It might seem an American Dream come true: About 100 Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors, ten at a time, are managing five laboratories stocked with “totally state-of-the-art equipment” in a gleaming new tower on the National University of Singapore campus. As the New York Times reports, the campus houses the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology and other projects, involving “world-class universities from Britain, China, France, Germany, Israel and Switzerland.” The MIT professors and their forty PhD and postdoctoral researchers are designing “myriad innovations”: driverless cars that would respond to “killer app” sensors throughout Singapore; stingray-like robots that will collect ocean-bottom data to fight noxious algae; and technologies that will track infectious diseases, energy consumption, and other movements in this tightly run, wealthy city-state of 5.4 million people.

Now that the uproar provoked by the disclosure of the National Security Agency's (NSA) surveillance programs has lessened, and the main protagonists, Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, have had a chance to make the case for their actions, we are in a position to evaluate whether their disclosure and publication of communications intelligence was justified. To this end, this essay starts by clarifying the history, rationale, and efficacy of communications surveillance. Following this I weigh the arguments against surveillance, focusing in particular on the countervailing value of privacy. Next I explain why state secrecy makes it difficult for citizens and lawmakers to assess the balance that officials are striking between security and privacy. Finally, I turn to consider whether the confounding nature of state secrecy justifies Snowden's and Greenwald's actions. I conclude that their actions are unjustified because they treat privacy and transparency as trumps. Consequently, their actions embody a moral absolutism that disrespects the norms and procedures central to a constitutional democracy.

Ten years since its adoption by the UN General Assembly, the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) has become an established international norm associated with positive changes to the way that international society responds to genocide and mass atrocities. In its first decade, RtoP has moved from being a controversial and indeterminate concept seldom utilized by international society to a norm utilized almost habitually. This is an assessment that stands in contrast to the widespread view that RtoP is associated with “growing controversy,” but is one that rests on evidence of state practice.

The last resort criterion has a hallowed place in the just war theory tradition. Many leading just war theory scholars accept it as a jus ad bellum requirement and some powerful politicians reference it. While there are several versions of last resort, many take it to mean that peaceful options that have a reasonable chance of achieving a just cause must be exhausted before the use of force is permissible. Its justification is straightforward and commonsensical: war is terrible, inevitably results in the deaths of numerous innocents and destruction of their property, and thus should be avoided whenever possible. I argue that last resort should be dropped from the just war tradition because its inclusion in the just war tradition can result in a greater number of harms to innocents than if the precept did not exist. What should matter morally is the severity and numbers of harms inflicted on innocents, not whether those harms are inflicted violently or nonviolently. I suggest that in the context of achieving a just cause, the only actions that are permissible are those that are likely to inflict the fewest morally weighted harms and that meet the other just war theory precepts (excluding last resort). Three accounts of last resort do not permit this, whereas while a fourth does, it is redundant with an important account of the jus ad bellum proportionality precept. Thus violent policies may be preferable in some rare circumstances to nonviolent alternatives such as non-targeted sanctions and negotiations because nonviolent policies sometimes are more likely to foreseeably and avoidably result in far greater harms to innocents than violent options.

A new set of “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs) are currently being negotiated at the United Nations, and there is a widespread consensus that these goals must be “universal.” This article analyses what universality might mean in this context, and its normative significance as a guiding principle for the goals. After briefly introducing the Sustainable Development Goals as found in the current stage of the negotiations, thearticle proceeds in three sections that consider three different senses of universality. In the first, I outline the most intuitive or straightforward sense of universality as a claim about the scope of the goals, with limited import for the content. In the second section, I expand on this idea by noting a widespread understanding of the content of the goals which might also be thought universal and which reflects a moral cosmopolitan constraint on the ambition of each goal. Universality is paired with, and contrasted against, the need for differentiation. In the final section, I examine this idea of differentiation, asking how and how far, the goals should allow for country context. From this discussion arises a third account of universality which incorporates a demand for fair burden-sharing. I consider, and ultimately caution against, this account of universality, even though the demand forfairness is crucial in its own right.

In this latest work by one of our leading political and legal philosophers, Allen Buchanan outlines a novel framework for assessing the system of international human rights law—the system that he takes to be the heart of modern human rights practice. Buchanan does not offer a full justification for the current system, but rather aims “to make a strong prima facie case that the existing system as a whole has what it takes to warrant our support of it on moral grounds, even if some aspects of it are defective and should be the object of serious efforts at improvement” (p. 173).