Blog
Jon Finer and the Doorstep
Jon Finer, who has been nominated to serve as the deputy national security advisor in the Biden/Harris administration, gave an interview with GlobalBrief in 2020. He was asked about the impact of domestic politics and trends on U.S. foreign policy formulation. Finer’s response is worth perusing: In some ways, the traditional divide between American foreign […]
Can Staying at Home be Saving Lives and Avoiding Killing? COVID-19, Lockdowns and the Doing/Allowing Distinction
Lockdown and its purpose have been summarized in five words that have echoed from the mouths of politicians, public health bodies, and social media accounts of large companies and private citizens: “Stay at home. Save Lives.” This essay argues that some lockdown measures are neither standard cases of saving nor standard cases of refraining from doing harm.
How Will the Biden Administration Adjudicate a Clash of Values?
Simplistic assessments of U.S. foreign policy like to paint the policy divide BETWEEN values and interests. The reality is that policy often must choose between different and competing values. Last month, we noted the “ethical tensions” emerging between different camps that will most likely comprise the Biden/Harris administration’s national security team. Writing in Politico, Nahal […]
EIA Spring 2021 Remote Editorial Internship
Ethics & International Affairs, the journal of the Carnegie Council, seeks a remote volunteer intern for the spring semester. The goal of the journal is to integrate rigorous thinking about principles of ethics and justice into discussions of the practical policy dilemmas that frequently arise in global politics. Some topics that the journal commonly publishes on include the ethics of war, the responsibility to protect, international migration, climate change, human rights, and emerging technology.
Competing Ethics in the Biden Administration?
Writing in The Atlantic, Thomas Wright outlines three broad “camps” vying for influence over the foreign policy and national security policies of the Biden/Harris administration. There are the “restorationists”–the same term used by the Carnegie Council report for those who seek to return U.S. foreign policy to its broad, pre-2016 parameters; there are the reformers […]
What We’ve Been Reading
Welcome to our roundup of news and current events related to ethics and international affairs! Here’s some of what we’ve been reading this past month.
Are the Narratives Going to Matter?
A month ago, on The Doorstep podcast, Nahal Toosi, who is Politico’s foreign affairs reporter, discussed the competing narratives and policy preferences within the “big tent” of the Democratic Party and how, in the event that the Biden/Harris ticket prevailed in the presidential contest, all of this might play out. She observed, former U.S. officials […]
Ecological Genocide in the Amazon: Raphael Lemkin and the Destruction of Human Groups
For most people, the word “genocide” likely evokes mental images of concentration camps, killing fields, and mass graves. Deforestation, no matter how severe, would seem to be only tenuously related, if at all.
