Is International Law Impartial? Steven R. Ratner The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest among philosophers in the core questions of ethics and justice on the international plane. Issues once discussed primarily in the response to the major global debates of the 1960s and 1970s-the vietnam War and the North-South economic imbalance-have returned to the domain of philosophers. This engagement has taken place in two distinct, but related, debates. First, philosophers have devoted considerable attention to the ethical significance of nationality and patriotism king whether an impartial morality permits some disparate treatment of an individuals co-nationals. These questions are not new, of course, having been raised in important earlier works by Alisdair MacIntyre, Peter Singer, Andrew Oldenquist, and others Second, scholars have revisited issues of international justice in great detail, including works on human rights as well as just war theory. These works ask, as brian Barry put it, given a world that is made up of states, what is the morally permissible range of diversity among them? One impetus for renewed work on these ideas-which again were the subject of major works by Charles Beitz, Terry Nardin, and others- was the publication of John rawls The Law of peoples While in many ways asking and answering different questions, these two bodies of work are related in that they focus on what constitutes a just world, and what role the Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School. I greatly appreciate comments from Eyal Benvenisti, Allen Buchanan, John Deigh, Brian Leiter, and David wippman Brian Barry, International Society from a Cosmopolitan Perspective, in INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY: DIVERSE ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES 144, 154 (David R Mapel Terry Nardin ed 1998)Is International Law Impartial? Steven R. Ratner∗ The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest among philosophers in the core questions of ethics and justice on the international plane. Issues once discussed primarily in the response to the major global debates of the 1960s and 1970s – the Vietnam War and the North-South economic imbalance – have returned to the domain of philosophers. This engagement has taken place in two distinct, but related, debates. First, philosophers have devoted considerable attention to the ethical significance of nationality and patriotism, asking whether an impartial morality permits some disparate treatment of an individual’s co-nationals. These questions are not new, of course, having been raised in important earlier works by Alisdair MacIntyre, Peter Singer, Andrew Oldenquist, and others. Second, scholars have revisited issues of international justice in great detail, including works on human rights as well as just war theory. These works ask, as Brian Barry put it, “given a world that is made up of states, what is the morally permissible range of diversity among them?”1 One impetus for renewed work on these ideas – which again were the subject of major works by Charles Beitz, Terry Nardin, and others – was the publication of John Rawls’ The Law of Peoples. While in many ways asking and answering different questions, these two bodies of work are related in that they focus on what constitutes a just world, and what role the ∗ Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School. I greatly appreciate comments from Eyal Benvenisti, Allen Buchanan, John Deigh, Brian Leiter, and David Wippman. 1 Brian Barry, International Society from a Cosmopolitan Perspective, in INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY: DIVERSE ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES 144, 154 (David R. Mapel & Terry Nardin eds, 1998)