A notable feature of nationalism's contemporary resurgence is the increasing eagerness of governments to support and shape the political causes of populations living abroad that are viewed as ethnic kindred. However, global criteria for judging when such kin state activism is and is not acceptable have so far remained elusive, as the objectionable instances of the practice tend to overshadow the legally and morally consistent ones. I argue that the analysis of world affairs and promotion of global justice would benefit from an ethic of transnational conduct that has a rightful place for kin states. I defend a set of cosmopolitan criteria for this purpose, outlining how they enable us to recognize and combat the dangers posed by certain forms of kin state mobilization without forgoing the opportunities presented by certain other forms to overcome minority repression and enhance regional security.

Traditional just war doctrine holds that political leaders are morally responsible for the decision to initiate war, while individual soldiers should be judged solely by their conduct in war. According to this view, soldiers fighting in an unjust war of aggression and soldiers on the opposing side seeking to defend their country are morally equal as long as each obeys the rules of combat. Revisionist scholars, however, maintain that soldiers who fight for an unjust cause bear at least some responsibility for advancing an immoral end, even if they otherwise fight ethically. This article examines the attitudes of the American public regarding the moral equality of combatants. Utilizing an original survey experiment, we find that the public's moral reasoning is generally more consistent with that of the revisionists than with traditional just war theory. Americans in our study judged soldiers who participate in unjust wars as less ethical than soldiers in just wars, even when their battlefield conduct is identical, and a large proportion supported harsh punishments for soldiers simply for participating in unjust wars. We also find, however, that much of the American public is willing to extend the moral license of just cause significantly further than revisionist scholars advocate: half of the Americans in our survey were willing to allow an unambiguous war crime—a massacre of innocent women and children—to go unpunished when the act was committed by soldiers fighting for a just cause. Our findings suggest that incorporation of revisionist principles into the laws of war would reinforce dangerous moral intuitions encouraging the killing of civilians.

The findings reported in the article “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants,” by Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino, are indeed disturbing, but I am not convinced that they tell us all we need to know about public attitudes. Different questions, those that invite respondents to reflect on the reciprocal nature of practical morality (exemplified by the golden rule: “Do unto others . . .”), might reveal very different views of justified and unjustified conduct in war. I believe that these views, regarding, for example, the treatment of prisoners of war, would probably support the idea of the moral equality of soldiers on the battlefield.

In their article “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants,” Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino have revealed a wealth of information about the views of contemporary Americans on the ethics of war. Virtually all they have discovered is surprising and much of it is alarming. My commentary in this symposium seeks mainly to extract a bit more from their data and to draw a few further inferences. Among the striking features of Sagan and Valentino's data are that the views of Americans tend to cluster at the extreme ends of the spectrum of possible views about the ethics of war, that an apparent sympathy for pacifism coexists with harshly punitive views about the treatment of soldiers, and that few of those surveyed appear to have given any thought to the implications of the views they expressed for what it might be permissible for enemies of the United States to do to captured American soldiers. The commentary concludes by arguing that Sagan and Valentino's findings do not, as they argue, support the fear that is sometimes expressed that a wider acceptance of revisionist just war theory, and in particular its incorporation into the law, would make the practice of war even more barbarous than it already is.

In their article “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants,” Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino argue that the American public evaluates soldiers’ wartime actions more according to whether the war they are fighting was initiated justly, than on their actions during warfare. In this respect, their views are more similar to those of revisionist philosophers than to those of traditional just war theorists. Before leaping to broad conclusions from their survey, it should be replicated. If the findings hold in the replication, intriguing questions could be asked about comparative cross-national attitudes and about the relationship between democracy and war.

In their contributions to the symposium “Just War and Unjust Soldiers,” Michael Walzer, Jeff McMahan, and Robert O. Keohane add greatly to our understanding of how best to study and apply just war doctrine to real-world conflicts. We argue, however, that they underestimate both the degree to which the American public seeks revenge, rather than just reciprocity, and the extent of popular acceptance of violations of noncombatant immunity by soldiers perceived to be fighting for a just cause. We call on empirical political scientists, lawyers, psychologists, and historians to engage with moral philosophers and political theorists in debates about the influence of just war theory and the laws of armed conflict.

The fluid use of the terminology associated with “migration governance” can obscure its intention and implications. Different meanings of core terminology risks allowing troubling policies that are not really about migration, understood widely as border crossing, or even more broadly as human movement, to be legitimized. UN-level coordination with regard to “migration governance” needs to be part of addressing this concern. For example, this article advocates explicitly engaging with this risk through the implementation of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. It considers this issue from the perspectives of a handful of countries, each of which has its own complex relationship to the compact. It argues that in each of these apparently very different contexts, policies identified as being directed at “migration control” can be found to be directed not at controlling migration but at reconfiguring existing and stable state societies along ethnic, racial, linguistic, and other lines. The development of implementation plans for the Global Compact for Migration provides the opportunity to interrogate the purposes of “migration governance” and to find mechanisms to address its hidden uses.

Most current work on privacy understands it according to an economic model: individuals trade personal information for access to desired services and websites. This sounds good in theory. In practice, it has meant that online access to almost anything requires handing over vast amounts of personal information to the service provider with little control over what happens to it next. The two books considered in this essay both work against that economic model. In Privacy as Trust, Ari Ezra Waldman argues for a new model of privacy that starts not with putatively autonomous individuals but with an awareness that managing information flows is part of how people create and navigate social boundaries with one another. Jennifer Rothman's Right of Publicity confronts the explosive growth of publicity rights—the rights of individuals to control and profit from commercial use of their name and public image—and, in so doing, she exposes the poverty of treating information disclosure merely as a matter of economic calculation. Both books emphasize practical and doctrinal solutions to the problems they identify. In this essay, I take a step back and draw out the extent to which they converge on a fundamentally important point: the blunt application of market logic with its tools of property and contracts fails to protect the interests that lead us to turn to privacy in the first place; the tendency to economize privacy is a significant part of why we inadequately protect it.