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57 Guild Prac. 107 (2000)
The Ethics of International Sanctions: The Case of Yugoslavia

handle is hein.journals/guild57 and id is 119 raw text is: JOVAN BABIC & ALEKSANDAR JOKIC THE ETHICS OF INTERNATIONAL SANCTIONS: THE CASE OF YUGOSLAVIA Sanctions, such as those applied by the United Nations against Yugosla- via, or rather the actions of implementing and maintaining them, at the very least implicitly purport to have moral justification. On May 30, 1992, Secu- rity Council Resolution 757 imposed a universal, binding blockage on all trade and scientific, cultural and sports exchanges with Serbia and Montenegro. In addition to expressing the usual concern and dismay regarding vari- ous events, the language of this Resolution includes, on three occasions, un- mistakably moral language of deploring failures in meeting the demands of earlier resolutions. Sanctions have political and economic, as well as military and strategic, consequences for the sanctioned state, perhaps as desired by the sanctioning party. However, the question raised in this essay is whether sanctions also produce morally reprehensible consequences that undermine their often-cited moral justification. If so, international economic sanctions are an immoral means of achieving primarily political goals. Six morally significant consequences of sanctions are: 1) the unethical, elevated susceptibility of the sanctioned to political (and other forms of) manipulation; 2) inherent and unjust paternalism; 3) the abandonment of strict moral criteria on virtually all levels of evalua- tion, primarily inside the sanctioned country, but also in sanctioning states, exhibited in the attitudes towards the sanctioned; 4) the general decline in moral consciousness; 5) the rise of many forms of violence within the sanctioned state, an increase in lawlessness and a general decline of expectations in all areas of life; and Jovan Babic is a professor of ethics and chair of the philosophy departmentat the University of Belgrade and a board member of the Institute for European Studies in Belgrade. He is co-founder of the International Law and Ethics Conference Series. Currently, Babic is Visiting Professor at University of Arizona. Aleksandar Jokic is a professor of philosophy at Portland State University where he also teaches in the Conflict Resolution Graduate Program. He is executive director of the Center for Philosophical Education (CPE) at Santa Barbara City College, and co-founder of the International Law and Ethics Conference Series (ILECS). Reprinted with permission of the Fletcher Forum of World Affairs.

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