Review Essays
Poverty Alleviation, Global Justice, and the Real World
For nearly half a century, political theorists have wrestled with the problem of global social justice, producing ever more elaborate and analytically-sophisticated models, but without engaging significantly with, or materially influencing, real-world politics. In this review essay, Chris Brown considers one of the latest contributions to this literature.
The Ethics of Insurgency
In this review essay, James Turner Johnson considers two recent books on the ethics of insurgency warfare. He draws on the deep history of moral and legal thought on the subject to forcefully defend many of the standards laid out in the classical just war tradition and enshrined in international law.
Shifting International Security Norms
In this review essay, Denise Garcia draws on two recent books to argue that new technology can reinforce security norms just as easily as it can undermine them. Additionally, she shows that contestation is a natural part of the process by which norms are reformed or replaced, and that this leads to ethical progress over the long term.
Immigration Ethics and the Context of Justice
This review essay by Linda Bosniak engages David Miller’s recent book Strangers in our Midst. Specifically, Bosniak highlights the tensions inherent in Miller’s contextualist political theory of immigration.
The Lessons of Effective Altruism
In this essay, Rubenstein examines two recent books by Peter Singer and William MacAskill on the philosophy and philanthropic movement known as Effective Altruism (EA). She addresses both the promise and limitations of EA—whose proponents seek to do the “most good”—arguing that a “hidden curriculum” underlies its teachings.
Ethics and Inequality: A Strategic and Practical View
Deng Xiaoping once said, “Let some get rich first, the others will follow.” This is Angus Deaton’s basic view in The Great Escape. Deaton, cowinner of the Leontief Prize in 2014 and winner of the Nobel Prize in 2015, chronicles the rise of almost all of humanity out of conditions of widespread hunger, disease, destitution, and premature death, and into a world where infant and child mortality has fallen sharply, and where heart diseases and even cancers are declining.
Children’s Rights as Human Rights
Fundamental state failures—to recognize and act in children’s best interest; to afford them the right to be heard; and to respect, protect, and fulfill their other rights–threaten children worldwide. Two new books address these failures.
Justice for All: The Promise of Democracy in the Global Age
For Carol Gould, to make democracy fulfill its potential, it has to be transformed from its static and formal state to a more engaged, participatory, and interactive mode of governance.
