Photo credit: pixy.org under Creative Commons license. This is a guest post by George DeMartino, professor of international economics at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. This post is the first in an...
Photo credit: pixy.org under Creative Commons license. This is a guest post by George DeMartino, professor of international economics at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. This post is the first in an...
The controversy surrounding the coalition airstrike in Kunduz continues to rumble on this week after military investigators drove an armoured personnel carrier into a hospital’s front gate. A...
Keeping up with the current engagement with artificial intelligence (AI) is a full time task. Today in the New York Times, two (here and here) lead articles in the technology section were about AI,...
In his most recent post, PTJ argues that "things like Freakonomics are basically corrosive and should be opposed whenever practicable". While he repeats in that post (and the comments section) a...
So this email arrived my mailbox yesterday:Hi Mr. Carpenter, I am a fourth year college student and I have the honor of reading one of your books and I just had a few questions... I am very fascinated by your work and I am just trying to understand everything. Can you please address some of my questions? I would greatly appreciate it. It certainly help me understand your wonderful article better. Thank you very much! :) Sincerely, [NAME REDACTED]The "questions":1. What is the fundamental purpose of your article? 2. What is your fundamental thesis? 3. What evidence do you use to support your...
Quoting an anonymous former military intelligence officer, that is how Adam Swerer described the Wikileaks' archive published Sunday in an op-ed earlier this week. Joshua Foust concurred in a PBS essay:If I were a Taliban operative with access to a computer — and lots of them have access to computers — I’d start searching the WikiLeaks data for incident reports near my area of operation to see if I recognized anyone. And then I’d kill whomever I could identify. Those deaths would be directly attributable to WikiLeaks. Even with the names removed from these reports, you know where they...
I have been fortunate to be a part of a number of interesting conversations over the last few weeks, and am currently attending the conference linked above, hosted by the Levan Institute for Humanities and Ethics, the University of Southern California Global Health Institute, and the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California. Conversations are centering around global norms and international agreements on women's health, health aid, human trafficking, economic empowerment, violence and war, and medicine distribution. These conversations are extremely...
The Associated Press has sparked a controversy by publishing these graphic photos of Marine Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard's death in Afghanistan, against the wishes of his parents and the Pentagon.Forgetting the fact that we never seem too concerned about representations of dismembered or dying people from other countries, let's review the two key issues in the debate:1) Should the DoD be bullying the press into sitting on war photos that render war as ugly as it is? In reviewing the coverage on blogs, most comments I've seen by military personnel argue no.* But they also think it's bunk to...
A few months ago fellow NYU inhabitant Joshua Tucker of The Monkey Cage asked what, if any, social science research had been done on the effectiveness of torture in obtaining valuable intelligence? Josh's primary question was an ethical one, that being if a researcher had a personal objection to the use of torture, but through an empirical analysis of data found that it in fact did extract valuable data, should the researcher attempt to get it published despite his or her personal objection? This touched off a very interesting discussion among Monkey readers, and I recommend it to all.Today,...
Ethics and pragmatism sometimes align in matters of war and peace, and other times they work at cross purposes. Two recent examples illustrate this rather banal point:1. Brian Ulrich calls attention to what might be charitably described as a misguided Israeli tactic for dealing with Hamas in the West Bank:It's long been said that Hamas is popular because of its social services. Israel's defense establishment is now on the case:"Israeli military officials have identified Hamas's civilian infrastructure in the West Bank as a major source of the Islamic group's popularity, and have begun...
John Knox has published a long and dense yet fascinating article, "Horizontal Human Rights Law" in January's issue of the American Journal of International Law. In it, he asks considers whether international human rights law, designed to prescribe how states may and must treat their citizens, also impose human responsibilities on citizens themselves?Thinking that it maybe should, the now-defunct Human Rights Commission took up the issue before it disbanded in 2006, an effort which culminated in a Draft Declaration on Human Social Responsibilities that aimed to lay out both the horizontal...
It is always wonderful, at this time of year, when grading a student’s paper teaches a professor something and leaves him/her thinking anew about ethical ironies in world politics. My MPIA student, Christopher Farnsworth, who is now being recruited by the US Department of Defense, just wrote a fascinating analysis of Congressional policy on the sale of precision-guided munitions for my class on the “Rules of War.” (The paper, which is still in draft form as these things go, nonetheless contains a wealth of information on this issue, and is available here for those who know as little about...