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A Peaceful, Silent, Deadly Remedy: The Ethics of Economic Sanctions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Joy Gordon
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Abstract

Economic sanctions are emerging as one of the major tools of international governance in the post-Cold War era. Sanctions have long been seen as a form of political intervention that does not cause serious human damage, and therefore does not raise pressing ethical questions. However, the nature of sanctions is that they effectively target the most vulnerable and least political sectors of society, and for this reason they must be subject to ethical scrutiny.

This essay looks at sanctions in the context of three ethical frameworks: just war doctrine, deontological ethics, and utilitarianism. It argues that sanctions are inconsistent with the principle of discrimination from just war doctrine; that sanctions reduce individuals to nothing more than means to an end by using the suffering of innocents as a means of persuasion, thereby violating the Kantian principle that human beings are “ends in themselves”; and that sanctions are unacceptable from a utilitarian perspective because their economic effectiveness necessarily entails considerable human damage, while their likelihood of achieving political objectives is low.

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 13 , March 1999 , pp. 123 - 142
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1999

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References

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