The Temporal Dimension of Post-Charter Self-Defence

Author(s):  
Kinga Tibori Szabó
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Sheehy ◽  
Julie Stubbs ◽  
Julia Tolmie
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Eugénia C. Heldt

Time plays a central role in international organizations (IOs). Interactions among actors are embedded in a temporal dimension, and actors use formal and informal time rules, time discourses, and time pressure to obtain concessions from their counterparts. By the same token, legacies and innovations within and outside IOs can be examined as a dynamic process evolving over time. Against this background, this chapter has a twofold aim. First, it examines how actors use time in IOs with a particular focus on multilateral negotiations to justify their actions. Drawing on international relations studies and negotiation analysis, this piece explores six different dimensions of time in the multilateral system: time pressure, time discourse, time rules, time costs, time horizons, and time as a resource. Second, this chapter delineates the evolution of IOs over time with the focus on innovations that emerge to adapt their institutional system to new political and economic circumstances. This piece looks particularly at endogenous and exogenous changes in IOs, recurring to central concepts used by historical institutionalism, including path dependence, critical junctures, and sequencing. This allows us to map patterns of incremental change, such as displacement, conversion, drift, and layering.


2021 ◽  
pp. medethics-2020-107103
Author(s):  
Stephen David John ◽  
Emma J Curran

Lockdown measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic involve placing huge burdens on some members of society for the sake of benefiting other members of society. How should we decide when these policies are permissible? Many writers propose we should address this question using cost-benefit analysis (CBA), a broadly consequentialist approach. We argue for an alternative non-consequentialist approach, grounded in contractualist moral theorising. The first section sets up key issues in the ethics of lockdown, and sketches the apparent appeal of addressing these problems in a CBA frame. The second section argues that CBA fundamentally distorts the normative landscape in two ways: first, in principle, it allows very many morally trivial preferences—say, for a coffee—might outweigh morally weighty life-and-death concerns; second, it is insensitive to the core moral distinction between victims and vectors of disease. The third section sketches our non-consequentialist alternative, grounded in Thomas Scanlon’s contractualist moral theory. On this account, the ethics of self-defence implies a strong default presumption in favour of a highly restrictive, universal lockdown policy: we then ask whether there are alternatives to such a policy which are justifiable to all affected parties, paying particular attention to the complaints of those most burdened by policy. In the fourth section, we defend our contractualist approach against the charge that it is impractical or counterintuitive, noting that actual CBAs face similar, or worse, challenges.


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