Odious debts are debts incurred by a government without either popular consent or a legitimate public purpose. There is a debate within academic circles as to whether the successor government to a regime that incurred odious debts has the right to repudiate repayment. In the real world, however, repudiation is not currently an option granted legitimacy by either global capital markets or the legal systems of creditor states. There are, thus, compelling reasons to reform the law of odious debts to allow for such repudiation in strictly limited circumstances. Beyond the moral problem of requiring the formerly captive citizens of a tyrant to repay their oppressor's personal debts, the burden of odious-debt servicing can perpetuate the cycle of state failure, which has direct national security consequences. In addition, a properly designed odious debt reform could function as an alternative punitive mechanism to trade sanctions with fewer harmful implications for the general population of the targeted state. Classical proponents of odious debt reform advocate for recognition of a legal rule under which successor governments could challenge the validity of debts incurred by prior regimes against the odious debt legal standard in a judicial-style forum. I make the case for an alternative “Due Diligence Model” of reform that provides far greater ex ante certainty for lenders, both as to which debts might be classified as odious debts and what steps the lender must take to protect its investments from subsequent invalidation. The Due Diligence Model also solves certain time-consistency problems inherent to the Classical Model.

This paper is a response to Jeff McMahan‘s “Just Cause for War” (Ethics & International Affairs 19, 2005). McMahan holds, as many have, that there is a just cause for war against group X only if X have made themselves liable to military force by being responsible for some serious wrong. But he interprets this liability requirement in a very strict way. He insists (1) that one may use force against X for purpose Y only if they are responsible for a wrong specifically connected to Y; and (2) that one may use force against an individual member of X only if he himself shares in the responsibility for the wrong. This paper defends a more permissive, and more traditional, view of just war liability against McMahan's claims. Against McMahan‘s first claim it argues that certain “conditional just causes,” such as disarming an aggressor, deterring future aggression, and preventing lesser humanitarian crimes, can be legitimate goals of war against X even if X have no specific liability connected to them. Against McMahan's second claim it argues that soldiers who have no responsibility for X‘s wrong may nonetheless be legitimately attacked because in becoming soldiers they freely surrendered their right not to be killed by enemy combatants in a war between their and another state, so killing them in such a war is not unjust. Though initially a criticism of McMahan, the paper makes positive proposals about conditional just causes and the moral justification for directing force at soldiers.

In perpetuating and exacerbating restricted access to essential medicines, current trade-related intellectual property rules on medicines may violate core human rights to health and medicines. In this light, their impact on the global disease burden raises serious questions about their necessity, and their justification should be critically assessed from the perspective of human rights standards. These standards require that international trade rules on medicines be justified to the fullest extent possible, and permitted only to the extent to which they can be justified. In this article I explore the impact of trade rules on medicines access, and the growing force of the human right to health. I argue that the limited justification for strong patents in poor countries suggests the need for significant reform of trade-related intellectual property rights. I argue further that human rights standards may offer both normative and practical tools for achieving this reform and for challenging trade rules on medicines at various levels.

There is agreement internationally that responsibility for reducing emissions should be equitably shared, but debate about the principles for determining equitable shares frequently focuses on the distribution of emissions rights. This shift of focus from responsibilities to rights is not necessarily conducive to reducing emissions. There is reason for caution, particularly, regarding suggestions that emissions rights should be assimilated to human rights. Concerns about the situation of the worst off globally have led to calls for recognition of a human right to some baseline amount of emissions per capita in order to secure subsistence. However, given the reasons to support a human right to an adequate environment, it would be a mistake to recognize any human right to pollute. What the worst off have a right to is secure access to the means to a decent life. Arguing that issues of both emissions and subsistence should be comprehended within a single framework of justice, the proposal here is that this broader framework be developed by reference to the idea of “ecological space.” An equitable distribution of rights to ecological space would in principle ensure an equitable distribution of welfare goods without sanctioning any excess use of natural resources or environmental services, including the planet's capacity for absorbing carbon.

The Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative is the largest multilateral effort aimed at providing debt relief. In this essay, we address the question of whether this program is consistent with a view of justice commonly known as liberal egalitarianism. We argue that the HIPC initiative violates two basic liberal egalitarian principles. More generally, we show why the debate on debt relief must move beyond a discussion of whether or not countries should be held responsible for their sovereign debt. We urge a more careful and broader classification of which of the factors affecting a country's situation it should be held responsible for and which it should not. While there are good arguments for sometimes not holding poor countries responsible for their sovereign debt, it is hard to see why the same arguments should not also apply to many other factors that affect a country's net disposable income.

Despite some limited moves toward openness and accountability, suprastate policy formation in such bodies as the World Trade Organization remains fundamentally exclusive of individuals within states. This article critiques the “don't kill the goose” arguments commonly offered in defense of such exclusions. It highlights similarities between those arguments and past arguments for elitist forms of democracy, where strict limitations are advocated on the participation of nonelites in the name of allowing leaders to act most effectively in the broad public interest. Advocated here is movement toward a strongly empowered WTO parliamentary body that would be guided in practice by a principle of democratic symmetry, attempting to match input to the increasing impacts of WTO governance. A parliament with codecision powers broadly similar to those of the European Parliament is offered as a long-term institutional ideal.

The precautionary principle, widely endorsed at the national and international level, continues to be at the center of a heated debate. Some authors claim that the principle is unscientific; others argue that the principle is paralyzing and gives decision-makers no direction. Confusion and misconceptions are generated by the multiplicity of definitions and interpretations of the precautionary principle. This essay contributes to the debate on the precautionary principle in two ways: (1) it clarifies what a mild formulation of the principle entails, and (2) it identifies a number of misconceptions underlying some of the main criticisms of the principle.

A reasonable formulation of the precautionary principle requires both substantive and procedural elements: the substantive element suggests that in circumstances where uncertainties and risks of irreversible harms are present, decisions should err on the side of environmental preservation; the procedural element suggests that the principle should favour decision-making processes that are iterative and informative over time and that integrate experts' assessments of the risks to be governed and people's preferences and values.

Against this background, five misconceptions underlying the main criticisms of the precautionary principle are identified and deconstructed. The analysis of the misconceptions sheds further light on the fact that following the principle, processes of learning are stimulated, and accordingly, technology is not halted; to the contrary, the application of the principle leads to a better understanding of technological developments and their effects.

Recent cosmopolitan thinking attempts to find a place for local (including national) attachment, but all of the proposals offered have been exposed to telling critique. There are objections to the claim that local obligations are only instances of cosmopolitan duty, and to the claim that we can give a moral justification to national societies as networks of mutual benefit. This article argues that it is not mutual benefit but mutual risk that grounds compatriot preference. While exposure to coercion as such does not track national boundaries, exposure to the risks of state abuse, political choice, and social conformity provide us with a reason to take our compatriots' interests seriously. The same argument, however, displays the limits of this reasoning, and also grounds a demanding obligation to aid other societies.

Should states be held responsible and punished for violations of international law? The recent ruling by the International Court of Justice that Serbia cannot be held responsible for genocide in Bosnia reflects the predominant international legal position. But such a position leaves open the possibility that states or nonstate agents can never be held responsible for international crimes. This article argues that they can and should be. While most international ethicists and legal theorists reject the punishment of corporate entities such as states, this article argues that certain types of international violations can only be undertaken by states, and, as a result, states must bear the responsibility for them. Drawing on some neglected strands in international law and political theory, the article sketches a potential institutional framework for the punishment of state crimes, particularly genocide and aggression.

Risk and liability change the initially stipulated terms of contracts, overruling their otherwise binding nature. Risk encourages careful assessment of debtors' abilities to service debts. Errors and negligence in assessment, and even external shocks, make creditors suffer losses. Disregarding one's duty of care or professional standards, or engaging in tortious or illegal behavior makes actors liable to compensate for any resulting damage—a necessary systemic element of the framework markets need to function well. Neither mechanism was allowed to work properly in sovereign lending.

This essay analyzes why risk and liability are necessary mechanisms of well-functioning markets, and discusses how risk can be handled. In the United States, inappropriate regulatory norms hindered providing against risk in the case of sovereign debt. The absence of liability—a market imperfection—has produced debts no decent legal system would recognize as legitimate domestic debt, thus aggravating the sovereign debt problem, and giving rise to concepts such as criminal, odious, and illegal debts. Discriminating sovereign debtors and disobeying the rule of law caused market distortions, resulting in not only grave damages to debtors, but also losses to creditors that the mechanisms risk and liability would have avoided. Finally, I briefly present proposals to repair these shortcomings in order to avoid the disasters of the past.

Since the late 1970s, an increasingly global coalition of churches and nongovernmental organizations has pressed for reduction if not outright cancellation of the foreign debt of highly indebted poor countries, because of its deleterious impact on poor people. The movement achieved limited yet substantial success in the Jubilee 2000 campaign. In it, the movement invoked a biblical prescription of periodic debt relief to urge the international community to mark the millennium by recognizing a period of “jubilee” for heavily indebted poor countries, in which government debts would be cancelled and freed up resources used to alleviate poverty. The Catholic Church made a crucial contribution to the movement, through the involvement of its personnel, justice and peace offices, social service agencies, academic and research institutions, national bishops’ conferences, Vatican agencies, and Pope John Paul II. The essay traces the moral arguments the church made for debt relief, with a particular focus on two influential statements: those of the Vatican's Pontifical Justice and Peace Commission in 1987, and the U.S. Catholic bishops’ conference in 1989. By stimulating discussion of the ethics of debt among senior policymakers, the church's efforts strengthened the legitimacy of the claim that excessive debt servicing was unjust. Zambia is offered as a case study of church and coalition efforts to press not only for debt cancellation, but also for measures to ensure that freed-up resources be used effectively for poverty reduction, and that debtor governments contract new debt in a transparent manner.