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IS INTERNATIONAL LAW IMPARTIAL?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2005

Steven R. Ratner
Affiliation:
University of Michigan Law School

Extract

The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest among philosophers in the core questions of ethics and justice on the international plane. Issues once discussed primarily in the response to the major global debates of the 1960s and 1970s—the Vietnam War and the North-South economic imbalance—have returned to the domain of philosophers. This engagement has taken place in two distinct but related debates. First, philosophers have devoted attention to the ethical significance of nationality and patriotism, asking whether an impartial morality permits disparate treatment of an individual's co-nationals. Second, scholars have revisited issues of international justice in great detail, including works on human rights as well as just war theory. These works ask, as Brian Barry put it, “given a world that is made up of states, what is the morally permissible range of diversity among them?” One impetus for renewed work on these ideas was the publication of John Rawls's The Law of Peoples.

Type
ARTICLES
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

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