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41. Terminal Illness, Socialized Medicine, and the Question of Individual’s “best interest”

Author:
Shehzad Ali
Publication Date:
12-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Review of Human Rights
Institution:
Society of Social Science Academics (SSSA)
Abstract:
In April 2018, Alfie Evans, a 23-month-old child, died in the UK. He suffered from a degenerative neurological illness. His parents wanted to get further treatment for him outside the country, but the hospital authorities and courts denied permission. This article addresses three dimensions of the case: a) state intervention in individual’s health decision-making, b) potential violation of a human right, and c) the problematic nature of the state policy of socialized medicine. I engage René Girard anthropological theory of violence and mimesis to argue that this case highlights how states enact sacrificial violence upon the terminally ill as a part of maintaining coherent public order.
Topic:
Human Rights, Ethics, Violence, Bioethics, and Medicine
Political Geography:
Global Focus

42. Ethics vs. Ethos in US and UK Megabanking

Author:
Edward J. Kane
Publication Date:
05-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
Company law in the US and UK fails to acknowledge that authorities’ propensity to rescue giant banks from the consequences of insolvency assigns taxpayers a coerced and badly structured equity stake in too-big-to-fail institutions. The entrenched managerial norm of maximizing stockholder value lends a misplaced legitimacy to efforts by TBTF managers to take on dangerous levels of tail risk because their bank’s deep downside is effectively eliminated by the prospect of unlimited taxpayer support. Conventional tools of prudential regulation constrain but do not de-legitimate this behavior. To accomplish that end, this paper calls for: (1) a formal recognition of the fiduciary duties that TBTF firms owe to taxpayers and (2) criminalizing aggressive pursuit of safety-net subsidies as “theft by safety net.”
Topic:
Finance, Ethics, Banks, Banking, and Ethos
Political Geography:
United Kingdom, Europe, North America, and United States of America

43. Many Worlds, Many Theories, Many Rules: Formulating an Ethical System for the World to Come

Author:
Nicholas Onuf
Publication Date:
12-2016
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional (RBPI)
Institution:
Instituto Brasileiro de Relações Internacionais (IBRI)
Abstract:
There are many ways to speak about the modern world, and many theories setting it apart. I focus on a world facing economic decline and a return to the status-ordering of traditional societies. With republican theory as a backdrop, I show that an updated virtue ethics constitutes an ethical system uniquely suiting any society that is significantly status-ordered.
Topic:
International Relations, Ethics, and International Relations Theory
Political Geography:
Global Focus

44. Resisting Necro-biographies

Author:
Michael Shapiro
Publication Date:
12-2016
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Review of Human Rights
Institution:
Society of Social Science Academics (SSSA)
Abstract:
In order to determine whether an individual or a specific identity-bearing group has potential for terrorism, the state engages in a systematic practice of constructing biographies, which could warrant its use of lethal power. This practice privileges a security consciousness while discounting the vagaries of everyday life contingency, which plays a crucial role in creating who we are and what we do. The element of contingency becomes more visible when we focus on the lives of migrants and their movements. The State’s excessive concern with security inhibits the opportunity spaces for role exits from the indemnity economies it invents. In this brief response to such actions of the state, I take an ethical stance that affords victims the right to refute their constructed identities and to presenting counter-biographies.
Topic:
Migration, Terrorism, Ethics, State, and Identity
Political Geography:
Global Focus

45. The Impact of Sustainability Codes of Conduct in the Financial Sector

Publication Date:
02-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI)
Abstract:
This paper analyzes the impact of four major financial sector sustainability codes of conduct, the UN Environmental Programme Finance Initiative, the UN Principles for Responsible Investment, the Equator Principles and the Global Alliance for Banking on Values with regard to their impact on the sustainability of their members. The codes of conduct focus on the integration of environmental, social and governance criteria into financial decision making in lending, investment, asset management and project finance. corporate sustainability voluntary codes of conduct have a positive impact on their members. The effectiveness, however, depends on the quality and content of a code, as well as on implementation and compliance mechanisms.
Topic:
Economics, International Trade and Finance, Markets, United Nations, and Ethics
Political Geography:
Global Focus

46. Strategic Insights: Whiskey over Books, Again? Anti-Intellectualism and the Future Effectiveness of Army 2025

Author:
Dr. Don M. Snider
Publication Date:
02-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College
Abstract:
Crossing the Plains on an expedition to Utah [in the 1850s], Major Charles A. May searched the wagons in an effort to reduce unnecessary baggage. When he reached the wagons of the light artillery battery, Captain Henry J. Hunt proudly pointed out the box containing the battery library. “Books,” May exclaimed. “You say books? Whoever heard of books being hauled over the Plains? What the hell are you going to do with them?” At that moment Captain Campbell of the Dragoons came up and asked permission to carry a barrel of whiskey. ”Yes, anything in reason Captain, you can take along the whiskey, but damned if these books shall go.
Topic:
Education, Military Affairs, and Ethics
Political Geography:
United States of America

47. The Temporal Experience of Chinese Students Abroad and the Present Human Condition

Author:
Anders Sybrandt Hansen
Publication Date:
09-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
German Institute of Global and Area Studies
Abstract:
This article examines the experiences of Chinese elite uni- versity students abroad through the lens of temporality. In the strug- gle to get ahead, elite students are expected to carefully deploy their time. Studying abroad, it is argued, has become one more step in a culturally idealised temporal arrangement of how one is expected to go about advancing. The downside to this ethics of striving is shown to be a pervasive sense of restlessness (, fuzao). The article shows how relocating to a different life environment allowed a group of elite students to respond to their temporal predicament in existentially creative ways that registered socially as personal maturation. It is argued that these responses were set in motion by the students’ in- habiting an expanse of not-yet-purposeful time. Treating the tem- poral experience of Chinese elite students as a pronounced inflection of an increasingly global temporal mode of striving, the article en- quires into the temporality of the present human condition.
Topic:
Education, Globalization, Ethics, and Students
Political Geography:
China, Asia, and Global Focus

48. Morals in International Politics

Author:
A. Orlov
Publication Date:
03-2015
Content Type:
Working Paper
Abstract:
The world is changing fast; it is changing by leaps and bounds which makes it next to impossible to explain what is going on and to foresee possible repercussions.1 An unsophisticated observer in the West and elsewhere in the world where Western propaganda is heard and believed might imagine that the forces of freedom and democracy are waging an uncompromising struggle against despotism and tyranny (in the widest sense of the terms). It is implied that the United States and the rest of the civilized West are on the side of the forces of good confronted by an obscure conglomerate of the forces of evil, of which Russia is part if according to President Obama and certain other Western leaders. Former President of France Valéry Giscard d’Estaing has written in his memoirs that according to this interpretation the forces of good insist on democratic elections, human rights, and freedom of trade; America does not hesitate to use its might to defend good and oppose the forces of evil interfering with the fulfillment of these ideals.
Topic:
Democratization, Politics, International Affairs, Elections, and Ethics
Political Geography:
Global Focus and United States of America

49. Lethal and Legal? The Ethics of Drone Strikes

Author:
Dr. Shima D. Keene
Publication Date:
12-2015
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College
Abstract:
While supporters claim that drone warfare is not only legal but ethical and wise, others have suggested that drones are prohibited weapons under International Humanitarian Law (IHL) because they cause, or have the effect of causing, indiscriminate killings of civilians, such as those in the vicinity of a targeted person. The main legal justification made by the Barack Obama Administration for the use of armed drones is self-defense. However, there is ambiguity as to whether this argument can justify a number of recent attacks by the United States. In order to determine the legality of armed drone strikes, other factors such as sovereignty, proportionality, the legitimacy of individual targets, and the methods used for the selection of targets must also be considered. One justification for the ethical landscape is the reduced amount of collateral damage relative to other forms of strike. Real time eyes on target allow last-minute decisions and monitoring for unintended victims, and precise tracking of the target through multiple systems allows further refinements of proportionality. However, this is of little benefit if the definition of “targets” is itself flawed and encompasses noncombatants and unconnected civilians. This monograph provides a number of specific recommendations intended to ensure that the benefits of drone warfare are weighed against medium- and long-term second order effects in order to measure whether targeted killings are serving their intended purpose of countering terrorism rather than encouraging and fueling it.
Topic:
Human Rights, War, Counter-terrorism, and Ethics
Political Geography:
United States of America

50. The Ethics of Drone Strikes: Does Reducing the Cost of Conflict Encourage War?

Author:
Dr. James Igoe Walsh and Marcus Dr. Schulze
Publication Date:
09-2015
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College
Abstract:
Armed unmanned aerial vehicles—combat drones—have fundamentally altered the ways the United States conducts military operations aimed at countering insurgent and terrorist organizations. Drone technology is on track to become an increasingly important part of the country’s arsenal, as numerous unmanned systems are in development and will likely enter service in the future. Concerned citizens, academics, journalists, nongovernmental organizations, and policymakers have raised questions about the ethical consequences of drones and issued calls for their military use to be strictly regulated. This level of concern is evidence that the future of drone warfare not only hinges on technical innovations, but also on careful analysis of the moral and political dimensions of war. Regardless of whether drones are effective weapons, it would be difficult to sanction their use if they undermine the legitimacy of U.S. military forces or compromise the foundations of democratic government.
Topic:
Security, Human Welfare, War, Military Strategy, Military Affairs, Counter-terrorism, Ethics, and Drones
Political Geography:
United States of America