For better or worse, all people rely on the same environment as well as increasingly connected economic and political architecture. These international networks host the most significant problems humanity faces in the modern world. In a new collection of essays, Ethics in International Affairs: A Reader, leading political scientists, economists, and ethicists address many of these global problems. The editors, Joel Rosenthal and Christian Barry, have tapped many of the most knowledgeable thinkers and writers to analyze issues ranging from “Just War theory” to developmental economics.
The volume is divided into four sections: “Conflict and Reconciliation,” “Grounds for Intervention,” “Governance, Law and Membership,” and “Global Economic Justice.” Each section has about four articles—varying widely in length and readability—but all 17 address issues that affect hundreds of millions of people almost every day.
For example, in one article, Alex J. Bellamy explores the concept of “Responsibility to Protect”: the idea that powerful nations have a responsibility to use military force to depose a regime when it deliberately harms its own people. The Rwandan genocide serves as the model case where the West shirked that responsibility, but Bellamy devotes most of his article to the crisis in Darfur and the war in Iraq. The main conclusion that Bellamy draws is that western governments use the responsibility to protect ideal exclusively as a rhetorical tool for pursuing national interest. Thus, the U.S. government appeared tremendously more sensitive to the plight of Iraqi Kurds under Saddam Hussein than it did to Darfurian villagers under fire from government warplanes.
In another interesting article, “The Invisible Hand of the American Empire,” Robert Wade explores the sources and nature of American power. While he sees many avenues of American control, Wade identifies the global financial and economic architecture as the most important of such factors. The bottom line, in Wade’s eyes, is that these systems enable the high levels of consumption without requiring reciprocal production of physical goods. These high rates of consumption ensure that the United States remains the main hub for the flow of technology and human resources, advantages which would put any nation head and shoulders above the rest of the world.
A short and especially sweet article questions the idea of a “preventative war.” The author, Neta C. Crawford, identifies the dependence on a “potential threat” as the primary difficulty in justifying pre-emptive offensives. U.S. leadership is on the record saying things like, “We cannot wait for ... the smoking gun ... in the form of a mushroom cloud,” (George W. Bush), and arguing that no level of risk is acceptable when it comes to weapons of mass destruction (Dick Cheney). The logical problem with such notions is obvious, because it is impossible to completely eliminate risk; the idea that we should reduce risk as much as possible is a failure to use marginal reasoning, and has consequently justified astronomical expenditures for minor reductions in risk.
Though these and other ideas in Ethics in International Affairs are interesting and extremely important to the world, they suffer from a problem common to all ideas about large-scale ethical problems: they have no practical application. Only a tiny fraction of us will ever have any real power over the military and economic decisions made by our government, so in some sense, this book is comparable to mere entertainment. Still, for those with an interest in international affairs and the patience to work through difficult concepts and language, Ethics in International Affairs will be very entertaining.
