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.

It is a commonplace to say that the world has changed since the tragic events of September 11. This also holds true for those dedicated to humanitarian action—to the prevention of death and the alleviation of suffering during crisis and conflict, irrespective of any consideration other than need. The cause of the change for us, however, is not so much the attacks themselves or their vicious character. Sadly, such great loss of life and willingness to inflict death indiscriminately upon innocent civilians is nothing new, as those of us who have worked in areas of conflict know only too well.

What has changed is that, as a result of these attacks, the leading international power, the United States, has declared a new global war on terrorism. This war, as it has been defined, pits terrorism against freedom, and those who would imperil humanity against those who stand to defend it. While the main focus, thus far, has been on Afghanistan, the repercussions have swiftly embraced the entire planet. Like the Cold War, this is an open-ended, global fight defined to uphold both interests and values. Yet unlike the Cold War, it is one in which alliances are constantly shifting, the enemy consists primarily of an ill-defined set of nonstate actors as well as their purported state sponsors, and territorial control is not necessarily an aim.

The U.S.–led war on terrorism poses a number of challenges for independent humanitarian action and the principles that underpin it. First, it seeks to subordinate humanitarianism to its broader purpose, undermining the ability of humanitarian actors to impartially reach out to all victims. Second, by questioning the applicability of international humanitarian law, the antiterrorism campaign could well threaten the fundamental restraints on the conduct of warfare, thus weakening the protection and assistance to which civilians are entitled. Third, there is a shift in attention to conflicts worldwide, and the victims they generate, making it more difficult to respond to crises at the margins of current priorities.

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.

Most Muslims now live in democracies—a fact that is rarely acknowledged. The Muslim world has also elected five women heads of state in the past decade. These two indicators are symbolic of the diversity within the Muslim world, and also of the direction in which that world is headed.

Few Muslims wish to be classified in a category that would prevent them from participating in the benefits of modernity. The pull of mass education, commerce, trade, and engagement with the world is strong. But these possibilities are openings that radical Islam is attempting to close off, which has led to an ideological civil war within Islam. In country after country, the middle class, the elite, and most of the poor are frightened by an austere version of theocratic Islam that has managed to gain political leverage. In order to sustain modern governments and access to the world in which they want to be active contributors, Muslims need an alliance with the West—not a confrontation.

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.

The United States' foreign policy in Afghanistan has a long history of misguided plans and misplaced trust—a fact that has contributed to the destruction of the social and physical infrastructure of Afghan society. Afghans contend that after having fought as U.S. allies against the Soviet Union—with the price of more than two million dead—the United States swiftly walked away at the end of that bloody, twenty-three-year conflict. The toll of the war on Afghan society reflected in current statistics is so staggering as to be practically unimaginable: 12 million women living in abject poverty, 1 million people handicapped from land mine explosions, an average life expectancy of forty years (lower for women), a mortality rate of 25.7 percent for children under five years old, and an illiteracy rate of 64 percent. These horrific indicators place Afghanistan among the most destitute countries in the world in terms of human development.

The events of September 11 have forced institutions to reexamine their priorities and practices. Yet the first world war of the twenty-first century has left many wondering if there truly is a war, and what, if anything, different is demanded of them. The philanthropic sector in particular has not changed significantly, and it continues to struggle with fundamental concerns about its directions. If September 11 and its aftermath are to mean anything to philanthropy other than emergency relief, it must be a recognition that now is the time to tackle the problems and tensions that were ignored before the attacks. For nearly a year, philanthropy as a sector has not rallied behind this call for longer-term reform. Philanthropy should take up these tasks, no matter how daunting they may be, for if foundations do not lead the effort, it may be left to the governments and the militaries of the world to respond on their own.

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.

All wars—and the current war on terrorism is no exception—provide serious tests for the rule of law. The demands of armed conflict, with its instantaneous decisions of life and death, do not lend themselves easily to legal constraint. It is thus not surprising that the United States, which has been outspoken historically on matters of human rights, would become less attentive to those concerns after coming under deadly attack. For Human Rights Watch (HRW) and other human rights organizations, the primary concern since September 11 has been to demonstrate that upholding fundamental rights, whether on the battlefields of Afghanistan or in the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, is not only consistent with fighting international terrorism, but is, in essence, what the war is all about. The unwillingness of the Bush administration to embrace this idea bodes ill for the protection of rights as the war on terrorism reaches across the globe.

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.

Most work in medical ethics across the last twenty-five years has centered on the ethics of clinical medicine. Even work on health and justice has, in the main, been concerned with the just distribution of (access to) clinical care for individual patients. By contrast, the ethics of public health has been widely neglected. This neglect is surprising, given that public health interventions are often the most effective (and most cost-effective) means of improving health in rich and poor societies alike.

In this essay I explore two sources of contemporary neglect of public health ethics. One source of neglect is that contemporary medical ethics has been preoccupied—in my view damagingly preoccupied—with the autonomy of individual patients. Yet individual autonomy can hardly be a guiding ethical principle for public health measures, since many of them must be uniform and compulsory if they are to be effective. A second source of neglect is that contemporary political philosophy has been preoccupied—in my view damagingly preoccupied—with the requirements for justice within states or societies, and (until very recently) has hardly discussed justice across borders. Yet public health problems often cross borders, and public health interventions have to measure up to the problems they address.

Everyone wants to be healthy, but many of us decline to act in healthy ways. What bearing, if any, should these choices have on the ethics of clinical practice and health policy? Should risk-takers have the same claim on scarce resources, such as organs for transplant, as those whose plight is due to no choices of their own? And is there any reason not to impose fees and taxes on risk-takers, be they smokers or mountain climbers, to defray the added expense of the care they may need? In health resource allocation aimed at reducing the burden of disease, should we regard certain burdens as individual responsibilities: for example, dealing with stigma, or caretaking for family members?

Socioeconomic status (SES) and health expectancy are strongly linked. To the extent that this results from risk-taking by the poor, is reduction of SES-linked health inequalities a morally important social goal? International public health aims at improving health on a population level. The World Health Organization has been criticized for failing to distinguish genuine health risks from personal lifestyle choices, as when it speaks of a tobacco-related “epidemic” as if cigarette use were a contagious disease like malaria. Should personal responsibility for health be taken into account in setting the agenda for global public health, and in measuring progress by countries in improving health. This paper addresses applications of the notions of personal and social responsibility for health. It also looks at the vulnerability of the notion of personal responsibility for health to intentional manipulation by self-interested parties in health policy debates.

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.

There is no cure or vaccine for HIV/AIDS. The only life-prolonging treatment available is antiretroviral (ARV) therapy. WHO estimates, however, that less than 5 percent of those who require treatment in developing countries currently enjoy access to these medicines. In Africa fewer than 50,000 people–less than 2 percent of the people in need–currently receive ARV therapy. These facts have elicited strongly divergent reactions, and views about the appropriate response to this crisis have varied widely.

The intensity of the debate concerning access to life-prolonging medicines for the treatment of HIV/AIDS, and the heated rhetoric with which they are often conducted, suggest that these disagreements may be rooted in deeper disagreements of value. It is not obvious, however, what disagreements of value are at stake in this debate. By analyzing the statements of scholars, public officials, activist organizations, and private sector representatives, each of whom may endorse very different policy recommendations on access to HIV/AIDS drugs, we have identified and created a typology of the different sources of disagreement in the debate. We conclude that the central disagreements concerning access to medicines arise from competing understandings of how responsibilities for bringing remedy to hardships should be allocated to different agents and institutions. A central lesson that emerges from our analysis is that thinking about “health equity” must extend beyond the explanation and justification of goals, values, and ideals, and engage more honestly with the difficult question of how responsibilities for bringing remedy to health crises should be allocated in complex social contexts.