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AbstractIntelligent machines – from automated robots to algorithmic systems – can create images and poetry, steer our preferences, aid decision making, and kill. Our perception of their capacities, relative autonomy, and moral status will profoundly affect not only how we interpret and address practical problems in world politics over the next 50 years but also how we prescribe and evaluate individual and state responses. In this article, I argue that we must analyse this emerging synthetic agency in order to effectively navigate – and theorise – the future of world politics. I begin by outlining the ways that agency has been under-theorised within the discipline of International Relations (IR) and suggest that artificial intelligence (AI) disrupts prevailing conceptions. I then examine how individual human beings and formal organisations – purposive actors with which IR is already familiar – qualify as moral agents, or bearers of duties, and explore what criteria intelligent machines would need to meet to also qualify. After demonstrating that synthetic agents currently lack the 'reflexive autonomy' required for moral agency, I turn to the context of war to illustrate how insights drawn from this comparative analysis counter our tendency to elide different manifestations of moral agency in ways that erode crucial notions of responsibility in world politics.

AbstractOne type of change that has lurked at the edges of scholarly discussions of international politics—often assumed, invoked, and alluded to, but rarely interrogated—is learning. Learning entails a very particular type of change. It is deliberate, internal, transformative, and peaceful (in the sense of being uncoerced). In this contribution to the roundtable "International Institutions and Peaceful Change," I ask whether intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) can learn in a way that is comparable to the paradigmatic learning of individual human beings. In addressing this question, I take three steps. First, I explore references to corporate entities "learning" within the discipline of international relations (IR) and ask whether what is being proposed is, in fact, genuine learning by the organizations themselves. Second, I attempt to construct a robust account of institutional learning that departs from these conceptions and acknowledges instead the self-reflection and structural transformation that I argue learning at the corporate level requires. Third, for the purpose of illustration, I turn briefly to the UN following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the slaughter of more than eight thousand men and boys outside Srebrenica in 1995 to identify examples of each stage of institutional learning. Finally, I offer three provisional claims about my proposed conception of institutional learning that warrant attention in future work. Namely, I suggest that institutional learning: (1) cannot be equated with moral progress; (2) is possible despite formal organizations being incapable of emotional responses such as shame or regret; and, perhaps most controversially, (3) can occur at the level of the IGO without prior or parallel learning taking place at the level of the state or individual human actor.

"Coalition of the willing" is a phrase that we hear invoked with frequency in world politics. Significantly, it is generally accompanied by claims to moral responsibility. Yet the label commonly used to connote a temporary, purpose-driven, self-selected collection of states sits uneasily alongside these assertions of moral responsibility.This article explores how the informal nature of such associations should inform judgments of moral responsibility. I begin by briefly recounting what I call a model of institutional moral agency in order to explain why it seems theoretically and practically problematic to talk about the moral responsibilities of informal associations. I then focus on coalitions of the willing as prominent, and challenging, examples of such associations, before raising misgivings about my own rather stark distinction if it means that accounts of moral responsibility must be reduced to the members—or potential members—of such coalitions in a way that neglects the moral significance of their acting together. Prompted by these concerns, I explore arguments by Virginia Held and Larry May about moral responsibility in relation to informal associations and identify insights that can be taken from these positions to refine our expectations and evaluations of the actions associated with such collectivities. Finally, I consider the particular implications of these insights in relation to the widely espoused duty to intervene to rescue vulnerable populations.

Der Verfasser gliedert seine Überlegungen in vier Teilen vor. Im ersten Teil wird ein Modell von institutionellem moralischen Handeln entworfen, mit dem die Kriterien bestimmt werden sollen, die ein Kollektiv oder eine Gruppe erfüllen muss, um als moralisches Handlungssubjekt zu gelten. Außerdem werden die Umstände definiert, unter denen man erwarten kann, dass ein institutionelles moralisches Handlungssubjekt bestimmten Pflichten nachkommt. Auf dieser Grundlage wird in einem zweiten Teil geklärt, was unter einer "delinquenten" Institution zu verstehen ist. Im dritten Teil findet sich eine Erörterung der Probleme, die mit dem Versuch verbunden sind, delinquente Institutionen zu bestrafen. Im vierten Teil wird die damit verbundene Gefahr thematisiert, dass unschuldige Individuen zu Schaden kommen, wenn vorgeblich "delinquente" Staaten mittels organisierter Gewalt bestraft werden. In einem Ausblick wird die Frage diskutiert, wie sich die Verantwortung individueller Mitglieder delinquenter Institutionen, die über demokratische Entscheidungsfindungsinstitutionen verfügen, zu derjenigen in Institutionen verhält, in denen solche Strukturen nicht existieren, sowie zur Logik nichtdistributiver Formen der Bestrafung in Reaktion auf delinquente Institutionen im Gegensatz zu distributiven Formen der Bestrafung. (ICE2)