The Focus14 Aug 2025

💥 Can high-tech warfare be ethical — or does it just make war endless?

Yale professor Samuel Moyn joins us to explore how drones, AI, and precision strikes have transformed modern conflict. Based on his book Humane, this conversation asks whether efforts to make war more “humane” have sidelined the goal of peace itself.

Show Notes:
Connect with Sam
Yale: https://law.yale.edu/samuel-moyn Website: https://campuspress.yale.edu/samuelmoyn/
Books by Sam:🆕 Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (2023)

A critique of Cold War-era liberal thinkers who, in Moyn’s view, stripped liberalism of its utopian and transformative aspirations — leading to the more constrained version we see today.

🧠 Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (2021)

Explores how efforts to humanize war — through legal and technological means — have helped make war more acceptable and therefore unending.

📉 Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018)

Argues that modern human rights discourse has focused on minimum protections rather than addressing global inequality and distributive justice.

Articles by Sam:
Casus Belli, Harper’s Magazine, August 2025.
America is over Neo-Liberalism & Neo-Conservatism - Trump is not, The Guardian, July 2025.
The United States and the Human Rights Presidency, June 2025.

Previous Episode with Sam:
https://sageinternational.com.au/the-focus/humane-war-making-a-better-world/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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