A large and impressive literature has arisen over the past fifteen years concerning the emergence, transfer, and sustenance of political norms in international life. The presumption of this literature has been, for the most part, that the winds of normative change blow in a progressive direction, toward greater or more stringent normative control of individual or state behavior. Constructivist accounts detail a spiral of mutual normative reinforcement as actors and institutions discover the advantages of normative self- and other evaluation. There is also now much interesting research focused on the question of how to predict the emergence of future norms.

I focus, however, on a different issue here: the death of norms that had once seemed well internalized and institutionalized. The issue arises in relation to one of the most dramatic features in the defense policy of the United States since 2001: the crumbling of highly restrictive normative regimes prohibiting interrogatory torture and assassination as part of the “global war on terror.” My aim here is to sketch what I take to be the central features of cases in which even norms that are clearly defined and apparently well internalized in a democracy nonetheless lose their grip on policy. The ultimate lesson, however, is an unappealing irony: While democracies surely do better than authoritarian regimes in adopting and internalizing certain kinds of constraints, in part because of a greater sensitivity to public mobilization around normative questions, that same sensitivity makes the long-term survival of these norms precarious. In particular, I suggest that force-constraining norms are most effectively internalized by coherent and relatively insulated professional cadres who see themselves as needing to act consistently over time. But in a democracy the values and arguments of those cadres are susceptible to being undermined by a combination of public panic and the invocation by policymakers of a public interest that can override the claims both of law and pragmatic restraint. Democracy, hence, can be at the same time both fertile and toxic: fertile as a source of humanitarian values and institutions, but toxic to the very institutions it cultivates.

The model I will describe may be of predictive use in helping us to see the special vulnerability of normative orders in democracies. But my hope is that it is also constructive in showing us how states and institutions committed to maintaining a certain normative order, especially democratic states, might best try to entrench those norms. While my argument is conceptual and philosophical, it draws on this recent history. I also add two qualifications to this article's title. First, I am not addressing all norms, but specific norms concerning the state use of force in national security policy. I therefore do not make claims about the generalizability of the conflict I describe to other norms, for example, norms of racial, sexual, or religious orthodoxy or hierarchy, or norms of reciprocal interaction. Second, reports of a norm's death are frequently exaggerated, since norms can be latent, then resurrected. Arguably, the anti-torture norm was resuscitated by President Obama in 2009 when, as one of his first official acts as chief executive, he moved to prohibit cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees. I write here about the path of decay, whether or not that path is unidirectional, and why previously salient norms no longer seem to govern policy choice among political decision-makers.

Wars and interventions bring to the fore certain ethical issues. For instance, NATO's intervention in Kosovo in 1999 raised questions about the moral import of UN Security Council authorization (given that the Council did not authorize the action), and the means employed by interveners (given NATO's use of cluster bombs and its targeting of dual-use facilities). In what follows, I consider the moral permissibility of the NATO-led intervention in Libya and suggest that this particular intervention highlights three issues for the ethics of humanitarian intervention in general. The first issue is whether standard accounts of the ethics of humanitarian intervention, which draw heavily on just war theory, can capture the prospect of mission creep. The second issue is whether epistemic difficulties in assessing the intervention's likely long-term success mean that we should reject consequentialist approaches to humanitarian intervention. The third issue concerns selectivity. I outline an often overlooked way that selectivity can be problematic for humanitarian intervention.

In the preface of the 2006 edition of Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer makes an important distinction between, on the one hand, “measures short of war,” such as imposing no-fly zones, pinpoint air/missile strikes, and CIA operations, and on the other, “actual warfare,” typified by a ground invasion or a large-scale bombing campaign. Even if the former are, technically speaking, acts of war according to international law, he proffers that “it is common sense to recognize that they are very different from war.” While they all involve “the use of force,” Walzer distinguishes between the level of force used: the former, being more limited in scope, lack the “unpredictable and often catastrophic consequences” of a “full-scale attack.” Walzer calls the ethical framework governing these measures jus ad vim (the just use of force), and he applies it to state-sponsored uses of force against both state and nonstate actors outside a state's territory that fall short of the quantum and duration associated with traditional warfare. Compared to acts of war, jus ad vim actions present diminished risk to one's own troops, have a destructive outcome that is more predictable and smaller in scale, severely curtail the risk of civilian casualties, and entail a lower economic and military burden. These factors make jus ad vim actions nominally easier for statesmen to justify compared to conventional warfare, though this does not necessarily mean these actions are morally legitimate or that they do not have potentially nefarious consequences.

The global refugee regime encompasses the rules, norms, principles, and decision-making procedures that govern states' responses to refugees. It comprises a set of norms, primarily those entrenched in the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, which defines who is a refugee and the rights to which such people are entitled. It also comprises an international organization, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which has supervisory responsibility for ensuring that states meet their obligations toward refugees.

In today's age of restrictionism, a growing number of countries are closing their gates of admission to most categories of would-be immigrants with one important exception. Governments increasingly seek to lure and attract “high value” migrants, especially those with access to large sums of capital. These individuals are offered golden visa programs that lead to fast-tracked naturalization in exchange for a hefty investment, in some cases without inhabiting or even setting foot in the passport-issuing country to which they now officially belong. In the U.S. context, the contrast between the “Dreamers” and “Parachuters” helps to draw out this distinction between civic ties and credit lines as competing bases for membership acquisition. Drawing attention to these seldom-discussed citizenship-for-sale practices, this essay highlights their global surge and critically evaluates the legal, normative, and distributional quandaries they raise. I further argue that purchased membership goods cannot replicate or substitute the meaningful links to a political community that make citizenship valuable and worth upholding in the first place.

What comes to mind when we hear the word “drone”? For many of us, it is the image of a General Atomics MQ-1B Predator drone launching a Hellfire missile at a suspected militant target. But is this picture beginning to change? Should this picture change?

Since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the phrase “torture lite” has appeared in public discourse about torture, used by journalists, military intelligence personnel, and academics to distinguish between two kinds of torture: torture, which is violent, physically mutilating, cruel and brutal, and torture lite, which refers to interrogation methods that are, it is claimed, more restrained and less severe than real torture. Techniques in the latter category, which are also described as “enhanced interrogation techniques” or “stress and duress methods,” include extended sleep deprivation, noise bombardment, and forced standing. In this paper I argue that the distinction between torture and torture lite is attractive to liberal democracies because it bolsters what David Luban has called the “liberal ideology of torture,” the myth that torture can be compatible with the basic commitments of liberal states. However, as I shall demonstrate, torture lite techniques are torture, for they are sufficiently cruel and severe to meet any plausible definition of torture. Furthermore, the use of terms like “torture lite” and the nature of such techniques encourage a moral psychology in which the violence and cruelty of torture is denied, the victim's suffering is hidden, minimized and doubted, and the torturer's responsibility is diminished. As such, the use of torture lite techniques is likely to encourage the normalization of torture.

This essay examines the impact of activist mobilization within the anti-sweatshop movement on shared understandings of corporate moral agency. The anti-sweatshop movement represents a transnational advocacy network, which arose in response to the global restructuring of the apparel industry and is organizing to demand that apparel manufacturers be accountable to communities, workers, and consumers. The movement has been central in contesting received notions of corporate rights and responsibilities and in reconstituting the boundaries of the corporate moral agent. Underpinning this investigation is a discussion of the ascription of moral agency to collective actors. With the aid of a relational approach, it is argued that corporate moral agency is a construct emerging out of social historical interactions that reflect processes through which the boundaries of actors are drawn and justified. Through the use of rhetoric linking private economic transactions and international labor and human rights standards, the movement has successfully challenged corporate practices that were previously considered unremarkable.

As noted by other contributors to this roundtable, the response of the international community to civilian deaths in Libya—and the threat of further mass atrocities—is unusual in two key respects. First, Security Council Resolution 1973 authorized “all necessary measures” to protect civilians without the consent of the “host” state. The Council's intentions, and actions, could not be interpreted as anything other than coercive. Second, in contrast to other crises involving alleged crimes against humanity (most notably Darfur), diplomacy produced a decisive response in a relatively short period of time. Both of these features suggest that many analysts of intervention (including myself) need to revise their previously pessimistic assessments of what is possible in contemporary international politics.

I argue that transnational democracy provides the basis for a solution to the problem of the “democratic circle”—that in order for democracy to promote justice, it must already be just—at the international level. Transnational democracy could be a means to global justice. First, I briefly recount my argument for the “democratic minimum.” This minimum is freedom from domination, understood in a very specific sense. Employing Hannah Arendt's conception of freedom as “the capacity to begin,” the form of nondomination sufficient for the democratic minimum is the capability to initiate deliberation and thus democratic decision-making processes. My point in developing this argument further concerns the political form of a transnational polity: its citizens enjoy the democratic minimum as members of various demoi. In the case of the European Union, this leads to a potential for democratic domination. I call this the demoi problem, a difficulty that holds for any multilevel polity, for bounded as well as transnational political communities. Second, I argue that such domination is overcome so long as the capacity to initiate deliberation is distributed among various units and various levels. The democratic minimum could fail to obtain not only because individuals or groups are dominated by nondemocratic means, but also because they are dominated democratically to the extent that the demos of one unit lacks the normative power to initiate deliberation and thus is subordinated to others.

There has been little discussion of central bank accountability in recent decades because monetary policy has been seen as an essentially technical problem. Yet, during the 2008 financial crisis and the economic dislocations that ensued, central banks gained considerably in authority—bailing out failing institutions, using unorthodox monetary tools, and wading into sovereign debt crises. At the same time, the financial crisis and the slow recovery that has followed have revealed just how uncertain and volatile the global economy can be—a situation that poses new dilemmas for monetary policy. This article looks at the existing model of central bank accountability and finds it wanting in this new, more uncertain environment. Because the principle of central bank independence involves a very narrow set of objectives—generally focused on an inflation target—and very few opportunities for sanction, the main mechanism for accountability is that provided by the publication of information about the bank's deliberations and activities. In an era of increased economic uncertainty, when central bankers themselves admit that simple rules and models are no longer adequate, a narrow, transparency-based form of accountability is not sufficient. I suggest that we need a thicker, more robust form of accountability that fosters more deliberation and debate, ensures that central banks are answerable to their publics, and broadens the standards by which they are judged.

On August 2, 2015, after three long years of intergovernmental negotiations and consultations and some tense final moments, all UN member states finally endorsed the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with a new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2016. The question of accountability—or, more precisely, the question of how governments will be held to account for implementing the commitments made in this new agenda—was a critical point of contention throughout the negotiations, resulting in a significant watering down of initial proposals by the end of the process.

It is generally agreed by most observers that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have fallen short of achieving gender equality and women's empowerment. Today, women continue to be more likely than men to live in poverty, and more than 18 million girls in sub-Saharan Africa are out of school. One of the crucial reasons for the failure of the MDGs in relation to women was their inability to address the deeply entrenched and interlocking factors that perpetuate women's disadvantage. The new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as articulated in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, constitute an improvement over the MDGs. Goal 5, which enshrines the stand-alone goal on gender equality, is comprised of nine specific targets, including the elimination of gender-based violence and access to reproductive health. In addition, gender equality is mainstreamed into numerous others goals. Given that the global community is now poised to implement the SDGs, the challenge is how best to integrate a transformative approach into the planning, implementation, and delivery of the specific targets so that the SDGs contribute to achieving gender equality and women's empowerment.

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 a democratic society, the social rules are imposed by all upon each. As “recipients” of the rules, we tend to think that they should be designed to engender the best attainable distribution of goods and ills or quality of life. We are inclined to assess social institutions by how they affect their participants. But there is another, oft-neglected perspective which the topic of health equity raises with special clarity: As imposers of the rules, we are inclined to think that harms we inflict through the rules have greater moral weight than like harms we merely fail to prevent or to mitigate. What matters morally is not merely how we affect people, but how we treat them through the rules we impose. While current (consequentialist and Rawlsian) theorizing is dominated by the first perspective and thus supports purely recipient-oriented moral conceptions, an adequate approach to social justice requires a balancing of both. Such balancing results in a relational conception of justice, which distinguishes various ways in which an institutional scheme may causally affect the quality of life of its participants.

This essay argues that the strength of our moral reason to prevent or mitigate particular medical conditions depends not only on what one might call distributional factors, such as how badly off the people affected by these conditions are in absolute and relative terms, how costly prevention or treatment would be, and how much patients would benefit from given treatment. Rather, it depends also on relational factors, that is, on how we are related to the medical conditions they suffer. It then discusses some implications of this view for understanding responsibilities for international health outcomes.

Many industrialized countries, developing countries, and countries that have recently made the transition from communism to market-oriented economies are characterized by high and increasing income inequality. Trends in income inequality have been understood to have ethical significance for different reasons. Some have argued that lessening income inequality is a valuable goal in itself. This essay, on the other hand, focuses on three instrumental reasons for pursuing economic policies that engender less income inequality, particularly in developing countries.

• Inequality can inhibit growth and slow poverty reduction.

• Inequality often undermines the political process: that may lead to an inadequate social contract and may trigger bad economic policies-with ill effects on growth, human development, and poverty reduction.

• Inequality may undermine civic and social as well as political life, and inhibit certain kinds of collective decision-making; at the societal level it may also generate its own self-justifying tolerance, perpetuating a high inequality equilibrium despite the potential economic and political costs.

The author concludes that while societies with relatively high income inequality can, in principle, be equitable, it is more likely that income differentials will compound and aggravate unfairness in the allocation of opportunities, the functioning of the political process, and efforts to improve the well-being of the least advantaged.

There are many different ways to try to bring about an end to the harms involved in the production of consumer goods. In this article I will start at the bottom, with the individual whose ordinary choices about how to travel, what to eat, what to wear, where to shop, and which policies to support all cause her to confront the possibility of involvement in these harms to the environment, nonhuman animals, and persons.

Having dismissed the claim that an individual has a straightforward duty of justice not to consume unethically produced goods, in the second section I map out a few different approaches, all of which I take to be promising avenues for generating duties in individuals to consume ethically. I argue that the last approach is the most promising and spend the third section of this article developing it. Specifically, I argue that as a first step in collectivizing to act against unjust global labor practices, an individual ought to signal to others her commitments to ethical consumption. In section four I ask whether some signals are too cheap to function as a step toward collectivization, and defend the deliberate consumption of only ethically produced goods as a moderately costly and therefore reliable signal. In the last section I consider a challenge to the proposal in terms of whether it imposes unacceptable costs on consumers.

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.

The paper develops a critical analysis of deliberative approaches to global governance. After first defining global governance and with a minimalist conception of deliberation in mind, the paper outlines three paradigmatic approaches: liberal, cosmopolitan, and critical. The possibilities and problems of each approach are examined and a common concern with the scope for “deliberative reflection” in global governance is addressed. It is argued that each approach, to varying degrees, foregrounds the currently underdetermined state of knowledge about global governance, its key institutions, agents, and practices. In doing so, the question “ What is global governance?” is retained as an important and reflective element of ongoing deliberative practices. It is suggested that this constitutes the distinctive and vital insight of deliberative approaches to global governance.