Benjamin D. King

G. A. Cohen conceptualizes socialism as luck egalitarianism constrained by a community principle. The latter mitigates certain inequalities to achieve a shared common life. This article explores the plausibility of the community constraint on inequality in light of two related problems. First, if it is voluntary, it fails as a response to “the abandonment objection” to luck egalitarianism, as it would not guarantee imprudent people sufficient resources to avoid deprivation and to function as equal citizens in a democratic society. Contra Cohenite socialism, this appears unjust. Second, if it is instead enforced, coercive equalization beyond sufficiency-constrained luck egalitarianism, which is possibly necessary to achieve a shared common life, seems to require unjustified restrictions on liberty. I therefore argue that the constraint is most plausibly specified as requiring enforcement of sufficiency and only voluntary equalization thereafter. I also note, skeptically, why this constraint might be morally preferable to a purely sufficientarian alternative.

The mass killings, large-scale gang rape and large-scale expulsion of the Rohingyas from Myanmar constitute one of the most repugnant world events in recent years. This article addresses the question of whether armed humanitarian intervention would have been morally permissible to protect the Rohingyas. It approaches the question from the perspective of the jus ad bellum criteria of just war theory. This approach does not yield a definitive answer because knowing whether certain jus ad bellum conditions might have been satisfied is difficult to judge without detailed knowledge of military intelligence assessments. Nevertheless, I argue that there was just cause for intervention according to both liberal and communitarian perspectives; that legitimate authority in the form of United Nations Security Council authorization would not have been morally necessary; that it is doubtful whether permissible intervention would have required humanitarian intent; that in late August 2017, intervention might well have been a last resort, but that morally relevant facts suggest intervention might have been disproportionate and lacked a reasonable chance of success, such that, all things considered, it would have perhaps been impermissible. (Free access via third external link)

In this article, I consider the permissibility of forming defensive alliances, which is a neglected topic in the contemporary literature on the ethics of war and peace. Drawing on the jus ad bellum criterion of proportionality in just war theory, I argue that if permissible defensive force requires that its expected harms must be counterbalanced by its expected goods, then, permissible defensive alliance formation seems to also require that its expected harms must be counterbalanced by its expected goods, as the latter can result in much the same consequences as the former. Moreover, due to the incommensurability of values in play when making proportionality judgments, I argue for a value pluralist understanding of the criterion. On this view, defensive alliance formation is proportionate if the expected gains in certain values (goods) intuitively justify the expected losses in others (harms) when compared to the alternative expected value trade-offs of not allying. To explore the implications of my theoretical claims I consider them in relation to John Mearsheimer’s influential account of the causes of the Russo-Ukrainian War. On this account, the West’s strategy to assimilate Ukraine and Ukraine’s pursuit of NATO membership post-annexation of Crimea were disproportionate because the expected harms were unjustified when compared to the alternative expected goods and harms of forgoing Ukrainian membership of NATO. This does not imply that Russia’s aggression is just, but it does imply that the West and Ukraine are partially responsible for the war and that they acted impermissibly in attempting to expand/join NATO.