Thinking about international affairs has oscillated between idealism and realism throughout the modern period. Moralists continue to search for a way to combine what is reasonable in each in an ethically defensible middle between those extremes. Such efforts often yield a soft version of political realism: an ethics of compromise between moral ideals and real-world interests. But this resolution fails to escape an awkward dichotomy between “morality” and “reality,” as if moral considerations were not real and interests never illusory. It also rests on a simplistic conception of politics. Politics is distinguished from other activities in being concerned with obligations prescribed and enforced within a legal order, and those who make political decisions cannot ignore these obligations. Political decision-making must therefore take account of law, which is distinct from both morality and interest. Law may have its ultimate justification in moral principle, but it provides reasons for acting that are distinct from moral reasons. This is true of law at any level, including international law. Law also has material as well as normative force as part of the world in which decisions are made. A more nuanced middle-ground ethics, then, would take account of law as making demands of its own. If we bring law into the picture, we discover limits to action that are grounded on neither morality nor interest.

In Joseph Heller's comic war novel, Catch-22, the catch-22 of the title refers to a supposed military regulation that allowed one to be relieved of military service if one was insane, but further provided that no one who realized he would be better off out of military service could possibly be insane. Humanity's so far leaderless approach to dealing with rapidly accelerating climate change embodies a similar, but profoundly tragic, catch-22 that has, among other twists and contradictions, transmuted justice into paralysis.

The “resource curse” can strike countries that derive a large portion of their national income from exporting high-value natural resources, such as oil, gas, metals, and gems. Resource-exporting countries are subject to four overlapping curses: they are more prone to authoritarianism, they tend to suffer more corruption, they are at a higher risk for civil wars, and they exhibit greater economic instability.

As global governance institutions proliferate and become more powerful, their legitimacy is subject to ever sharper scrutiny. Yet what legitimacy means in this context and how it is to be ascertained are often unclear. In a previous paper in this journal, we offered a general account of the legitimacy of such institutions and a set of standards for determining when they are legitimate. In this paper we focus on the legitimacy of the UN Security Council as an institution for making decisions concerning the use of military force across state borders. The context for this topic has changed over the last decade as a result of the ongoing development of the responsibility to protect (RtoP) doctrine and extensive discussions about it in the United Nations. Yet the mostly widely accepted proposals for RtoP still require Security Council authorization for forceful intervention, and strictly limit the conditions under which such intervention may take place.

Who should pay the costs associated with anthropogenic climate change, how much should they pay, and why? This burden-distribution problem has become the central question of climate justice among scholars and activists, and it remains the primary obstacle to the development of an effective climate regime. The costs are expected to be significant and varied, but can generally be categorized in terms of mitigation—that is, those costs associated with reducing further human contributions toward the increasing atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases (GHGs) that cause climate change; and adaptation—that is, those costs that result from attempting to insulate humans from the harms associated with the anthropogenic environmental damage of climate change. Since mitigation actions undertaken by developed countries under the auspices of the Kyoto Protocol are self-financed and mitigation targets accepted by developing countries are widely viewed as contingent upon financing from developed countries, imperatives to reduce GHGs are fundamentally matters of allocating mitigation costs. Adaptation intervenes in the causal chain between climate change and human harm, allowing the former but preventing the latter, but when this is not possible, a third category of compensation costs must be assigned in order to remedy failed mitigation and adaptation efforts. Because the formulas for assessing liability for adaptation and for compensation are identical, and since climate justice requires adaptation efforts that render compensation unnecessary, for the purposes of this essay the category of adaptation shall be understood to include prevention of harm as well as ex post compensation for it. As expected, the “Copenhagen Accord” that emerged from the Fifteenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in December 2009 failed to satisfactorily address this core burden-allocation issue, making its resolution the primary problem to be addressed at the COP16 in Cancún, Mexico, at the end of 2010.