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For centuries, international reparations were commonly exacted as a form of victor's justice after war. Following World War II, however, the bitter legacy of the Treaty of Versailles and West Germany's compensation of Nazism's victim shifted this practice, ushering in a novel moral economy of international reparations. Yet, while recent decades have seen increased transnational activism around reparations, as well as interstate aid payments and official apologies, international reparations remain infrequent, and agreements often fail to end financial claims. This paper argues that one explanation for this lackluster record is a central paradox relating to finality. Though international reparations are designed to settle accounts and provide a basis for deeper reconciliation, by opening issues of traumatic memory to public debate, they often achieve the opposite effect and inspire a cascade of further financial claims. As evidence, we examine three cases of international reparations' occurrence and rejection: Germany's reparations for Nazi-era crimes, the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) formation following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and reparations negotiated but removed from the 1973 Paris Peace Accords. Employing process tracing methods on archival documents, we demonstrate in each case how this paradox helps explain international reparations' limitations as a practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years' political debates have raised questions regarding how to understand individuals' responsibilities for repairing unjust structures they may perpetuate, but do not directly cause. Though Iris Marion Young's conceptualization of structural injustice has become widespread in political theory, disagreements persist due to divergent and narrow understandings of intentionality. Some deny that individuals intentionally reinforce unjust structures, while others attempt to trace causality sufficiently finely to attribute such responsibility. This paper offers a novel cognitive entanglement model to move forward these debates, drawing on insights from neo-pragmatism and enactivist philosophy of mind. This model demonstrates how, to the degree that individuals cognitively entangle themselves with unjust structures, offloading cognitive responsibilities to them and uncritically accepting their logics, we can attribute extended intentionality and, along with it, an attenuated form of moral responsibility to inform differential obligations in the context of collective action. This framework explains how individuals relate to unjust structures, while also clarifying methods for combatting structural injustice through cognitive disentanglement—regaining critical perspective and cognitive distance from unjust institutions. I illustrate this framework's utility via the complex case of the United Kingdom's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the structural injustice it perpetuated. After considering relevant mitigating circumstances, this model can help move forward tendentious political debates, including over individual responsibilities to pay reparations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that a renewed focus on how dominant international practices produce ontological insecurity can help better orient ontological security studies (OSS) to injustice in world politics, particularly as it affects structurally marginalized political actors at multiple levels. It makes this case by bringing the work of Iris Marion Young to bear on OSS, particularly her theory of justice as the elimination of domination and oppression. Drawing on Young's "Five Faces of Oppression," this paper argues that multiple injustices endemic to the international system should be understood as key producers of ontological insecurity in the international system, both in their direct ability to destabilize identities and in their undermining of disadvantaged actors' ontological security-seeking practices. On international scales, these processes transcend levels of analysis, affecting individuals, social groups, and even states in differing ways. Incorporating Young's work into OSS not only helps build a vital bridge between the oft estranged sub-disciplines of political theory and IR, but also can provide scholars a means of better theorizing how ontological insecurity is so often a product of the international system's injustices. The paper thus concludes by proposing a normative turn within OSS, asking whether global justice should be understood as a precondition for ontological security-seeking among multiple co-existing actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The Birth of Ethics, Philip Pettit carefully argues that Erewhonians would develop concepts that closely resemble our normative concepts – including our moral concepts – and that this reveals a great deal about the nature of normativity in general and morality in particular. The purported revelations about morality include: Thesis #1: Moral concepts ascribe natural properties. Thesis #2 "Full-scale" moral realism is true. Thesis #3: There is a sufficiently good answer to the question, "Why be moral?" In this paper, I do not question Pettit's ingenious argument that the Erewhonians' conceptual repertoire would expand in the way described in his narrative. I instead question whether this narrative supports these metaethical theses. I argue that if our moral concepts were expressively equivalent to Erewhonian moral concepts, that would not ground a "full-scale" moral realism, nor would it give us a sufficiently compelling answer to the question "Why be moral?" Furthermore, I argue that our moral concepts are not expressively equivalent to Erewhonian moral concepts, which puts pressure on the argument that our moral concepts ascribe natural properties. Finally, contra Pettit, I argue that moral concepts do not play the same function in our lives as the analogous concepts play in Erewhonians' lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suppose that, for reasons of animal welfare, it would be better if everyone stopped eating chicken. Does it follow that you should stop eating chicken? Proponents of the 'inefficacy objection' argue that, due to the scale and complexity of markets, the expected effects of your chicken purchases are negligible. So the expected effects of eating chicken do not make it wrong. We argue that this objection does not succeed, in two steps. First, empirical data about chicken production tells us that the expected effects of consuming many chickens are not negligible. Second, this implies that the expected effect of consuming one chicken is ordinarily not negligible. Parity between your purchase and other counterfactual purchases, and uncertainty about others' consumption behaviour, each tend to pull the expected effect of a single purchase toward the average large scale effect. While some purchases do have negligible expected effects, many do not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a theory of incremental theoretical evolution connecting the practice of international politics with disciplinary IR. It theorizes how international political actors engaged in strategic local decision-making exert productive power over dominant scientific ontologies of the international system. We refer to the narratives emerging from these processes as strategic ontologies, defined as gradual reformulations of the subjects, objects, and relational logics of the international system according to positionally determined priorities. As strategic ontologies gain acceptance, their innovations endure beyond the context of their utterance, leading to meso-level theoretical evolution. We substantiate this account with comparative case studies of contested strategic ontologies that have yet to become dominant in either the international arena or IR theory. Without strategic ontology as an analytical lens, scholarship might miss embryonic theoretical innovations in the process of gaining traction. First, we examine how Israel and West Germany engaged in strategic ontological contestation when negotiating a reparations agreement following the Holocaust. Second, we analyze how states have used vulnerability in climate negotiations in 2020–2021 to recast global policy priorities. Recognition of strategic ontologies across contexts illuminates theoretical innovations in real-time and opens a path for dynamic new bridges between the academy and policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though psychic trauma may be an essential part of the human condition, in recent decades its interpretation as PTSD has had important political consequences. I examine both the political roots of the PTSD diagnosis and the disorder's subsequent impacts on American foreign policy discourse. I draw on a mixed-methods approach, including historical analysis of PTSD's development and quantitative and qualitative analysis of presidential papers, presidential debates, and the Congressional Record from the last fifty years. My chief findings are twofold. First, even though PTSD was added to the DSM in 1980, American leaders only began commonly referencing the disorder around the 2008 presidential cycle, more than half a decade into the War on Terror. Second, critical discourse analysis reveals that increased attention to PTSD has contributed to a blurring of important spatiotemporal lines around the concept of war, extending its consequences into an unknown future and outside the war zone. This erosion has profound normative consequences, considering how it similarly blurs the pivotal ethical distinction between victim and perpetrator. These findings not only elucidate an evolution that has taken place in American foreign policy, but also speak to the more general conceptual challenges posed by war trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although often omitted from final texts, armchair speculation is vital to much politics research. This article argues that thought experiments are a powerful tool for harnessing scholarly imagination with enormous potential for international relations (IR). To provide guidance for thought experiments' incorporation into IR research, the article begins by clarifying thought experiments' epistemological foundations and expanding existing best practices criteria for minimal-rewrite counterfactuals. Doing so enables consideration of the diversity of thought experiments useful to the discipline, ranging from alien invasions to zombie apocalypses. Then, the article outlines five ways in which thought experiments prove particularly useful in researching international politics: probing modal consequences of macro-level theories; refining concepts; formulating hypotheses; speculating about rare events; and conveying theories' real-world implications. To facilitate thought experiments' incorporation into mixed- and multi-methods research, the article's final section offers a novel typology to guide scholars in not only formulating new thought experiments, but also adapting and comparing them, including in conjunction with empirical methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Typical philosophical discussions of physician-assisted death ("PAD") have focused on whether the practice can be permissible. We address a different question: assuming that PAD can be morally permissible, how far does that permission extend? We will argue that granting requests for PAD may be permissible even when the PAD recipient can no longer speak for themselves. In particular, we argue against the 'competency requirement' that constrains PAD-eligibility to presently-competent patients in most countries that have legalized PAD. We think PAD on terminally ill, incapacitated patients can be morally permissible in cases where advance directives or suitable surrogate decision-makers are available, and should be legally permissible in such cases as well. We argue that this view should be accepted on pain of inconsistency: by allowing surrogate decision-makers to request withdrawal of life-sustaining care on behalf of patients and by allowing patients to request PAD, we rule out any plausible justification for imposing a competency requirement on PAD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research with enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPP) makes pathogens substantially more lethal, communicable, immunosuppressive or otherwise capable of triggering a pandemic. We briefly relay an existing argument that the benefits of ePPP research do not outweigh its risks and then consider why proponents of these arguments continue to confidently endorse them. We argue that these endorsements may well be the product of common cognitive biases-in which case they would provide no challenge to the argument against ePPP research. If the case against ePPP research is strong, the views of professional experts do little to move the needle in favour of ePPP research., Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared., (© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2024. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.)

The systemic inflammatory response seen in patients with severe COVID-19 shares many similarities with the changes observed in hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH); a disease characterized by excessive immune activation. Many patients with severe COVID qualify for a diagnosis of HLH. Etoposide, an inhibitor of topoisomerase II is used to control inflammation in HLH. This randomized, open-label, single center phase II trial attempted to determine whether etoposide can be used to blunt the inflammatory response in severe COVID. This trial was closed early after eight patients were randomized. This underpowered trial did not meet its primary endpoint of improvement in pulmonary status by two categories on an 8 point ordinal scale of respiratory function. There were not significant differences in secondary outcomes including overall survival at 30 days, cumulative incidence of grade 2 through 4 adverse events during hospitalization, duration of hospitalization, duration of ventilation and improvement in oxygenation or paO2/FIO2 ratio or improvement in inflammatory markers associated with cytokine storm. A high rate of grade 3 myelosuppression was noted in this critically ill population despite dose reduction, a toxicity which will limit future attempts to explore the utility of etoposide for virally-driven cytokine storm or HLH.