When introducing Politics Among Nations to his readers in the fall of 1948, Hans Morgenthau was explicit about the volume's ultimate purpose. His book was neither “disinterested” nor did it mean to offer “knowledge for its own sake.” Rather, the author meant to render both a real and practical service to his fellow countrymen. A series of factors had “completely reversed” the geopolitical status of the United States. It now held a position of predominant power in the world, and hence of foremost responsibility. Therefore, “the understanding of the forces that mold international politics and of the factors that determine its course has become more than an interesting intellectual occupation. It has become a vital necessity.”

This article assesses recent claims that international courts and tribunals can enhance their legitimacy through public reason. Section one argues that international legal scholars attribute a wide range of meanings to public reason, and goes on to provide clarification of how this range of conceptions, or ideas and ideals, referred to as public reason fits into the dominant and broadly Rawlsian tradition. Section two analyses properties and features of international courts that make public reason normatively relevant. Section three then sketches an ideal of public reason for ICs that suggests guidelines and principles to limit the discretion of judges when reasoning about morally and politically contentious issues. This ideal is designed to address a particular legitimacy concern raised against many new international courts, namely, that they engage in judicial activism, passing judgments on contentious moral and political issues without being sufficiently authorized and accountable. This ideal does not encourage the judges to engage in more judicial review, rather it seeks to restrict the judges' reasoning and judicial discretion when engaging in review and judicial development of the law. The final section compares and contrasts the proposed account of public reason to other adjudicative ideals, both from the general adjudicative accounts of Ronald Dworkin and Cass Sunstein, as well as the more ambitious and cosmopolitan accounts of public reason for ICs offered by the legal scholars Kumm, Sadurski, and Petersmann.

On August 2, 2015, after three long years of intergovernmental negotiations and consultations and some tense final moments, all UN member states finally endorsed the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with a new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2016. The question of accountability—or, more precisely, the question of how governments will be held to account for implementing the commitments made in this new agenda—was a critical point of contention throughout the negotiations, resulting in a significant watering down of initial proposals by the end of the process.

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, co-winner 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. Consequently, with exceptions related to AIDS and in the poorest countries, life overall is longer and health better than ever before.

Hans Morgenthau's concept of “the national interest” first appeared, somewhat like thunder out of China, in the essay “The Primacy of the National Interest” as part of a forum in the Spring 1949 issue of The American Scholar titled “The National Interest and Moral Principles in Foreign Policy.” As William Scheuerman observes, “The concept of the ‘national interest’ first takes on a special analytic status in this essay.” In the essay, the national interest is first presented as a necessary corrective to what Morgenthau had already characterized in Scientific Man vs. Power Politics as legalism, moralism, and sentimentalism in American politics, and as a more effective guide to foreign policy than the American tradition seemed able to provide.

There has been little discussion of central bank accountability in recent decades because monetary policy has been seen as an essentially technical problem. Yet, during the 2008 financial crisis and the economic dislocations that ensued, central banks gained considerably in authority—bailing out failing institutions, using unorthodox monetary tools, and wading into sovereign debt crises. At the same time, the financial crisis and the slow recovery that has followed have revealed just how uncertain and volatile the global economy can be—a situation that poses new dilemmas for monetary policy. This article looks at the existing model of central bank accountability and finds it wanting in this new, more uncertain environment. Because the principle of central bank independence involves a very narrow set of objectives—generally focused on an inflation target—and very few opportunities for sanction, the main mechanism for accountability is that provided by the publication of information about the bank's deliberations and activities. In an era of increased economic uncertainty, when central bankers themselves admit that simple rules and models are no longer adequate, a narrow, transparency-based form of accountability is not sufficient. I suggest that we need a thicker, more robust form of accountability that fosters more deliberation and debate, ensures that central banks are answerable to their publics, and broadens the standards by which they are judged.

Hans Morgenthau's The Purpose of American Politics was published in 1960, at the end of the Eisenhower administration and on the eve of the civil rights movement and military intervention in Vietnam. It is Morgenthau's first attempt to author a book primarily about the United States, exploring opposing American political traditions and their implications for foreign policy. In the process, he comments on past and present domestic and foreign crises and the ways they are refracted by Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian understandings of the national purpose. Morgenthau is drawn to the Hamiltonian approach, which is realist in its assumptions; but he is nevertheless sympathetic to the Jeffersonian emphasis on freedom, which differentiates America, in his view, from other countries. The book represents Morgenthau's coming to terms with America, lauding the purposes for which the country was founded, but the overall argument is pessimistic. Morgenthau contends that America has lost its sense of purpose, on the home front and abroad. When read next to his Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, published in 1946, the book reveals a significant shift in his intellectual and political orientations.

In recent years philosophical debates on human rights have focused upon the contrast between humanist and political conceptions of human rights. Defenders of the humanist conception take human rights to be those rights that we have solely in virtue of being human. By contrast, defenders of the political conception aim to offer an account of human rights practice without any recourse to notions such as human dignity, personhood, etc. They take human rights to be those rights that we have in virtue of being subject to political authority. In this essay, I show some of the problematic implications of endorsing this aspect of the political conception. After analyzing some key functions that the concept of human dignity plays in human rights practice, I focus on the gradual extension of legal human rights to corporations. I analyze the negative effects that the distinctive functions of human rights norms can have upon the human rights of natural persons once corporations are recognized as legal persons bearing human rights. Turning to human rights jurisprudence I then explore the normative resources that the concept of human dignity has to offer in order to prevent such negative effects and which are unavailable to a conception of human rights that disregards the humanist core of human rights practice.

Robert Sparrow recently argued in this journal that several initially plausible arguments in favor of the deployment of autonomous weapon systems (AWS) in warfare are in fact flawed, and that the deployment of AWS faces a serious moral objection. Sparrow's argument against AWS relies on the claim that they are distinct from accepted weapons of war in that they either fail to transmit an attitude of respect for enemy combatants or, worse, they transmit an attitude of disrespect. In this reply we argue that this distinction between AWS and widely accepted weapons is illusory, and therefore cannot ground a moral difference between AWS and existing methods of waging war. We also suggest that if deploying conventional soldiers in a given situation would be permissible, but we could expect to cause fewer civilian casualties by instead deploying AWS, then it would be consistent with an intuitive understanding of respect to deploy AWS in this situation.

In Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (1946), Hans Morgenthau celebrated the noble role of the statesman, whose tragic destiny entailed accepting the agonizing moral burden of committing lesser evils as the inescapable price for securing the greater good. In this elitist vision, the statesman is primarily accountable to personal conscience rather than to the poorly informed, undisciplined judgment of any democratic electorate. In focusing on the statesman's pivotal role, Morgenthau glossed over the ways the New Deal and the Second World War had transformed the institutional context within which American presidents made foreign policy. As he shifted his attention to American policy toward Vietnam in the late 1950s and the 1960s, however, his view of presidential leadership and the executive branch changed significantly. Morgenthau came to see the growth of the national security state and the unaccountable exercise of executive power as a twin threat to the foundations of republican government. His critique emphasized the pathologies of policymaking insulated within this state apparatus. He learned that one problem with the lesser-evil approach is that the moral distinctions on which it is predicated are relative and contingent in practice: that which was once proscribed from the policymaker's toolbox can readily become the prescribed instrument after the justifying precedent has been established.

The notion that some means of waging war are mala in se is a confronting one. Surely, any weapon can be used for good or ill? Philosophers often try to justify the category of mala in se by suggesting that some weapons are inherently incapable of being used in accordance with the just war principles of distinction and proportionality. This line of argument faces two obvious objections. First, claims about the limits of particular weapons typically fail to consider the different contexts in which they might be used. For example, anti-personnel mines can be used as defensive measures for fixed installations in marked locations that are fenced off from civilian intrusion. Second, deriving the category of mala in se from the principles of distinction and proportionality makes it redundant. The argument that some weapons cause disproportionate suffering is more persuasive, but it falters if one conducts an honest appraisal of the nature and extent of the suffering caused by weapons that are not held to be mala in se.

Discomfort with denationalization spans both proceduralist and consequentialist objections. I augment Patti Lenard's arguments against denationalization with an epistemological argument. What makes denationalization problematic for democratic theorists are not simply the procedures used to impose this penalty or its consequences but also the permanence of this type of punishment. Because democratic theory assumes citizens to be subject to developmental processes that can substantially alter a person's character in politically relevant ways, I argue in favor of states imposing only revocable punishments. Penalties removing people's rights and political standing must be accompanied by avenues for periodic reconsideration of such punishments in order to meet Lenard's standard of democratic legitimacy.

Patti Tamara Lenard assesses the justifications given for the right to revoke citizenship in democratic states and concludes that this practice is inconsistent with a commitment to democratic equality. She provides three normative reasons for the mismatch between democratic principles and revocation laws: that the practice of revocation discriminates between different citizens within each state; that it provides differential penalties for the same crime; and that it does not provide transparent justification or due process for this harsh punishment. Although I too am repulsed by this practice, I do not think it is necessarily undemocratic. Moreover, such analysis overlooks one legitimate motivation behind expatriation: the aim to regulate national allegiance. The new revocation initiatives act as a powerful symbolic tool in reinforcing a world order based on sovereign nation-states.

Citizenship status is meant to be secure, that is, inviolable. Recently, however, several democratic states have adopted or are considering adopting laws that allow them the power to revoke citizenship. This claimed right forces us to consider whether citizenship can be treated as a “conditional” status, in particular whether it can be treated as conditional on the right sort of behavior. Those who defend such a view argue that citizenship is a privilege rather than a right, and thus in principle is revocable. Participating in a foreign state's military, treason, spying, or committing acts that otherwise threaten the national security of one's state may all warrant revocation. This article assesses the justifications given for the claimed power to revoke citizenship in democratic states and concludes that, ultimately, such a power is incompatible with democracy.

I begin with a brief account of the claims given by contemporary democratic states for the “right to revoke.” Democratic citizenship is today commonly understood to be egalitarian, that is, it protects an equal basic package of rights for all citizens; and to be “the highest and most secure legal status,” that is, it is meant to be secure from unilateral withdrawal by the state. Formally, many democratic states have revocation laws on the books, but most of these have long been in disuse. Although I argue in this article that all revocation laws are inconsistent with democratic citizenship, I focus on the recent surge in proposed and implemented revocation laws, which are justified as essential to protecting national security.

In the second section I outline three reasons to object to revocation laws. First, revocation laws discriminate between citizens based on their citizenship status. Second, since they single out those who are eligible for revocation, they apply unequal penalties for the same crime. Third, they are inadequately justified, in general, but also particularly to those who may be subject to them, because they are not adequately connected to the policy goal they are said to fulfill. I conclude with some brief observations concerning the ways in which revocation permits states to abrogate their shared responsibility for protecting the global community from dangerous individuals.