This essay addresses moral hazards associated with the emerging doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). It reviews the broad acceptance by the Vatican and the World Council of Churches of the doctrine between September 2003 and September 2008, and attempts to identify grounds for more adequate investigation of the moral issues arising. Three themes are pursued: how a changing political context is affecting notions of sovereignty; the authority that can approve or refuse the use of force; and plural foundations (...) for human rights in a religiously and otherwise plural world such that the human rights protection does not become tyrannical. (shrink)

Accountability for developing, deploying, and using any emerging weapons system is affirmed as a guiding principle by the Group of Governmental Experts on Emerging Technologies in the Area of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems. Yet advances in emerging technologies present accountability challenges throughout the life cycle of a weapons system. Mindful of a lack of progress at the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons since 2019, this essay argues for a mechanism capable of imputing accountability when individual agent accountability is exceeded, forensic (...) accountability unreliable, and aspects of political accountability fail. (shrink)

My essay “Responsibility to Protect and Militarized Humanitarian Intervention: When and Why the Churches Failed to Discern Moral Hazard” (JRE 40.2) called for more questioning engagement with R2P than the broadly uncritical welcome given by the churches to the doctrine between September 2003 and September 2008. In response to Luke Glanville's reply, this essay identifies further reasons for caution before accepting R2P and so-called humanitarian wars alongside defensive wars as paradigmatically justified. It is structured with reference to the tests in (...) A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, the Report by the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, as recommended to the General Assembly when considering whether to authorize or apply military force: seriousness of risk, intention, last resort, proportional means, balance of consequences. (shrink)

This special volume of Studies in Christian Ethics constitutes the most significant continuation to date of Christian social ethics in the tradition of Ronald Preston. It brings together leading scholars and new voices in the field from around the world, covering a broad range of contemporary issues, including globalisation, poverty, feminism, civil society, economics and religious pluralism.

This special volume of Studies in Christian Ethics constitutes the most significant continuation to date of Christian social ethics in the tradition of Ronald Preston. It brings together leading scholars and new voices in the field from around the world, covering a broad range of contemporary issues, including globalisation, poverty, feminism, civil society, economics and religious pluralism.

This volume frames the question of responsibility as a problem of agency in relation to the systems and structures of globalization. According to Ricoeur responsibility is a “shattered concept” when considered too narrowly as a problem of act, agency and individual freedom. To examine this Esther Reed develops a short genealogy of modern liberal and post-liberal concepts of responsibility in order to understand better the relationship dominant modern framings of the meanings of responsibility. Reed engages with writings by major modern (...) (Schleiermacher, Hegel, Marx, Weber) and post-liberal (Buber, Levinas, Derrida, Badiou, Butler, Young, Critchley) theorists to illustrate the shift from an ethnic responsibility built on notions of accountability and attributions to an ethic responsibility that starts variously from the 'other'. Reed sees Dietrich Bonhoeffer as the most promising partner of this theological dialogue, as his learning of responsibility from the risen Christ present now in the (global) church is a welcome provocation to new thinking about the meaning of responsibility learned from land, distant neighbour, (global) church and the bible. Bonhoeffer's reflections on the centre, boundaries and limits of responsibility remain helpful to Christian people struggling with an increasingly exhausted concept of accountability. (shrink)

This essay frames the question of responsibility as a problem of agency in relation to the systems and structures of globalization. Responsibility is a “shattered concept” when considered too narrowly as a problem of act, agency, and individual freedom. Constructively, the essay introduces Dietrich Bonhoeffer as the most promising theological dialogue partner for rethinking the meaning of responsibility today. His challenge is to find a way of talking about responsibility that does not collapse into individualism or become ensconced within a (...) univocal logic that subsumes socioeconomic, cultural, and religious differences within itself. The claim is that Bonhoeffer’s reflections on the center, boundaries, and limits of responsibility are helpful today to Christian people struggling with an increasingly exhausted concept of responsibility, when linear agent-act-consequence connections to distant others and far away harms are increasingly difficult to trace. (shrink)

THERE IS A RELATIVE DEARTH OF THEOLOGICAL CONTRIBUTION TO PRESENT-day discussion about the status of territorial borders. Secularist discourse tends to divide between "partialists" and "impartialists." Partialists work with an ideal of states as distinct cultural communities, which justifies priority for the interests of citizens over refugees. Impartialists work with an ideal of states as cosmopolitan agents, which takes into account equally the interests of citizens and refugees. The aim of this essay is to show how selected biblical texts help (...) to rethink these categories and offer different, theologically informed ways of construing the meaning of borders. The need for an "ethic of answerability" is established and initial suggestions are given as to how this approach might be developed. (shrink)

This paper is about love of one’s neighbour near and far given humanity’s division into nations. The primary dialogue partner is Peter Singer and his preference utilitarian approach to moral reasoning wherein the challenge is to count the welfare of individuals impartially, regardless—or, at least, with far less regard than is often given—of divisions into nation-states. The claim is made that, despite the considerable and proper challenges from Singer and other so-called new cosmopolitans, it remains possible and, indeed, necessary at (...) the present time for Christian people to work with an account of nation and nationhood as permitted within divine providence. This claim is cast in terms of traditional Christian teaching about the order of love (L. ordo amoris). (shrink)

This essay argues that a restatement of Thomistic natural law reasoning is increasingly necessary in jurisprudential debate about international law. Mindful of Pope John Paul II's call for a renewal of international law, the essay engages with the present-day tension between Morgenthau-type realism and neo-Kantian discourse-oriented cosmopolitanism. The essay addresses whether the former is sufficiently realistic in our global 21st century context, and whether the latter is adequately cosmopolitan. Attention is drawn to Aquinas's understanding of the relation between custom, consent (...) and political authority in order to expose some of the limits of present-day statism, and to suggest that Thomistic natural law reasoning is, potentially at least, better able to cope with the intractable disagreement that characterises 21st century global relations than some forms of neo-Kantian jurisprudence. (shrink)

This article inquires into what the gospel of peace might mean for Christian theological engagement with international law and sets a provisional agenda for peace ethics in an age of global risks. Two warnings are sounded with respect to the language of ‘peace ethics’ and ‘the rule of law’. Three priorities are identified: thinking with and about the global poor in ways that do not render ‘the other’ somehow different from myself; retrieval of the twin ideas of ‘naturalness’ and distributive (...) justice in natural law reasoning as they bear upon international law and the use of force; how to conceive of international common good by considering ‘peace through law’ as a potentially subversive endeavour when employed in the service of the global poor. (shrink)

This essay warns that Nigel Biggar’s permissive reading of the classic, theological just war tradition is problematic especially when combined with his highly contextual approach to the United Nations Charter and laws of war. Two points are made: When compared to Augustine’s grappling with the disordered loves of the Roman empire—including ‘foreign iniquity’ as an excuse for military action, the animus dominandi, and wars of a kind that generate more war—In Defence of War lacks a political realism robust enough to (...) defend against leaving the laws of war in the hands of the most powerful nations. When compared to Augustine’s engagement with why and how secular law must constitute the conditions for peaceable and ordered co-existence, In Defence of War fails to incorporate into its just war reasoning a defence of the legal regime necessary for the protection of international peace and security. (shrink)

This paper applies aspects of Hugo Grotius's theologically informed theory of property to contemporary issues concerning access to the human DNA sequence and patenting practices. It argues that Christians who contribute to public debate in these areas might beneficially employ some of the concepts with which he worked--notably "common right," the "right of necessity," and "use right." In the seventeenth century, wars were fought over trading rights and access to the sea. In the twenty-first century, information and intellectual property are (...) the issues of the day. Grotius's writings serve to correct the overemphasis in modern liberalism on individual rights, and have practical application to the debate concerning the reduction of the human genome to the status of private property. (shrink)

This article tests the proposition that new weapons technology requires Christian ethics to dispense with the just war tradition (JWT) and argues for its development rather than dissolution. Those working in the JWT should be under no illusions, however, that new weapons technologies could (or do already) represent threats to the doing of justice in the theatre of war. These threats include weapons systems that deliver indiscriminate, disproportionate or otherwise unjust outcomes, or that are operated within (quasi-)legal frameworks marked by (...) accountability gaps. The temptation to abrogate (L. abrogare—repeal, evade) responsibility to the machine is also a moral threat to the doing of justice in the theatre of war. (shrink)