Ned Dobos

Relative to the abundance of literature devoted to the legal significance of UN authorisation, little has been written about whether the UN’s failure to sanction an intervention can ever make it immoral. This is the question that I take up here. I argue that UN authorisation (or lack thereof) can have some indirect bearing on the moral status of a humanitarian intervention. That is, it can affect whether an intervention satisfies other widely accepted justifying conditions, such as proportionality, “internal” legitimacy, and likelihood of success. The more interesting question, however, is whether the UN’s failure to provide a mandate can make a humanitarian operation unjust independently of these other familiar considerations. Is a proportional, internally legitimate humanitarian intervention, with a just cause and strong prospect of success, still morally unacceptable if it is not approved by the United Nations Security Council? This is the question that I turn to in the second half of the paper

The principle of absolute sovereignty may have been consigned to history, but a strong presumption against foreign intervention seems to have been left in its stead. On the dominant view, only massacre and ethnic cleansing justify armed intervention, these harms must be already occurring or imminent, and the prudential constraints on war must be satisfied. Each of these conditions has recently come under pressure. Those looking to defend the dominant view have typically done so by invoking international peace and stability, or the value of communal self-determination. But the internal aspect of legitimacy has been overlooked in all of this. If a government insists on defending the human rights of foreigners, it must also be sure not to violate the rights of its own citizens in the process. I argue that the current presumption against humanitarian intervention cannot be substantially relaxed for internal reasons, or given the obligations that states owe to their own constituents.

Targeted killing has become a staple tactic in the “war in terror”. Since the beginning of the second Intifada, Israel is estimated to have killed over four hundred Palestinians in targeted strikes, while the US has killed over two thousand in Pakistan alone since 2004. These statistics include the deaths of innocent bystanders caught in the wrong place at the wrong time—“collateral damage”—as well as the deaths of the terrorists themselves. Be that as it may, the American and Israeli publics have largely settled into an acceptance of the targeted killings carried out in their name.In Anna Goppel’s Killing Terrorists: A Moral and Legal Analysis, even the staunchest defender of targeted killing will find good reason to reconsider. The book does not bother developing an absolute, in-principle objection to targeted killing; it concedes to advocates of the practice that there are conceivable circumstances under which it might be justified. But these circumstances are shown to b ..

An armed humanitarian intervention must have a reasonable prospect of success to be justified. It must also be a proportional last resort. These are necessary conditions for legitimate AHI. It has been suggested that, in addition to these necessary conditions, there are also ideal conditions of AHI, namely disinterest and multilateralism. These conditions are said to enhance the moral credentials of an armed intervention without being strictly required. The paper concerns itself with the relationship between these two ideals and the requirement of a reasonable prospect of success. Specifically, I explore the suggestion that the former are in some way instrumental to the latter. On this view, we should aspire towards disinterest and multilateralism because these things contribute to a positive humanitarian outcome. If this is correct then the ideal conditions can be partly grounded in, or justified in reference to, the prospect of success principle.

abstract Many reasons have been given as to why humanitarian intervention might not be justified even where rebellion with similar aims would be a morally legitimate option. One of them is that intervention involves the imposition of alien values on the target society. Michael Walzer formulates this objection in terms of a people's right to a state that ‘expresses their inherited culture’ and that they can truly ‘call their own’. I argue that this right can plausibly be said to extend sovereignty to at least some illiberal governments, and therefore to impose at least some moral constraints on humanitarian intervention. The problem for Walzer is that this right cannot form the basis of a constraint that applies to foreign intervention exclusively. Once the details of Walzer's argument are teased out, it becomes apparent that civil war and revolution must be equally restricted by this right. Hence a people's prerogative to be governed in accordance with familiar traditions cannot coherently be invoked to show that intervention is impermissible in cases where insurrection is taken to be justified.

The idea that jobs should be awarded purely on merit has become something of an axiom, but the moral basis of it remains elusive. If employers are under a duty to appoint the most qualified candidate, to whom exactly is this duty owed, and on what grounds? I distinguish two kinds of answers to this question. Candidate-centred arguments are those according to which qualifications generate entitlements for their bearer, such that the most qualified applicant for a job has some moral claim or right to it. But of course job-seekers are not the only parties with a stake in personnel selection decisions. The existing employees of an organisation, its clients and creditors, its shareholders, and society more generally are also affected. The duty to hire on merit, one might argue, is owed ultimately to one or more of these “stakeholder” groups. I refer to arguments with this structure as stakeholder-centred. The purpose of the paper is to carefully distinguish, organise and scrutinise various arguments within these camps; to sketch a map of the ethical terrain, so to speak. What the sketch reveals is that both the scope and weight of the duty to hire on merit — the exceptions to it, and the stringency of it — vary depending on its grounds. The argumentative strategy that we adopt to justify meritocracy, then, is of both theoretical and practical importance.

Both radical rebellion and humanitarian intervention aim to defend citizens against tyranny and human rights abuses at the hands of their government. The only difference is that rebellion is waged by the oppressed subjects themselves, while humanitarian intervention is carried out by foreigners on their behalf. In this paper, it is argued that the prudential constraints on war (last resort, probability of success, and proportionality) impose tighter restrictions on, or demand more of, humanitarian interveners than they do of rebels. Specifically, I argue that rebels enjoy exemptions from the success principle that do not apply to humanitarians, and that rebels are not constrained by the foreseen mediated consequences of their actions ? consequences that are interceded by the agency of other parties. The same cannot be said for intervening states. If this is right, then it is possible for a humanitarian intervention to fall short of the prudential conditions of legitimate war despite being expected to accomplish no less, and to cost no more, than a rebellion which is rightly judged to satisfy these conditions

There is no denying that international human rights norms are enforced selectively. Some oppressive governments become the targets of military intervention, while the political sovereignty of other, equally oppressive regimes is left intact. My aim in this paper is to determine whether a military operation to defend human rights can possibly be made morally illegitimate by the fact that the state prosecuting it has failed, is failing or will fail to defend human rights under relevantly similar circumstances elsewhere

The ‘working poor’ are paid below‐subsistence wages for full‐time employment. What, if anything, is wrong with this? The extant philosophical literature offers two kinds of answers. The first says that failing to pay workers enough to live on takes unfair advantage of them; the workers are exploited. The second says that employers who fail to pay living wages default on a duty of care grounded in a special relationship; the workers are neglected. These arguments, though generally sound, provide an incomplete picture of the wrongdoing involved. Neither adequately captures the intuition that a firm treats its employees not just badly, but disdainfully, by failing to pay them a living wage. My goal is to bring this particular feature of the relationship to salience. Working full‐time in return for below‐subsistence, I will argue, is an arrangement under which the worker is demeaned or insulted. This becomes apparent once we appreciate the expressive power of wages, and the intimate connection between one's labour and one's self.

Workers who go on strike are sometimes accused of holding their employer “to ransom”, the implication being that strike action is a kind of extortion. The paper provides an analytical reconstruction of this objection, before presenting and interrogating different strategies for countering it. The first says that work-stoppages can only be extortionate if they infringe an employer’s rightful claim to productive labour, but that no employer has any such claim under capitalism. The second says that work-stoppages cannot be extortionate because, by themselves, they cannot put an employer under duress. The third and most promising strategy says that an employer’s claim to the productive labour of workers is conditional upon his/her not exploiting them. This approach does not produce a blanket exoneration; it tells us that the aptness of describing a strike as extortionate depends on a prior appraisal of the conditions that the strikers work under, and the fairness with which they are treated.

Libertarianism and the shareholder model of corporate responsibility have long been thought of as natural bedfellows. In a recent contribution to the Journal of Business Ethics, Brian Schaefer goes so far as to suggest that a proponent of shareholder theory cannot coherendy and consistently embrace any moral position other than philosophical libertarianism. The view that managers have a fiduciary obligation to advance the interests of shareholders exclusively is depicted as fundamentally incompatible with the acknowledgement of natural positive duties – duties to aid others that have not been acquired by some prior commitment or transaction. I argue that Schaefer is mistaken. Positive duties are incompatible with the shareholder model only if we must contribute to their fulfilment in the corporate context; only if we have some reason to think that it is not possible or not permissible to discharge these obligations entirely in our private lives or through our various other roles and capacities. But we have no good reason to accept this. I argue that individuals are presumptively free to decide how and when to discharge their positive duties, and that buying shares does not cause this presumption to lapse. Hence a non-libertarian moral theory can be held without incoherence by a proponent of the shareholder model

Elizabeth Anderson exalts the transition from the aristocratic to the modern ethic of debt as one of the most significant cultural achievements of capitalism. Whereas the debitor was once forced to compromise his liberty, dignity, and equality, today the rights and freedoms of insolvents are legally protected, and disadvantaged members of the community can readily obtain credit without personal supplication. Anderson’s intuition was, until recently, widely shared. Then came the financial crisis of 2007-08 and the ensuing global recession, triggered by mass defaults among “sub-prime” borrowers. Many had entered the mortgage market with no proof of income, no assets behind them, no down-payment, a chequered credit history, and a generally reduced repayment capacity. Suddenly a flurry of criticism was unleashed against the lowering of credit standards and the government programs which pressured lenders to service the poor. My aim in this paper is not to assess the democratization of credit from the point of view of economic efficiency or political prudence, but rather to provide a much needed ethical appraisal. Any number of reasons might be advanced for why a particular government policy is morally objectionable. I will concentrate on the least controversial reason conceivable: the policy violates the rights of citizens. Whether this is true of government-driven credit-democratization - specifically, whether it violates the rights of the lenders compelled to act as agents of the policy, the rights of the third parties exposed to the risks associated with the expansion of credit markets, or both – is the question that I take up here.

This paper explores the ethics of networking as a means of competition, specifically networking to improve one’s prospects of prevailing in formal competitive processes for jobs or university placements. There are broadly two ways that networking might be used to influence the outcome of some such process: through the “exchange of affect” between networker and selector, and through the demonstration of merit by networker to selector. Both raise ethical problems that have been overlooked but need to be addressed.

In a recent analysis of the principle of civilian immunity, Igor Primoratz asks whether the circle of legitimate targets in war might be expanded so as to include at least some civilian bystanders. However Primoratz’ formulation of the ‘responsible bystander’ argument depends for its cogency on there being natural or non-acquired positive duties, and this is controversial. Furthermore, we feel that the citizens of a government unjustly at war are primarily and specially obliged to undermine that war, and that this is not simply a function of their being in the best position to do so, (which may not always be the case). Primoratz’ version of ‘responsible bystander’ cannot account for this. Here I develop an alternative formulation that does, and which is not reliant on controversial premises. I argue that to empower a government democratically is to assume a positive obligation to prevent that government from using its power to prosecute an unjust war, and that the neglect of this duty may render a significant portion of the duty-bound collective legitimate targets of necessary and proportionate violence. In closing I dispute Primoratz’ claim that this conclusion has “very little purchase on reality” or is irrelevant for practical purposes.

In the world of human resource management employees who deliberately “withhold effort” on the job are called “production deviants.” The implication is that workers are under a duty to perform as best they can, but why should we accept this? Three answers are presented and interrogated. The first says that employees who withhold effort are guilty of “time-banditry” or theft from their employers. The second says that withholding effort harms one’s colleagues or co-workers. The third suggests that employees owe their employers a debt of gratitude, whose discharge requires that they be as productive as they reasonably can be.

The fact that armed revolution would be justified under certain circumstances does not guarantee the legitimacy of foreign intervention in aid of, or in place that revolution, even where the means employed and the ends sought are similar. One commonly given reason for this is that foreign intervention might fall short of the prudential constraints on war—proportionality, last resort, likelihood of success—where rebellion would live up to them. But those who make this argument often seem to assume that the prudential constraints on war apply asymmetrically, or demand more of humanitarian interveners than they do of rebels. I suggest that this double-standard is inconsistent with a basic principle of moral reasoning, and may need to be revised or abandoned. If we reject the asymmetry, however, can we still maintain that consequentialist considerations block the right of revolution from transferring across national boundaries and becoming a right of military intervention and regime change?

Domestic sovereignty and international sovereignty have both been eroded in recent years, but the former to a much greater extent than the latter. An oppressed people's right to fight for liberal democratic reforms in their own country is treated as axiomatic, as the international responses to the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya illustrate. But there is a reluctance to accept that foreign intervention is always justified in the same circumstances. Ned Dobos assesses the moral cogency of this double standard and asks whether intervention can be consistently and coherently opposed given our attitudes towards other kinds of political violence. His thought-provoking book will interest a wide range of readers in political philosophy and international relations.

To what extent does the ethicality of an advertisement depend on the good or service being advertised? This question has engaged business ethicists for decades. Some say that an ad for something good is always good, while an ad for something bad is always bad. Others insist that advert-evaluation and product-appraisal are entirely independent of one another—the ethics of selling has nothing to do with what is being sold. In this paper I add another dimension to the debate. I do this not by offering an alternative answer to the question, but by inverting the questions itself. I ask: To what extent does our moral assessment of advertising influence our moral evaluation of particular products? I hope to show that one’s general attitude towards advertising invariably colours one’s appraisal of particular goods and services. If advertising is seen as a morally objectionable enterprise, products which may seem innocuous start to look not only useless, but baneful and corrupting. If advertising is seen as a morally, psychologically and socially valuable activity, the same innocuous products start to look fulfilling, enriching, and overall life-enhancing.

One of the most commonplace worries about humanitarian intervention relates to the perverse incentives that it might create, or the adverse reactions that it might provoke. For instance, it is sometimes said that by weakening the norm of sovereignty humanitarian intervention can encourage unscrupulous states to wage aggressive wars of self-interest using human rights as a pretense. It is feared, in other words, that humanitarian intervention—even when it has the purest motives—might ultimately do more harm than good by inciting unwanted reactions from other states or substate groups. I will refer to these kinds of knock-on effects as the mediated consequences of intervention. They are brought about via the interceding agency of parties other than the intervener. It is generally assumed that when judging the proportionality of a humanitarian intervention, these consequences must be factored into the equation. If an intervention is expected to provoke adverse reactions the accumulated costs of which will outweigh the benefits that the intervention will deliver, then the intervention is thought to be disproportional and, therefore, unjustified. I want to challenge this assumption. I begin by considering what the principle of proportionality can reasonably demand of rebels who are defending their own basic rights against an oppressive government. I argue that a rebellion in such circumstances cannot plausibly be rendered impermissible solely by the expectation of negative mediated consequences, even when those consequences outweigh the anticipated benefits of the rebellion. This would seem to imply that rebels may discount mediated consequence from the proportionality calculus. But if this is so, do we have sound reasons for withholding the same prerogative from humanitarian interveners pursuing similar ends and using similar means? Can we justify asymmetric standards of proportionality?

The practice of humanitarian intervention, which involves one state intervening militarily into another state in order to prevent abuses of human rights, raises a plethora of ethical and political issues. How is foreign intervention to be reconciled with state sovereignty? Is intervention a threat to international peace and stability? Are alien values being imposed on the target society? Each of these questions has been thoroughly explored by both philosophers and jurists. But the notion that a state infringes the rights of its own citizens by waging war to defend the human rights of foreigners has received relatively little attention. The only thorough philosophical exploration of this problem to date - Allen Buchanan's “The Internal Legitimacy of Humanitarian Intervention” - is the focus of this paper. My aim here is not to offer a resolution to the “internal” problem, but simply to show that Buchanan misrepresents it in several important respects. First, Buchanan understates the strength of this objection: it is much more resilient than he gives it credit for. Secondly, he overstates its scope, or the range of humanitarian interventions to which it applies. And finally, Buchanan is mistaken to think that whether or not an intervening state fulfils the rights of its own citizens can be determined prior to, and therefore independently of, the question of whether its actions are consistent with the rights of the society targeted by the intervention.

In many countries the military still threatens to punish personnel that disobey orders for the sake of self‐preservation. The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) in the U.S., for instance, makes it a crime for a soldier to refuse a directive from a superior unless what that order requires is “patently unlawful”. This qualification is usually interpreted narrowly to cover orders to commit war crimes or to victimize civilians, not orders that would require sacrifice of life or limb. In other words, soldiers are afforded some right of conscientious disobedience, but no right of non‐conscientious, self‐regarding disobedience.We would not think it morally justifiable for any civilian employer to demand and enforce obedience unto death. In most countries it is not legally justifiable, either. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Act (1970), for instance, grants workers a right to disobey an instruction and request an official workplace inspection if ever ever they believe that an “imminent danger” exists, where this is defined in terms of a reasonable expectation “of death or serious physical harm.” 5 The Act protects employees who exercise this right from discharge or retaliation. If it is not permissible for civilian employers to enforce compliance with such “imminently dangerous” directives, then why is it permissible for the military? This paper consider a number of possible responses to this question.

Suppose it is foreseeable that you will soon encounter a drowning child, whom you will only be able to rescue if you learn to swim. In this scenario we might think that you have a “prospective duty” to take swimming lessons given that this will be necessary to perform the future rescue. Cécile Fabre argues that, by parity of reasoning, states have a prospective duty to build and maintain military establishments. My argument in this essay pulls in the opposite direction. First, I emphasize that learning to swim is only a prospective duty under very specific circumstances. Normally there is no such duty; hence, we do not normally think that people deserve moral censure for choosing to forego swimming lessons. I then argue that, similarly, while a prospective duty to build a military can arise under some conceivable circumstances, these are not the circumstances that most states today find themselves in. I then suggest a more fitting domestic analogy to guide our thinking about this issue: Maintaining a standing army is less like learning to swim and more like keeping an assault weapon in the home “just in case.” This analogy supports a defeasible presumption against militarization.