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Societies of the East are often contrasted with those of the West in their stances toward technology. This paper explores these perceived differences in the context of international ethics guidance for artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Japan serves as an example of the East, while Europe and North America serve as examples of the West. The paper’s principal aim is to demonstrate that Western values predominate in international ethics guidance and that Japanese values serve as a much-needed corrective. We recommend a hybrid approach that is more inclusive and truly ‘international’. Following an introduction, the paper examines distinct stances toward robots that emerged in the West and Japan, respectively, during the aftermath of the Second World War, reflecting history and popular culture, socio-economic conditions, and religious worldviews. It shows how international ethics guidelines reflect these disparate stances, drawing on a 2019 scoping review that examined 84 international AI ethics documents. These documents are heavily skewed toward precautionary values associated with the West and cite the optimistic values associated with Japan less frequently. Drawing insights from Japan’s so-called ‘moonshot goals’, the paper fleshes out Japanese values in greater detail and shows how to incorporate them more effectively in international ethics guidelines for AI and robotics.

The purpose of the article is to conceptualize economic sanctions in terms of international power politics. Legal and economic literature study sanctions by means of legal norms analysis and their impact on economies, companies and corporations. However, this approach misses a political component, specially the one of coercion to comply with international norms or requirements of sanctions’ initiators. Usually sanctions are an instrument of economically advanced states vis a vis developing countries with fragile or vulnerable economy. The very essence of sanctions is determined by the asymmetry of international system in terms of economic capabilities. Such an asymmetry fuels a debate between those who consider sanctions as an effective and legitimate instrument (US, EU and other developed states) and those who believe that only the UN Security Council can be a legal source of sanctions, while others are illegal (supported by Russia, China and several dozens of developing countries). This debate reflects a cleavage on a more fundamental problem – the one of sovereignty and the right to interfere into sovereign affairs of states. Recognition of sanctions’ legitimacy would mean the recognition of the right to interfere into sovereign affairs of the target-states beyond the UN Charter. The article provides a reflection of this debate, stressing on different interpretations of the concept of sanctions.The article makes a distinction between the concept of sanctions and the concept of trade wars. Such disengagement is critically important for understanding sanctions as a political concept. If trade wars are conducted to maximize profits, economic sanctions are used to achieve political goals. This determines the fundamental difference in the relations between business and government: in the case of trade wars, business is the main lobbyist for decisions of state bodies, in case of sanctions, the government is the initiator, and business is forced to adapt to the current situation. In the first case, business acts as a subject, in the second - as an object.

The subject of this paper is the stand taken by the European Union towards the complex and decades-long Kosovo issue viewed from an international ethical perspective. The author is trying to prove that the issue, such as it is, represents a continuity of an inconsistent attitude of most European states towards the Serbian state territorial issue, which attitude has been persisting for two decades. The stand taken by the author is that by acquiescing to the formation and stabilization of a newly-created state in the Serbian territory, the European Union has actually assumed the role of a medium of overseas attempts at attaining as painlessly as possible the goal of the secession of Kosovo, which territory has been proclaimed of special American national interest and hence, of a legitimate influence. During the process, it was also the unreserved choice of Serbia for a 'European future' after October 5, 2000 that was taken into account. In the conclusion of this paper, the author points to possible consequences that the method of resolving this important state territorial issue could have on the stability of the Western Balkans in near or remote future.

The paper focuses on the ethical aspects of NATO aggression (or so-called “humanitarian intervention”), exerted against the FRY, actually Serbia, in the period from March to June 1999. The paper has been conceived as a critical dialogue with Jürgen Habermas, or rather the positions presented by him in a text entitled “Bestialität und Humanität: Eine Krieg an der Grenze zwischen Recht und Moral”. Following a short presentation of Habermas’s point of view, in the introduction to her paper the author discusses the moral implications of, as he points out, “the surgical precision of the air-strikes, as well as the programmatic sparing of the civilian population”, which are, according to him, the characteristics of this aggression with “a highly legitimating effect”. She then focuses on the key and declaratively moral argument that served to justify the aggression - the protection of human rights of Kosmet Albanians and the prevention of the humanitarian catastrophe they had been allegedly exposed to. After analyzing this argument thoroughly, in several steps, the author concludes that the aggression was not, as Habermas claimed, a “war on the border between law and morality”, but that it was actually beyond the borders of both law and morality and was deeply situated into a domain of interest-driven armed acts of the US foreign policy.