More Ethical than Not: Sanctions as Surgical Tools
Joy Gordon has made a major contribution to both the ethical analysis and the policy evaluation of economic sanctions. But her claims against sanctions should be understood as critique rather than condemnation and rejection of sanctions on ethical grounds. Through a series of arguments and examples, this response points out that Gordon may be too narrow in defining sanctions' success, and that, where sanctions have gone awry, it is because they were unimaginatively formulated and poorly implemented, not because sanctions are categorically unethical. Multilateral sanctions in the late 1990s are simply more finely tuned than a few years ago. As a technique of coercive diplomacy, sanctions are meant to change dramatically the costs and benefits that leaders of a nation calculate operate in their favor as they pursue policies that the majority of the international community have declared abhorrent. We can, with the help of Gordon's critical claims, accomplish this goal in a more ethical manner, and by so doing, increase the likely success of sanctions in the future.
THE MORALITY OF SANCTIONS
Abstract: Economic sanctions have been subject to extensive criticism. They are often seen as indiscriminate, intending the harms that they inflict, and using the suffering of the innocent as a means to enact policy change. Indeed, some reject outright the permissibility of economic sanctions. By contrast, in this essay, I defend the case for economic sanctions. I argue that sanctions are not necessarily morally problematic and, in doing so, argue that sanctions are less morally problematic than is often claimed. I go on to argue that sanctions may sometimes be morally preferable to the leading alternatives and, in particular, to wars and doing nothing. This is in part because sanctions are more likely to distribute fairly the currently inevitable harms to innocents of tackling aggression and mass atrocities. In the final part of the essay, I draw on this point to argue more generally that that we should often favor a “Harm-Distribution Approach” in the ethics of war and peace.
Command of the Air
Our geographical position, our size, our resources, our wealth, our astonishing national growth, the watchfulness of Providence which has accompanied more than one of our national crises, all indicate that our r6le in the world's future, that our part in world influence, is to be of the first importance. Just as in the war with Spain, events external to us and beyond our control forced us from our position of isolation into that of a world power with possessions and interests circling the globe, so today events external to us, and entirely beyond our control, are shaping for us a position and an influence greater than ever before. To touch upon only one of the directions in which that world influence will act, I will note our position as the most influential member of that American Federation which is surely coming, a federation of peaceful, prosperous, autonomous states, impregnable in their union, occupying the entire western hemisphere, seated upon two continents, reaching from pole to pole. In that coming world influence, the one great dominant thing which will overshadow all else will be air superiority and power. Twenty-four hundred years ago Themistocles, Athenian statesman, soldier, and creator of Athenian naval policy, asserted the principle that "He who commands the sea commands all." With the naval victory of Salamis, which changed the history of the world, he drove home the truth of his principle, and sent it down the centuries to be a living axiom of national power and influence today. 192