Two requirements have governed my thinking about an appropriate response to the attacks of September 11: the urgent need for action that would greatly reduce the threat of future mega-terrorist incidents, and the necessity of recognizing the appropriate legal, moral, and political limits to waging a defensive war.

It is hard to watch a society's political virtues mocked as weakness by an uncomprehending foe. The fireball attacks of September 11 against the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon consumed the lives of more than 3,000 ordinary people—Americans and foreign visitors , business people, secretaries, schoolchildren visiting the Pentagon, travelers flying home. Like Joseph Conrad's terrorist who wished to destroy pure mathematics and settled for the Greenwich clock tower, this was an attack on civil society and global economy, and worst of all, on the innocence of noncombatants.

I served as a lieutenant in Vietnam. In June 1969, after being in the country for about ten days, I saw my first combat action and it was typically confusing. My platoon was on a reconnaissance mission as part of a larger force when some members of the unit saw a few Vietcong soldiers and began to pursue them through the jungle and marshland countryside. The enemy soldiers were quickly cornered, one was captured, and at least two more cowered in a streambed about 100 yards away. In circumstances I do not fully understand to this day, there was gunfire, many vehicles raced back and forth, and the two radios I was required to monitor broadcast a confusion of chatter. Suddenly, on the higher command radio, I heard the voice of our colonel: “Stop shooting; that's murder,” he ordered. The soldiers did stop shooting, the prisoners were secured, and we continued our mission. But that single, short order had great impact on me. It taught me more than any schoolhouse instruction ever could have about the laws of war and how professional soldiers behave in combat.

Clearly, Osama bin Laden does not subscribe to any international rules in his unholy struggle against the world. The fatwa (religious ruling) issued in February 1998 by the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders—the network of terrorist organizations bin Laden established—holds that “to kill the Americans and their allies-civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim.” It makes no distinction between noncombatants and combatants, viewing civilians as soldiers in a zero sum confrontation.

It is curious to note the evolution of discussions about the moral and legal rules that apply in the fight against terrorism. Immediately after September 11, when it was clear that the United States was going to focus its new war within Afghanistan, the first question that arose was how the United States was going to assess the deaths of Afghan civilians as collateral damage . A second, major set of legal and ethical issues developed around the Bush administration's declaration that those captured in the war would face trial before military tribunals. And as the major campaigns of the war have come to a close, the celebrated issue has become the present and future legal status of the quite different fighters, supporters, and operatives of al-Qaeda and the former Taliban government who are in U. S .custody.

In the aftermath of the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, the categories of “good” and “evil” have come to dominate the rhetorical response of the U.S. government. This article investigates the implications of using the concept of “evil” as a major public policy rationale. The article focuses on the Bush Administration's attempts to frame its policy around this term in the current campaign against terrorism, but also considers recent uses of the term in the growing literature on war crimes, genocide, and domestic repression. Because the concept of evil has deep roots in various theological understandings, we examine its religious meanings (largely within the Christian tradition) and the problems that arise when applying it in the secular context of government policy. In assessing these problems, we focus on Hannah Arendt's efforts to comprehend the evils of totalitarianism within a secular perspective.

We argue that in contemporary policy discourse, “evil” is mostly invoked as a term of condemnation rather than an analytical concept, and that this usage tends to inhibit rather than encourage the search for explanation. It facilitates evasion of accountability within a secular framework of justice based on positive law. The alternative is to approach terrorism in the language of secular law, which rests on fixed criteria to regulate the use of force (in situations of war) and to prosecute and punish (in matters of crime). Such an approach complements and should encourage parallel efforts to comprehend events by examining their causes and historical context.

Sadly, there are few restraints on the endings of wars. There has never been an international treaty to regulate war's final phase, and there are sharp disagreements regarding the nature of a just peace treaty. There are, by contrast, restraints aplenty on starting wars, and on conduct during war. These restraints include: political pressure from allies and enemies; the logistics of raising and deploying force; the United Nations, its Charter and Security Council; and international laws like the Hague and Geneva Conventions. Indeed, in just war theory—which frames moral principles to regulate wartime actions—there is a robust set of rules for resorting to war (jus ad bellum) and for conduct during war (jus in bello) but not for the termination phase of war.

This article discusses the moral principles underlying the idea of humanitarian intervention. The analysis is in two parts, one historical and the other philosophical. First, the article examines arguments made in late medieval and early modern Europe for using armed force to punish the violation of natural law and to defend communities from tyranny and oppression, regardless of where they occur. It seeks to understand how moralists writing before the emergence of modern international law conceived what we now call humanitarian intervention.

In the context of international law, humanitarian intervention is usually understood to be an exception to the nonintervention principle. However, the natural law tradition regards international law as less important than the moral imperative to punish wrongs and protect the innocent.

Second, the article considers how humanitarian intervention is justified within the reformulation of the natural law tradition displayed in recent efforts to theorize morality along Kantian lines. In this reformulation, humanitarian intervention is a product of the duty of beneficence and, more specifically, of the right to use force to protect the innocent. The article draws upon the biblical injunction “Thou shalt not stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor,” which has become a centerpiece of the modern reformulation, and briefly explores its application to humanitarian intervention in the context of international relations today. This reformulation of natural law explains why, despite modern efforts to make it illegal, humanitarian intervention remains, in principle, morally defensible.

This article describes and evaluates the different strategies that have been employed by international human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in attempting to influence the behavior of multinational corporations (MNCs). Within the NGO world, there is a basic divide on tactics for dealing with corporations: Engagers try to draw corporations into dialogue in order to persuade them by means of ethical and prudential arguments to adopt voluntary codes of conduct, while confronters believe that corporations will act only when their financial interests are threatened, and therefore take a more adversarial stance toward them. Confrontational NGOs tend to employ moral stigmatization, or “naming and shaming,” as their primary tactic, while NGOs that favor engagement offer dialogue and limited forms of cooperation with willing MNCs.

The article explains the evolving relationship between NGOs and MNCs in relation to human rights issues and defines eight strategies along the engagement/confrontation spectrum used by NGOs in their dealings with MNCs. The potential benefits and risks of various forms of engagement between NGOs and MNCs are analyzed and it is argued that the dynamic created by NGOs pursuing these different strategies can be productive in moving some companies to embrace their social responsibilities. Yet, in order for these changes to be sustainable, national governments will need to enact enforceable international legal standards for corporate social accountability.

This article focuses on the expanding role of multinational corporations (MNCs) in developing countries, within the context of globalization and free trade. It demonstrates that the current state of globalization does not conform to the conventional notion of free trade. Therefore, given the prevailing circumstances, MNCs have an unfair advantage in expropriating a greater share of gains from efficiency and productivity from international trade than would be possible if labor had greater mobility or more equitable bargaining power.

The article presents evidence that the arguments advanced by MNCs in defense of their position are factually incorrect and logically flawed. Next, the article examines the efforts made by MNCs to ameliorate some of the adverse conditions arising from their overseas manufacturing and sourcing operations. The findings show that most of these efforts are more rhetorical than substantive.

Finally, it outlines a framework that allows multinationals to undertake meaningful actions that would both minimize the adverse consequences of, and enhance the positive benefits emanating from their overseas operations. These actions must be independently verifiable and transparent if MNCs are to gain credibility and public trust.

A failure to undertake meaningful reforms will retard or even reverse the process of globalization, thus depriving all concerned of globalization's attendant benefits. Even more ominously, such a failure would seriously undermine democratic values and erode the very foundations of political and economic freedom in large parts of the world that sustain private enterprise, property rights, respect for individual freedom, and protection of human rights.

Nothing is more politically important to think about, and act upon, than global poverty relief. Numbers can mask the human faces of poverty, but they do bring out its scale: Today, any day, 30,000 children under the age of five will die from preventable illness and starvation. A further 163 million children who will survive this day are severely undernourished. Some 1.2 billion people will try to subsist on less than one dollar a day, while 2.4 billion will not have access to basic sanitation.

Andrew Kuper begins his critique of my views on poverty by accepting the crux of my moral argument: The interests of all persons ought to count equally, and geographic location and citizenship make no intrinsic difference to the rights and obligations of individuals. Kuper also sets out some key facts about global poverty, for example, that 30,000 children die every day from preventable illness and starvation, while most people in developed nations have plenty of disposable income that they spend on luxuries and items that satisfy mere wants, not basic needs.

The main thrust of my argument was that ad hoc suggestions of charity cannot replace a systematic and theoretically informed approach to poverty relief. Charitable donation sometimes helps—and sometimes harms—but is no general solution to global poverty, and can be positively dangerous when presented as such. We need to consider, and often choose, other routes to helping the poor—including ethical tourism and fair trade in luxury goods. We will not be able to invest in such feasible routes if we give away all our extra income, as Singer recommends. Sticking to donation above all, when a combination of other strategies is necessary, is highly likely to harm the poor.

The one central point in all my writing on this topic, from “Famine, Affluence and Morality” onward, has been that the failure of people in the rich nations to make any significant sacrifices in order to assist people who are dying from poverty related causes is ethically indefensible. It is not simply the absence of charity, let alone of moral saintliness: It is wrong, and one cannot claim to be a morally decent person unless one is doing far more than the typical comfortably-off person does.