The growing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) raises questions about what comparative advantage, if any, human beings will have over machines in the future. This essay explores what it means to be human and how those unique characteristics relate to the digital age. Humor and ethics both rely upon higher-level cognition that accounts for unstructured and unrelated data. That capability is also vital to decision-making processes—such as jurisprudence and voting systems. Since machine learning algorithms lack the ability to understand context or nuance, reliance on them could lead to undesired results for society. By way of example, two case studies are used to illustrate the legal and moral considerations regarding the software algorithms used by driverless cars and lethal autonomous weapons systems. Social values must be encoded or introduced into training data sets if AI applications are to be expected to produce results similar to a “human in the loop.” There is a choice to be made, then, about whether we impose limitations on these new technologies in favor of maintaining human control, or whether we seek to replicate ethical reasoning and lateral thinking in the systems we create. The answer will have profound effects not only on how we interact with AI but also on how we interact with one another and perceive ourselves.

As part of a roundtable on “Balancing Legal Norms, Moral Values, and National Interests,” this essay presents a Christian view of how to think coherently about the relationships between those three elements. Christian monotheism entails the view that there is a given moral order or “natural law,” which comprises basic human goods (or universally objective values) and moral rules for defending and promoting them. This natural law precedes all human, positive law. It follows that, while the authority of positive international law is important for the maintenance of the good of social order, it is still penultimate, since it can be trumped by natural law. Moreover, international law's authority is weaker than that of national law, because controversy over its sources gives greater scope for the interpreter's moral and political prejudices to shape its construal. Since the interpretation of international law is subject to diverse construals, occasions arise when its authority is invoked to shield the perpetration of grave injustice. In such circumstances, an appeal to natural law could supply moral justification for humanitarian military intervention, even when it violates the letter of international law. Humanitarian intervention, however, is often criticized for being motivated by national interests. A Christian view that follows Thomas Aquinas, however, does not regard national interests as immoral per se, but recognizes that self-interest can be legitimate, and that a national government has a moral responsibility to promote the legitimate interests of its people.

As part of a roundtable on “Balancing Legal Norms, Moral Values, and National Interests,” this essay argues that the policy field of secessionist conflict is structured around a set of five rival norms. The norms of territorial integrity and self-determination form the core of this structure, while the norms of noninterference in internal affairs, human and minority rights, and democracy and good governance each come into play depending on the specific scenario. This configuration permits the parties involved in a secessionist conflict to select from a menu of norms the ones that best suit their interests. Norm selection—a concept that I introduce here—displays remarkable regularities, indicating default positions for each type of actor: home states, secessionist groups, entrapped minorities, patrons, and the broader international community. However, significant outlier cases signal that interests do not simply trump norms but that actors accord different values to those norms over time. This attribution is influenced by the dynamics of a normative environment in which norms rise and fall. In particular since the end of the Cold War, discourse as well as state practice has shifted away from the traditional taboo on secession toward more revisionist concepts, such as remedial secession or earned sovereignty, providing an opening for the secessionist wave that started with the breakup of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.