Military Intervention, Regional Organizations, and Host-State Consent

Two ethical frameworks have dominated the discussion of organ donation for long: that of property rights and that of gift-giving. However, recent years have seen a drastic rise in the number of philosophical analyses of the meaning of giving and generosity, which has been mirrored in ethical debates on organ donation and in critical sociological, anthropological and ethnological work on the gift metaphor in this context. In order to capture the flourishing of this field, this article distinguishes between four frameworks for thinking about bodily exchanges in medicine: those of property rights, heroic gift-giving, sacrifice, and gift-giving as aporia. These frameworks represent four different ways of making sense of donation of organs as well as tissue, gametes and blood, draw on different conceptions of the relations between the self and the other, and bring out different ethical issues as core ones. The article presents these frameworks, argues that all of them run into difficulties when trying to make sense of reciprocity and relational interdependence in donation, and shows how the three gift-giving frameworks (of heroism, sacrifice and aporia) hang together in a critical discussion about what is at stake in organ donation. It also presents and argues in favour of an alternative intercorporeal framework of giving-through-sharing that more thoroughly explicates the gift metaphor in the context of donation, and offers tools for making sense of relational dimensions of live and post mortem donations

United States Armed Intervention in Nicaragua: A Rejoinder

On April 9, 1984, Nicaragua filed suit in the International Court of Justice (I.C.J.) charging the United States with engaging in military and paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua in violation of the Charters of the United Nations and the Organization of American States, and of general and customary international law. On May 10, 1984, after a hearing at which both states presented evidence and legal arguments, the Court ordered the United States to cease its covert war against Nicaragua pending the determination of the case on the merits. The vote was 14-1, with only the U.S. judge dissenting. The Court then held hearings, in which both the United States and Nicaragua participated fully, on the preliminary issues of jurisdiction and admissibility. On November 26, 1984, the Court ruled in Nicaragua\u27s favor on these issues by lopsided margins. Faced with a hearing on the merits of Nicaragua\u27s claims, the United States announced on January 18, 1985, that it would not participate further in the case