Professor Bruce Green was quoted in a Law360 article discussing the ethical implications of the sanctions that are imposed on Russia as a result of the war in Ukraine.
While economic sanctions are seen as the most effective way short of direct military confrontation to force Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop the invasion, legal experts warn of ethical implications on how the sanctions affect the Russian people.
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Bruce Green, a legal ethics scholar at Fordham University School of Law, said the ethical aspects and underlying political and foreign policy judgments are intertwined — and hard to separate.
“I assume there is no question of legality, that sanctions comply with international law and our own law,” he said. “The question is whether they are useful or whether they cause needless suffering to no good end.”
“Might sanctions, while causing ordinary Russians to suffer, help serve our foreign policy and humanitarian objectives of ending the much greater, and entirely unjustified, suffering that the Russian government, acting through the Russian military, is inflicting on the Ukrainian people? If so, it is hard to say the sanctions are unethical,” Green said. “Or do you know that sanctions are destined to be ineffectual, or that there is a way to achieve the same objective simply by targeting Putin and others in power? If so, you might say that economic sanctions are unethical because they cause suffering to innocent people that serves no good and necessary purpose.”
Ultimately, it is up to elected officials to answer that question, he said.