaccine delivery, but there will always be blind spots that the data cannot fill. Investment in healthcare, with attention to the danger of minimal access to care for minority groups that are at risk and in fragile situations, remains the best chance to prepare communities for outbreak detection, surveillance, and containment.

How do civilians react to being harmed in war? Existing studies argue that civilian casualties are strategically costly because civilian populations punish a belligerent who kills civilians and support the latter's opponent. Relying on eighty-seven semi-structured interviews with victims of coalition attacks in Afghanistan, this article shows that moral principles inform civilians’ attitudes toward their own harming. Their attitudes may therefore vary with the perceived circumstances of an attack. Civilians’ perception of harm as unintended and necessary, in accordance with the moral principles of distinction and necessity, was associated with narratives that cast an attack as relatively more legitimate and with a partial or full release of the coalition from blame. The principle of proportionality, which requires that civilian casualties are caused in pursuit of a legitimate war aim, informed their abstract attitudes toward civilian casualties in Afghanistan. Two rules of international law, which accord with the moral principles of distinction and necessity, were reflected in the civilians’ attitudes. The legal rule of proportionality, which diverges from the namesake moral principle, failed to resonate with the civilians. The article explores whether compliance with the legal rules of distinction and necessity can contribute to mitigating the strategic costs of civilian casualties.

The fluid use of the terminology associated with “migration governance” can obscure its intention and implications. Different meanings of core terminology risks allowing troubling policies that are not really about migration, understood widely as border crossing, or even more broadly as human movement, to be legitimized. UN-level coordination with regard to “migration governance” needs to be part of addressing this concern. For example, this article advocates explicitly engaging with this risk through the implementation of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. It considers this issue from the perspectives of a handful of countries, each of which has its own complex relationship to the compact. It argues that in each of these apparently very different contexts, policies identified as being directed at “migration control” can be found to be directed not at controlling migration but at reconfiguring existing and stable state societies along ethnic, racial, linguistic, and other lines. The development of implementation plans for the Global Compact for Migration provides the opportunity to interrogate the purposes of “migration governance” and to find mechanisms to address its hidden uses.

Technology has an outsized impact on the modern world; it is how we have tamed our frontiers. But that role is largely ignored when it comes to the Arctic frontier. Emerging technologies, especially AI, can enable desperately needed services and infrastructure—but they can also challenge ethics, law, and policy, as they usually do. For instance, autonomous icebreaker ships pose a dual-use dilemma since they can be used for both humanitarian and military purposes. As a lesson for other frontiers, this article will broadly introduce the potential role of AI in the changing Arctic and some of the ethical concerns that deserve attention before that future arrives.

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.

As part of a roundtable on “Balancing Legal Norms, Moral Values, and National Interests,” this essay describes the humanitarian diplomacy of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) by comparing it conceptually with other forms of advocacy and illustrating it with the ICRC's recent experience in the Yemen crisis. Humanitarian diplomacy is examined as one particular way of balancing legal norms, moral values, and national interests in the pursuit of greater respect for international humanitarian law (IHL) and principled humanitarian action in armed conflicts. The essay looks back to ancient history for archetypal forms of humanitarian advocacy in various cultural traditions. It then describes humanitarian diplomacy's practice of discreet diplomacy and confidential dialogue with all parties to a conflict, and compares its relatively “quiet” approach with the “loud” approach of outrage activism focused on “naming and shaming,” which tends to be the norm today. The essay argues that there is an important and complementary place for the ICRC's style of humanitarian diplomacy alongside other forms of advocacy even in the face of criticism that the ICRC is sometimes publicly silent about what it knows of atrocities and avoids naming and shaming.

Civil disobedience is a conscientious, unlawful, and broadly nonviolent form of protest, which most political philosophers and many non-philosophers are inclined to treat as potentially defensible in democratic societies. In recent years, philosophers have become more receptive to long-standing complaints from activists that civil disobedience is an unduly restrictive framework for considering the ethics of dissent. Candice Delmas and Jason Brennan have written important books that illustrate and strengthen this trend, both defending forms of “uncivil” resistance that go beyond the narrow confines of civil disobedience. Their books offer contrasting but complementary philosophical defences of incivility as a tactic of resistance, but it is nonetheless a mistake to conclude that the rich tradition associated with civil disobedience no longer has any relevance for resistance in national, transnational, and global contexts.

In an article titled “Reforming the Security Council through a Code of Conduct: A Sisyphean Task?” (Ethics & International Affairs 32, no. 4, pp. 463–82), Bolarinwa Adediran argues that efforts to establish a code of conduct at the UN Security Council amount to energy misspent—for reasons both of practicability and effectiveness. While it is true that the proposed codes of conduct do not offer any shortcuts or magic answers to the dilemmas surrounding efforts to prevent atrocity crimes and protect populations, I disagree with the assessment that these initiatives will ultimately prove to be “unhelpful.” I examine the initiatives on three levels of analysis: (1) their effect on political and normative movement toward giving increased attention to human security considerations, (2) their effect on Security Council decision-making, and (3) their effect on atrocity prevention and protection on the ground. The proposed codes have both downside risks and upside potential on all three levels, but it is on the first level that my assessment most sharply diverges from that of Adediran.

The principles of the best interest of children and subsidiarity constitute the conceptual foundation of the Convention on Protection of Children and Co-Operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (HCIA). Subsidiarity in the HCIA dictates a priority for domestic adoption placements for children over intercountry adoption. This article argues against subsidiarity on two fronts. First, the analysis shows that the in-principle priority of domestic adoption cannot be justified on the basis of either heritage rights or state sovereignty. Second, the principle of subsidiarity in the HCIA is a procedural principle, one that stipulates the political/geographical location of the placement of children through a priority ordering. This does not comport with the principle of subsidiarity as it has been conceptualized in ethics and social philosophy, which gives normative structure to the process of decision-making by stipulating the proper level for decisional authority. Subsidiarity in this original sense holds that decisions regarding child welfare should be made at the lowest level possible, by those most affected by the decisions, unless doing so would not be the most suited to protecting and promoting the best interests of children. Appealing to subsidiarity in this theoretical version reveals at least two significant problems with HCIA placement policy and leads to the conclusion that subsidiarity in the HCIA must be formally revised as a structural principle of ethics that will not support the general priority of domestic adoption.

Most current work on privacy understands it according to an economic model: individuals trade personal information for access to desired services and websites. This sounds good in theory. In practice, it has meant that online access to almost anything requires handing over vast amounts of personal information to the service provider with little control over what happens to it next. The two books considered in this essay both work against that economic model. In Privacy as Trust, Ari Ezra Waldman argues for a new model of privacy that starts not with putatively autonomous individuals but with an awareness that managing information flows is part of how people create and navigate social boundaries with one another. Jennifer Rothman's Right of Publicity confronts the explosive growth of publicity rights—the rights of individuals to control and profit from commercial use of their name and public image—and, in so doing, she exposes the poverty of treating information disclosure merely as a matter of economic calculation. Both books emphasize practical and doctrinal solutions to the problems they identify. In this essay, I take a step back and draw out the extent to which they converge on a fundamentally important point: the blunt application of market logic with its tools of property and contracts fails to protect the interests that lead us to turn to privacy in the first place; the tendency to economize privacy is a significant part of why we inadequately protect it.

Why Does Inequality Matter? is the long-awaited book-length development of T. M. Scanlon's views on objectionable inequality, and our obligations to eliminate or reduce it. The book presents an impressively nuanced and thoughtful analysis as well as succinct explanations of different objections to various forms of inequality. It is not only set to further cement Scanlon's influence on philosophical debates about equality but also makes a good guide to the problems of inequality for the nonspecialist reader. The book is not without faults, however. Even within a pluralist approach to inequality such as Scanlon's, it is not sufficiently clear what, if anything, his specific objections to status inequality, and to control over other people's lives, have in common with his other egalitarian objections to inequality of political influence, opportunity, and income and wealth—or whether, in the case of control, the objection is egalitarian at all.

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.