Patrick Taylor Smith

Collaboration between the arts and health sectors is gaining momentum. Artists are contributing significantly to public health efforts such as vaccine confidence campaigns. Artists and the arts are well positioned to contribute to the social conditions needed to build trust in the health sector. Health professionals, organizations, and institutions should recognize not only the power that can be derived from the insights, artefacts, and expertise of artists and the arts to create the conditions that make trust possible. The health sector must also recognize that, while it can gain much from partnership with artists, artists risk much—namely, the public's trust—when they are in such partnerships. This essay unpacks these claims and considers the care and ethical considerations that must be brought to these partnerships to yield constructive pathways for ethical collaboration as well as for both establishing public trust and continuing to hold the health care profession accountable for becoming more trustworthy.

Health justice seeks, both conceptually and in practice, to strengthen community engagement and empowerment as an integral means of addressing health disparities. In this essay, we explore the nature of communities and their roles in health care/public health. We propose that an ethical principle of respect for communities is a requisite part of health justice. It is this respect for communities that ethically grounds health justice’s calls for greater community engagement and empowerment. Conceptions of health justice, we claim, will gain ethical power and coherence as this principle is more clearly recognized and further developed.

Laura Valentini’s Justice in a Globalized World presents, with admirable clarity, a new, hybrid conception of global justice that builds on insights from both cosmopolitans and statists, especially their relational variants. Relational cosmopolitans generally argue that substantial economic cooperation and interdependence (i.e., the relevant economic relations) trigger robust obligations of distributive justice. They then argue that, as a matter of fact, these relations obtain globally in virtue of intensifying global trade, capital flows, and labor migration. Thus, relational cosmopolitans conclude that obligations of distributive justice directly apply to the global economic order. Relational statists, by contrast, argue that obligations of distributive justice are trigged by coercive, political relations. Furthermore, these coercive relations only obtain—and can only be justified—within a state. As a consequence, the global order is a ‘secondary site’ of justice that ought to be con

This paper develops a novel, neo-republican account of just state surveillance in the information age. The goal of state surveillance should be to avoid and prevent domination, both public and private. In light of that conception of justice, the paper makes three substantive points. First, it argues that modern state surveillance based upon information technology and predicated upon a close partnership with the tech sector gives the state significant power and represents a serious potential source of domination. Second, it argues that, nonetheless, state surveillance can serve legitimate republican ends and so unilateral and private technological attempts to block it may be wrongful. Third, it argues that, despite the serious normative failings of current institutions, state surveillance can be justly regulated and made accountable through a legal liability regime that incentivizes tech company intermediaries to ally with civil society groups in order to safeguard the privacy rights of potential subjects of state surveillance.

Since cyberattacks are nonphysical, standard theories of casus belli — which typically rely on the violent and forceful nature of military means — appear inapplicable. Yet, some theorists have argued that cyberattacks nonetheless can constitute just causes for war — generating a unilateral right to defensive military action — when they cause significant physical damage through the disruption of the target's computer systems. I show that this view suffers from a serious drawback: it is too permissive concerning the types of actions that generate casus belli since many essentially peaceful and non-violent mechanisms can nonetheless cause physical damage. I resolve this difficulty by developing a sovereignty-based account of casus belli and applying it to cyberwarfare. I argue that legitimate states have a constrained right to unilaterally respond with military force to unfriendly actions that bypass or overwhelm the political deliberations of the target state in order to force a change in behaviour contrary to the determinations of the people of the target state. This new account of casus belli avoids the problems of the consequence-based view by plausibly restricting the types of unfriendly action that give rise to casus belli and yet offers an attractive explanation for why some cyberattacks nonetheless do generate a potential right to a unilateral defensive response.

This paper argues that it is permissible for computer scientists and engineers—working with advanced militaries that are making good faith efforts to follow the laws of war—to engage in the research and development of lethal autonomous weapons systems. Research and development into a new weapons system is permissible if and only if the new weapons system can plausibly generate a superior risk profile for all morally relevant classes and it is not intrinsically wrong. The paper then suggests that these conditions are satisfied by at least some potential LAWS development programs. More specifically, since LAWS will lead to greater force protection, warfighters are free to become more risk-acceptant in protecting civilian lives and property. Further, various malicious motivations that lead to war crimes will not apply to LAWS or will apply to no greater extent than with human warfighters. Finally, intrinsic objections—such as the claims that LAWS violate human dignity or that it creates ‘responsibility gaps’—are rejected on the basis that they rely upon implausibly idealized and atomized understandings of human decision-making in combat.

Questions about dirty hands have often focused on legitimate, secure leaders deciding whether to violate important deontological principles or the rules of interpersonal morality. The purpose of this paper is to show that revolutionaries have dirty hands; revolutionaries do wrong by engaging in unilateral usurpation of the existing system with the hope that latter benefits will justify their actions. Yet, once the revolution securely generates improvements for the common good, the initial usurpation becomes increasingly irrelevant to judgments of the new government’s legitimacy. The paper argues that only retroactive justification—where later success forces opponents and advocates to reinterpret the wrongness of the initial action—can fully capture the complex moral dynamics of revolutions.