Ethics and Human Rights in World Affairs Final Examination -
Instructions: This examination in four parts, which you may answer in any order. Choose your questions so as to avoid repeating yourself.
Part I- Briefly answer six of the following questions.
1. Identify and elucidate: "The problem of establishing a perfect civil constitution is subordinate to the problem of a law-governed external relationship with other states, and cannot be solved unless the latter is also solved."
2. What are the main components of what is usually called the "International Bill of Rights?"
3. Identify and elucidate: "Independence alone provides no guarantee of human rights and dignity, nor of any other freedom than, by definition, that of the country as a whole. Indeed, it may serve to bar more tightly the sovereign gates which exclude intervention of any kind including intervention aimed at the protection and promotion of the rights of individuals."
4. Identify and elucidate: "However the political code is specified, terrorism is the deliberate violation of its norms. For ordinary citizens are killed and no defense is offered-none could be offered-in terms of their individual activities."
5. Identify and elucidate: "He who seeks salvation of the soul, of his own and of others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics, for the quite different tasks of politics can only be solved by violence."
6. Identify and elucidate: "If one cares about people's powers to choose a conception of the good, then one must care about the rest of the form of life that supports those powers, including its material conditions."
7. What three approaches to applying the rules of jus in bello does Walzer set out in Just and Unjust Wars and which does he advocate?
8. Identify and elucidate: "...with the ordinary conventions of civilized life thrown into confusion, human nature, always ready to offend even where laws exist showed itself proudly in its true colors, as something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice the enemy to anything superior to itself."
9. Identify and elucidate: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal instability, or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."
10. Identify and elucidate: "A substantive ethic of responsibility would confront the whole range of normative issues facing the modern nation-state, and it would do so not by wishing the state out of existence but by nudging it toward the structural changes that would enlarge the scope for ethical behavior."
Part II- Choose ONE question (of two) below. Both relate to the following passages:
"In the 21st century, I believe that the mission of the United Nations will be defined by a new, more profound awareness of the sanctity and dignity of every human life, regardless of race or religion. This will require us to look beyond the framework of states and beneath the surface of nations and communities." (Kofi Annan, UN Human Development Report 2000.)
Consider the former UN Secretary-General's position in light of the following and then answer question one or question two below.
(a) "Universality is, in fact, the essence of all human rights; all people are entitled to them, all state and civil actors should defend them. The goal is nothing less than human rights for all." (Mary Robinson, former UN High Commissioner on Human Rights)
(b) "...this normative conception of human capability is designed to make room for a reasonable pluralism in specification. The capabilities approach urges us to see common needs, problems, and capacities, but it also reminds us that each person and group faces these problems in a highly concrete context." (Martha Nussbaum)
(c) "The principle of the defense of human rights cannot be consistently applied in foreign policy because it can and it must come in conflict with other interests that may be more important than the defense of human rights in a particular instance." (Hans Morgenthau, 1975)
1. What are the strengths and weakness of the 'capabilities approach' to human rights advocated by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum? Does it succeed in transcending the debate on 'negative' vs 'positive' rights? And how well does it balance the universality inherent in human rights claims against the "highly concrete context" of nation-states and local practices?
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2. How do the norms of human rights interact with, or indeed confront, the sovereign independence of states? What arguments and instruments of policy do advocates of universal human rights deploy against states and with what degree of effectiveness? What are the obstacles and dilemmas that any human rights policy directed by (or at) states must confront?
Part III- Choose ONE question out of the three below.
3. "The clearest evidence for the stability of our values over timeis the unchanging character of the lies soldiers and statesmen tell. They lie in order to justify themselves, and so they describe for us the lineaments of justice. Wherever we find hypocrisy, we also find moral knowledge." (Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars).
How does Walzer seek to persuade us of the continued importance and relevance of the just war tradition (renamed by him as the "legalist paradigm")? What are the key components of this tradition? What are the major challenges to it? Should the just war tradition continue to guide our choices about war in an age of terrorism?
4. Consider the following four quotations, and answer the question that follows.
(a) "When a people has had the misfortune to be ruled by a government under which the feelings and the virtues needful for maintaining freedom could not develop themselves, it is during an arduous struggle to become free by their own efforts that these feelings and virtues have the best chance of springing up." (John Stuart Mill, 1859).
(b) "Though somecritics fret that R2P could prove to be a humanitarian veneer by which powerful states could justify military intervention in the development world, more often the problem has been the opposite...The capable have stood by as the slaughter of civilians unfolded before the world's-and sometimes even UN peacekeepers'-eyes. They have looked for excuses not to act, rather than for reasons to intervene." (E. Luck, quoted in Weiss, Humanitarian Intervention.)
(c) "A second and less controversial meaning of self-determination is the right of peoples to determine the internal structure and functioning of their societies without interference." (Rupert Emerson, 'The Fate of Human Rights in the Third World.')
(d) "Where a population is suffering serious harm as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure....the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect." (The Responsibility to Protect Report, 2002.)
Compare and contrast these views on the possible justifications for (or arguments against) outsideintervention. What is your view on how, or indeed whether, "humanitarian intervention" (even if it is renamed as 'responsibility to protect') can be justified? Cite specific examples and readings in your answer.
5. In an oft-quoted remark, Cavour asserted that "if we had done for ourselves what we did for the state, what scoundrels we would have been!"
"Institutionalized torture...subverts the very foundation of the idea of justice and law. If the state itself becomes the torturer, how can we believe in the civil order that it claims to bring or to sanction? Legal torture extends the scope of the destructive action it exerts. Instead of stopping with the torturer and the victim, it spreads to all members of society, since they know it is being practiced in their name and yet they avert their eyes and do nothing to put an end to it." (Tzvetan Todorov, 2009)
Does acting "for the state" absolve an individual from responsibility for the act? How should we distinguish between individual and collective responsibility for policies and actions, perhaps even including torture, undertaken by a state?
Part IV - (Question distributed and prepared in advance)
You are on the foreign policy staff of a leading candidate for high public office (not necessarily in the USA but it could be). An innocent in matters of international relations, the candidate turns to you for advice on the major issue concerning ethical choice in the world of states that is your specific area of expertise. (The candidate knows that you have been carefully following a major issue in contemporary world politics and dimly remembers reading Thucydides, Kant, Weber et alia back in the day when s/he was a student. S/he seeks to recall some general insights on your particular issue, so s/he may seem to be deeply informed about it for an impending speech and discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations on the ethical challenges facing international leaders. But you both know that s/he was, at best, an indifferent student and will rely entirely on your briefing as preparation for the talk.)
Specifically, the candidate seeks substantive guidance on:
- the basic political dynamic of the issue you have been following , i.e., What is it about? What interests are at stake or in play?
- important recent developments with the issue
- the specifically ethical dilemmas raised by the issue
- the contrast between how a cosmopolitan (à lá Kant) or Realpolitiker (à lá Weber or Kissinger) would approach the issue
- and, most important, what you think should be done and why
Overall, the candidate asks you for a briefing on the basic question of how to frame an ethically sound policy on your specific issue. Provide now an advance text of this concise and pithy briefing.
Note - word limit depends on the answers of each question.