Despite the prevalence of human rights discourse, the very idea or concept of a human right remains obscure. In particular, it is unclear what is supposed to be special or distinctive about human rights. In this paper, we consider two recent attempts to answer this challenge, James Griffin’s “personhood account” and Charles Beitz’s “practice-based account”, and argue that neither is entirely satisfactory. We then conclude with a suggestion for what a more adequate account might look like – what we call (...) the “structural pluralist account” of human rights. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Our aim in this brief essay is not to defend a particular policy or attitude toward lockdown measures in the United States or elsewhere, but to consider the scope and limits of different types of arguments that can be offered for them. Understanding the complexity of these issues will, we hope, go some way to helping us understand each other and our attitudes toward state responses to the pandemic.

In his important new book National responsibility and global justice, David Miller presents a systematic challenge to existing theories of global justice. In particular, he argues that cosmopolitan egalitarianism must be rejected. Such views, Miller maintains, would place unacceptable burdens on the most productive political communities, undermine national self-determination, and disincentivize political communities from taking responsibility for their fate. They are also impracticable and quite unrealistic, at least under present conditions. Miller offers an alternative account that conceives global justice in (...) terms of a minimum set of basic rights that belong to human beings everywhere. Primary responsibility for securing such rights for an individual lies with his or her state, but in so far as these rights go unprotected, responsibilities for fulfilling them may fall on outsiders. While less ambitious that cosmopolitan egalitarian justice, Miller argues that his own view would nevertheless enable us to articulate what is most morally objectionable about our current world. In this article it is argued that none of Miller's critiques of cosmopolitan egalitarianism is effective, and that while certainly preferable to the status quo, a world governed by Miller's principles is not an attractive ideal. (shrink)

In this essay, I reflect on the divergent arguments about limited force made by Daniel R. Brunstetter and Samuel Moyn in their respective monographs. Arguing that their positions can be reconciled, I agree with Brunstetter that limited force has a role to play in establishing and maintaining a just world order. At the same time, however, I am mindful of Moyn's warning that limited force may lead to perpetual war. The way to ensure that limited force both works toward justice (...) and does not result in perpetual war, I argue, is to focus more on considerations of jus ante bellum (right before war) and jus post bellum (right after war), the so-called “growing edges of just war theory.” I hold that the responsible use of statecraft, which just war thinking seeks to inform, accepts that limited force constitutes a legitimate tool to facilitate order, justice, and peace. However, any justifiable use of force must be restrained and limited and aim for a just peace. The embrace of limited force should thus be complemented with an effort by state leaders to bolster the edges of just war in order to facilitate a security environment that requires the use of limited force less frequently. (shrink)

Troubled times often gives rise to great art that reflects those troubles. So too with political theory. The greatest work of twentieth century political theory, John Rawls's A theory of justice, was inspired in various respects by extreme social and economic inequality, racialized slavery and racial segregation in the United States. Arguably the most influential work of political theory since Rawls—Michael Walzer's Just and unjust wars—a sustained and historically informed reflection on the morality of interstate armed conflict—was written in the (...) midst of the Vietnam War. It should be no surprise, then, that the bellicose period of the past 20 years should give rise to a robust new literature in political theory on the morality of armed conflict. It has been of uneven quality, and to some extent episodic, responding to particular challenges—the increased prevalence of asymmetric warfare and the permissibility of preventive or preemptive war—that have arisen as a result of specific events. In the past decade, however, a group of philosophers has begun to pose more fundamental questions about the reigning theory of the morality of armed conflict warfare—just war theory—as formulated by Walzer and others. Jeff McMahan's concise, inventive and tightly argued work Killing in war is without doubt the most important of these challenges to the reigning theory of the just war. This review article discusses McMahan's work, some of the critical attention it has received, and its potential implications for practice. (shrink)

This article contributes to the debate among just war theorists about the ethics of using armed drones in the war on terror. If violence of this kind is to be effectively restrained, it is necessary first to establish an understanding of its nature. Because it is difficult to conceptualize drone-based violence as war, there is concern that such violence is thus not captured by the traditional jus ad bellum framework. Drone strikes probably do not constitute a law enforcement practice, so (...) the peacetime ethics of criminal justice do not apply either. One possible solution is to develop and apply a legitimization framework of jus ad vim in which vim is “force short of war,” although this depends upon a vim–bellum distinction being a sustainable one. Moving beyond discussion of these three alternative concepts of drone-based violence, the article suggests a fourth—vis perpetua —and explores the ethical implications thereof. As a form of violence that presents no physical risk to individual users of force, a program of drone strikes poses a moral problem if it is intended to continue indefinitely, leading to the systematic endangerment of innocents without the eventual promise of peace. (shrink)

When can we say that a debt crisis has been resolved fairly? An often overlooked but very important effect of financial crises and the debts that often engender them is that they can lead the crisis countries to increased dependence on international institutions and the policy conditionality they require in return for their continued support, limiting their capabilities and those of their citizens to exercise meaningful control over their policies and institutions. These outcomes have been viewed by many not (...) merely as extremely unfortunate and regrettable, but also as deeply unfair. And indeed, increasingly potent popular movements have pressured governments, financial institutions, and the financial community to seek what they take to be fairer solutions to debt crises. The merits of these programs and proposals for dealing more fairly with sovereign debt remain hotly disputed. In this essay, we try to take a step back from the political fray and examine some more fundamental considerations that seem relevant to assessing the fairness of current arrangements governing economic exchanges related to debt contracts and alternatives that have been proposed to them.Our discussion is organized into seven sections. First, we characterize briefly the concept of fairness and its role in social evaluation. Second, we clarify what sovereign debt is, and, third, the ethical statuses that particular sovereign debts can have. Fourth, we identify and describe the main features of current practices related to sovereign debt. Fifth, we describe an "ideal picture" of creditor/debtor relations. We argue that in such a scenario a broad range of ethical considerations can plausibly be invoked in support of practices that closely resemble those presently governing sovereign debt. Sixth, we draw attention to the many ways in which in reality the relations between sovereign debtors and their creditors differ markedly from the relationships between the creditor and debtor in the ideal picture. Because of this, many of the ethical considerations that would support present practices were relations between sovereign debtors and their creditors to resemble more closely those depicted in the ideal picture fail to do so under present circumstances. We conclude, moreover, that the remaining ethical considerations that might be advanced in support of the present system are at best quite inconclusive. Finally, we describe briefly specific reform proposals to current practices. While we will not attempt to show that these proposals would necessarily make the rules governing economic exchanges relevant to sovereign debt more fair, we conclude, in light of our earlier analysis, that they must be given much more serious consideration than they have so far received in policy circles. Indeed, there are strong prima facie reasons to believe that some combination of these proposed policies might prevent or mitigate some of the most ethically regrettable outcomes of present practices and norms by changing the incentives of sovereign borrowers and those who lend to them. (shrink)

The quality of our theoretical argumentation, the diversity and insights of our methods, and our general level of understanding are markedly better than a generation ago. However, this progress has been driven by a division of labor with increased specialization that has led each part of the field to become narrower.

Why Does Inequality Matter?is the long-awaited book-length development of T. M. Scanlon's views on objectionable inequality, and our obligations to eliminate or reduce it. The book presents an impressively nuanced and thoughtful analysis as well as succinct explanations of different objections to various forms of inequality. It is not only set to further cement Scanlon's influence on philosophical debates about equality but also makes a good guide to the problems of inequality for the nonspecialist reader. The book is not without (...) faults, however. Even within a pluralist approach to inequality such as Scanlon's, it is not sufficiently clear what, if anything, his specific objections to status inequality, and to control over other people's lives, have in common with his other egalitarian objections to inequality of political influence, opportunity, and income and wealth—or whether, in the case of control, the objection is egalitarian at all. (shrink)

In a recent global survey commissioned for the Millennium Summit of the United Nations, people around the world consistently mentioned good health as what they most desired.

In this book, Christian Barry and Sanjay G. Reddy propose ways in which the international trading system can support poor countries in promoting the well-being of their peoples.

How should International Political Theory (IPT) relate to public policy? Should theorists aspire for their work to be policy- relevant and, if so, in what sense? When can we legitimately criticize a theory for failing to be relevant to practice? To develop a response to these questions, I will consider two issues: (1) the extent to which international political theorists should be concerned that the norms they articulate are precise enough to entail clear practical advice under different empirical (...) circumstances; (2) whether they should provide concrete practical advice on policy choice and institutional reform. These questions are related but distinct, and we should answer each quite differently. Regarding the first, I shall argue that it counts heavily against a theory if it is not precise enough to guide policy and reform given certain empirical assumptions. On the second, I will argue that theorists should be very cautious when engaging with questions of policy and institutional design. Some principles of IPT can be criticized for being insufficiently precise, but a degree of abstraction from concrete policy recommendations is a virtue, rather than a vice, of an element of IPT. I conclude that we should aim to be precise without being concrete. To help fix ideas and anchor my argument, I will discuss these issues with reference to a principle that John Rawls has advocated in his influential work The Law of Peoples (Rawls 1999a): a duty of assistance to societies that lack the capacity to satisfy the basic needs or protect the basic rights of their people. (shrink)

This book helps readers identify feasible and morally plausible reforms of global institutional arrangements and international organizations.

Many assert that affluent countries have contributed in the past to poverty in developing countries through wars of aggression and conquest, colonialism and its legacies, the imposition of puppet leaders, and support for brutal dictators and venal elites. Thomas Pogge has recently argued that there is an additional and, arguably, even more consequential way in which the affluent continue to contribute to poverty in the developing world. He argues that when people cooperate in instituting and upholding institutional arrangements that foreseeably (...) result in more severe or more widespread poverty or human rights deficits than would foreseeably result under feasible alternative arrangements, they are contributors to these harms. Because of this, he argues, they have stringent, contribution-based (or negative) duties to address this poverty. We will call this the ‘Feasible Alternatives Thesis' (FAT), and our aim in this article is to examine it critically. (shrink)

This book explores the nature of moral responsibilities of affluent individuals in the developed world, addressing global poverty and arguments that philosophers have offered for having these responsibilities. The first type of argument grounds responsibilities in the ability to avert serious suffering by taking on some cost. The second argument seeks to ground responsibilities in the fact that the affluent are contributing to such poverty. The authors criticise many of the claims advanced by those who seek to ground stringent responsibilities (...) to the poor by invoking these two types of arguments. It does not follow from this that the affluent are meeting responsibilities to the poor. The book argues that while people are not ordinarily required to make large sacrifices in assisting others in severe need, they are required to incur moderate costs to do so. If the affluent fail consistently to meet standards, this fact can substantially increase the costs they are required to bear in order to address it. (shrink)

Recently adopted international texts have given a new focus on conflicts of interests and access to information resulting from biomedical research. They confirmed ethical review committees as a central point to guarantee individual rights and the effective application of ethical principles. Therefore specific attention should be paid in giving such committees all the facilities necessary to keep them independent and qualified.

Political science is divided between methodological individualists, who seek to explain political phenomena by reference to individuals and their interactions, and holists (or nonreductionists), who consider some higher-level social entities or properties such as states, institutions, or cultures ontologically or causally significant. We propose a reconciliation between these two perspectives, building on related work in philosophy. After laying out a taxonomy of different variants of each view, we observe that (i) although political phenomena result from underlying individual attitudes and behavior, (...) individual-level descriptions do not always capture all explanatorily salient properties, and (ii) nonreductionistic explanations are mandated when social regularities are robust to changes in their individual-level realization. We characterize the dividing line between phenomena requiring nonreductionistic explanation and phenomena permitting individualistic explanation and give examples from the study of ethnic conflicts, social-network theory, and international-relations theory. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the development of philosophy of science in the 1970s. The explanatory framework is the picture of two fundamental split-offs: the controversial establishment of history and sociology of science and of formal philosophy of science as independent disciplines, against the background of more traditional “conceptual” varieties of philosophy of science. I illustrate these developments, which finally led to somewhat “purified” versions of the respective accounts, by examining a case study, namely, that of the structuralist school, which (...) emerged in the 1970s as an attempt to reconcile historical and formal approaches in philosophy of science. I try to explain the failure of this initial program of “Kuhn Sneedified” and its transition to a more purified formalist version, on the basis of the fact that the former attempt was caught somewhere amid the purism of conceptual, historical, and formal accounts of philosophy of science. (shrink)

Today's digital revolution is a worldwide phenomenon, with profound and often differential implications for communities around the world and their relationships to one another. This book presents a new, explicitly international theory of media ethics, incorporating non-Western perspectives and drawing deeply on both moral philosophy and the philosophy of technology. Clifford Christians develops an ethics grounded in three principles - truth, human dignity, and non-violence - and shows how these principles can be applied across a wide range of cases (...) and domains. The book is a guide for media professionals, scholars, and educators who are concerned with the global ramifications of new technologies and with creating a more just world. (shrink)

The papyri transmit a part of the testimonia relevant to pre-Socratic philosophy. The ʼCorpus dei Papiri Filosofici‛ takes this material only partly into account. In this volume, a team of specialists discusses some of the most important papyrological texts that are major instruments for reconstructing pre-Socratic philosophy and doxography. Furthermore, these texts help to increase our knowledge of how pre-Socratic thought – through contributions to physics, cosmology, ethics, ontology, theology, anthropology, hermeneutics, and aesthetics – paved the way for the canonic (...) scientific fields of European culture. More specifically, each paper tackles papyrological texts concerning the Orphics, the Milesians, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the early Atomists, and the Sophists. For the first time in the field of pre-Socratics studies, several papers are devoted to the Herculanean sources, along with others concerning the Graeco-Egyptian papyri and the Derveni Papyrus. (shrink)

Many political theorists defend the view that egalitarian justice should extend from the domestic to the global arena. Despite its intuitive appeal, this ‘global egalitarianism’ has come under attack from different quarters. In this article, we focus on one particular set of challenges to this view: those advanced by domestic egalitarians. We consider seven types of challenges, each pointing to a specific disanalogy between domestic and global arenas which is said to justify the restriction of egalitarian justice to the former, (...) and argue that none of them – both individually and jointly – offers a conclusive refutation of global egalitarianism. (shrink)

Although the international community repetitively pledged considerable amounts of adaptation finance to the global South, only little has been provided so far. Different instruments have been proposed to generate more funding and this paper aims at identifying those that are most suitable to raise adaptation finance in a just way. The instrument assessment is based on the following main criteria: fairness, effectiveness and feasibility. The criteria are applied to four instruments: contributions from domestic budgets, international carbon taxes collected (...) at the national level, border tax adjustments as well as selling emissions allowances in domestic trading schemes. Domestic emission trading schemes and border tax adjustments achieve the best-or rather, the least bad-results. Two further findings are that instruments are unable make agents pay for past excessive emissions and that all instruments generate rather small amounts of funding. As a consequence of the latter, adaptation finance will continue to be highly insufficient in all likelihood. (shrink)

In recent years it has often been claimed that policies such as subsidies paid to domestic producers by affluent countries and tariffs on goods produced by foreign producers in poorer countries violate important moral requirements because they do severe harm to poor people, even kill them. Such claims involve an empirical aspect—such policies are on balance very bad for the global poor—and a philosophical aspect—that the causal influence of these policies can fairly be characterized as doing severe harm and killing. (...) In this essay, we examine the philosophical aspect of this issue. We conclude that these policies do not do harm to the poor, but rather enable harm to them in various ways, and explore the moral implications of this fact. (shrink)

International policies often make the conferral of aid, debt relief, or additional trading opportunities to a country depend upon its having successfully implemented specific policies, achieved certain social or economic outcomes, or demonstrated a commitment to conducting itself in specified ways. Such policies are conditionality arrangements. My aim in this article is to explore whether conditionality arrangements that would make the conferral of debt relief depend on whether the debtor country achieves a certain status with respect to the human (...) right fulfilment of its population can be justified. I argue that many objections that are typically advanced against conditionality arrangements are unconvincing, and that the possible benefits of human rights conditionality are sufficient to warrant serious intellectual and practical exploration. Whether or not particular arrangements are justified cannot be determined in advance of such exploration. (shrink)

The Bloomsbury Companion to Ethics offers the definitive guide to this key area of contemporary philosophy. Covering all the fundamental questions asked by meta-ethics and normative ethical theory, thirteen specially commissioned chapters from an international team of experts explore the central ideas, terms and case studies in the field, and new directions in ethics as a whole. Now available in paperback, the Companion to Ethics covers issues such as moral methodology, moral realism, ethical expressivism, constructivism and the error theory, (...) morality and practical reason, moral psychology, morality and religion, consequentialism, Kantian ethics, virtue ethics, feminist ethics, moral particularism, experimental ethics, and biology, evolution and ethics. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including key technical terms, a historical chronology, a detailed list of internet resources for research in ethics, and a thorough list of recommended works for further study, this is the essential resource for anyone studying, researching and writing in contemporary philosophical ethics. (shrink)

When can or should citizenship be granted to prospective members of states? When can or should states withdraw citizenship from their existing members? In recent decades, political philosophers have paid considerable attention to the first question, but have generally neglected the second. There are of course good practical reasons for prioritizing the question of when citizenship should be granted—many individuals have a strong interest in acquiring citizenship in particular political communities, while many fewer are at risk of denationalization. Still, loss (...) of membership in a political community is a practice with a long history that continues to take place today. -/- Concerns about national security have recently led several liberal democratic states to pass, strengthen or consider legislation that would empower their governments to denationalize certain persons.] At the international level, formal norms governing denationalization are vague and generally toothless, and there are no international legal norms that restrict denationalization to citizens who hold another citizenship or wish to take up citizenship elsewhere (Worster, 2009). So it is important to determine whether there are conditions under which denationalization can be morally justified and, if so, what those conditions are. We shall argue that while denationalization is ordinarily impermissible, there is a class of crime committed by citizens that may render it not only permissible, but a fitting response on the part of the state. (shrink)

This paper examines Dharmakīrti's arguments against Cārvāka physicalism in the Pramāṇasiddhi chapter of his magnum opus, the Pramāṇavārttika, with a focus on classical Indian philosophical attempts to address the mind-body problem. The key issue concerns the relation between cognition and the body, and the role this relation plays in causal-explanatory accounts of consciousness and cognition. Drawing on contemporary debates in philosophy of mind about embodiment and the significance of borderline states of consciousness, the paper proposes a philosophical reconstruction that builds (...) on two important features of the Buddhist account: an expanded conception of causality and a robust account of phenomenal content. (shrink)

Earth’s life-support system is facing megaproblems of sustainability. One important way of how these problems can be addressed is through innovation. This paper argues that responsible innovation that contributes to sustainable development consists of three dimensions: innovations avoid harming people and the planet, innovations ‘do good’ by offering new products, services, or technologies that foster SD, and global governance schemes are in place that facilitate innovations that avoid harm and ‘do good.’ The paper discusses global governance schemes based on deliberation (...) as a means to foster such responsible innovation. These schemes can provide voluntary soft-law regulations that complement and extend national and international hard-law regulations and facilitate collective innovation that contributes to SD goals. The article addresses the facilitative role of governments and international organizations in overcoming problems of deliberation and offers illustrative examples of such governance schemes. (shrink)

Reinforcement learning systems usually assume that a value function is defined over all states that can immediately give the value of a particular state or action. These values are used by a selection mechanism to decide which action to take. In contrast, when humans and animals make decisions, they collect evidence for different alternatives over time and take action only when sufficient evidence has been accumulated. We have previously developed a model of memory processing that includes semantic, episodic and working (...) memory in a comprehensive architecture. Here, we describe how this memory mechanism can support decision making when the alternatives cannot be evaluated based on immediate sensory information alone. Instead we first imagine, and then evaluate a possible future that will result from choosing one of the alternatives. Here we present an extended model that can be used as a model for decision making that depends on accumulating evidence over time, whether that information comes from the sequential attention to different sensory properties or from internal simulation of the consequences of making a particular choice. We show how the new model explains both simple immediate choices, choices that depend on multiple sensory factors and complicated selections between alternatives that require forward looking simulations based on episodic and semantic memory structures. In this framework, vicarious trial and error is explained as an internal simulation that accumulates evidence for a particular choice. We argue that a system like this forms the “missing link” between more traditional ideas of semantic and episodic memory, and the associative nature of reinforcement learning. (shrink)

How to integrate artificial intelligence technologies in the functioning and structures of our society has become a concern of contemporary politics and public debates. In this paper, we investigate national AI strategies as a peculiar form of co-shaping this development, a hybrid of policy and discourse that offers imaginaries, allocates resources, and sets rules. Conceptually, the paper is informed by sociotechnical imaginaries, the sociology of expectations, myths, and the sublime. Empirically we analyze AI policy documents of four key players in (...) the field, namely China, the United States, France, and Germany. The results show that the narrative construction of AI strategies is strikingly similar: they all establish AI as an inevitable and massively disrupting technological development by building on rhetorical devices such as a grand legacy and international competition. Having established this inevitable, yet uncertain, AI future, national leaders proclaim leadership intervention and articulate opportunities and distinct national pathways. While this narrative construction is quite uniform, the respective AI imaginaries are remarkably different, reflecting the vast cultural, political, and economic differences of the countries under study. As governments endow these imaginary pathways with massive resources and investments, they contribute to coproducing the installment of these futures and, thus, yield a performative lock-in function. (shrink)

Scholars disagree about the proper justification of human rights and which rights qualify as human rights. While some argue for a very limited set of human rights, others defend more comprehensive accounts. In this paper I suggest that a defence of a comprehensive set of human rights can be strengthened by combining constructivist deontological and well-being based teleological justifications. To this end, I discuss two prominent proponents of constructivism and the well-being approach: Rainer Forst and Simon Caney. Forst criticises teleological (...) justifications for grounding human rights in non-universalizable conceptions of the good, such as autonomy, that can reasonably be rejected by others. Constructivism, in contrast, does not rest on any particular idea of the good life and thus allows for greater ethical plurality. I reject this specific criticism, arguing that Caney’s approach ultimately allows for the same plurality. I also highlight that constructivism on its own cannot justify rights of people who are not (yet) able to reason. The well-being approach provides substantive arguments for the rights of these individuals. However, these arguments are made with the framework provided by constructivism. I hold, contra Caney, that Forst’s right to justification is primary in that it is the unavoidable basis from which justice issues can be dealt with in a reasonable way and that the main function of human rights is to protect the equal moral status of persons. I conclude that Forst’s constructivist and Caney’s well-being approach are complementary rather than rivalrous: when combined they provide a more robust justification for a comprehensive set of human rights than considered separately. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe article discusses the reception of Schelling’s philosophy by the young Paul Tillich. During his study on the theological faculty of the University of Halle from 1905 until 1907 Tillich was influenced by the Fichte interpretation of Fritz Medicus. Tillich uses Fichte’s philosophy as a theoretical frame for a modern theology. The problems from this Fichte reception lay in the concept of freedom as autonomy. In Schelling’s philosophy, especially in his concept of freedom as the possibility to come into contradiction (...) with oneself, the young Tillich finds the solution for these problems. (shrink)

The article examines the development of Paul Tillich’s understanding of Protestantism. Beginning with his 1913 ‘Systematic Theology’, the shifts in his theory of Protestantism, first developed after the First World War and then at the end of the 1920s, are reconstructed. It is demonstrated that, from the outset, Tillich extended the traditional soteriological interpretation of Protestantism into a universal-cosmological theory. Protestantism means not only critique, but also formation.

A social responsibility (SR) theory of the press has emerged in various democratic societies worldwide since World War II. The Hutchins Commission in the United States is the source of this paradigm in some cases, but a similar emphasis on serving society rather than commerce or government has also arisen in parallel fashion without any connection to Hutchins. Professionalism and codes of professional ethics are too narrow to serve as the framework for a global SR paradigm of the 21st century. (...) Instead, universal ethical principles are the most appropriate framework, and the cross-cultural axis around which these principles revolve is the sacredness of human life. Embedded in the protonorm of human sacredness are such ethical principles as human dignity, truthtelling, and nonmaleficence. These principles are citizen ethics rather than professional ethics; they are set in the social domain where SR gets its rationale. They provide a frame of reference internationally for assessing local news media practices and formulating codes of ethics. (shrink)

Since a couple of decades, the notion of a precautionary principle plays a central and increasingly influential role in international as well as national policy and regulation regarding the environment and the use of technology. Urging society to take action in the face of potential risks of human activities in these areas, the recent focus on climate change has further sharpened the importance of this idea. However, the idea of a precautionary principle has also been problematised and criticised by (...) scientists, scholars and policy activists, and been accused of almost every intellectual sin imaginable: unclarity, impracticality, arbitrariness and moral as well as political unsoundness. In that light, the very idea of precaution as an ideal for policy making rather comes out as a dead end. On the basis of these contrasting starting points, Christian Munthe undertakes an innovative, in-depth philosophical analysis of what the idea of a precautionary principle is and should be about. A novel theory of the ethics of imposing risks is developed and used as a foundation for defending the idea of precaution in environmental and technological policy making against its critics, while at the same time avoiding a number of identified flaws. The theory is shown to have far-reaching consequences for areas such as bio-, information- and nuclear technology, and global environmental policy in areas such as climate change. The author argues that, while the price we pay for precaution must not be too high, we have to be prepared to pay it in order to act ethically defensible. A number of practical suggestions for precautionary regulation and policy making are made on the basis of this, and some challenges to basic ethical theory as well as consumerist societies, the global political order and liberal democracy are identified. (shrink)