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A HISTORY OF ETHICS IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Kimberly Hutchings
Introduction
The term ‘ethics’ refers to practices and ideas relating to issues of what is right or wrong, legitimate or illegitimate, just or unjust to do, as well as a reflection on those practices and ideas. It is often used synonymously with ‘morality’ and overlaps with the broad category of the ‘normative’, encompassing not only the rights and wrongs of interactions between individuals and collectives but also the structures that enable and constrain action. If we think of the term ‘international relations’ as referring to interactions between various sorts of actors from distinct political or cultural communities, then it seems reasonable to assume that ethics in international relations is coextensive with international relations itself. In the same way that ethical values, norms, and conventions are embedded within all human communities, so they are embedded in relations to outsiders, whether as guests to be welcomed, traders to be bargained with, barbarians to be despised, or enemies to be defeated. How then do we set about writing a history of ethics in international relations? If history is a comprehensive account of the past of a particular phenomenon, then a full history of ethics in international relations would require encyclopaedic knowledge of world history, languages, and archaeology and is far beyond my scope as a scholar. But of course, no history is of this kind; history is always a selective interpretation of the past in the light of the present, the availability of evidence, the expertise and capacities of the historian. What follows, therefore, is a, not the, history of ethics in international relations.
This chapter examines the history of ethics as it has been identified as relevant to the discipline of international relations (IR) during the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Part of this process has been the setting up of canonical reference points for contemporary debate, so we will begin with a brief account of how classical sources have been treated as historical precursors of contemporary thinking on international ethics. We will then move on to consider the history of ethics in the study of international relations in three parts, which reflect standard periodisation in the history of the discipline. First, we will examine the place of ethics in IR from the early twentieth century to World War Two (WW2). Second, we will then look at international ethics in the Cold War period. Third, we will outline how ethics has become institutionalised as a growing subfield in IR in the post-Cold War period.
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The canon of ethics in international relations
There are standard histories of ethics in philosophy and political theory that identify canonical thinkers and perspectives, usually traced from the ancient Greeks to twentieth-century European thought.1 Scholars working specifically in international ethics have drawn on these histories selectively in constructing their own canon. Edward Keene warns against the tendency within IR to construct ‘traditions’ that impose a false historical unity on international thought across time. Keene argues that such work may not only distort the meaning of past ideas but may also mean that we miss the key international concerns of thinkers, whether in ancient Greece or nineteenth-century Europe.2 Nevertheless, it is common for scholars in international ethics to invoke an earlier history of ethical thought that can directly or indirectly contribute to contemporary international ethics. Sometimes this is done through the idea of distinct traditions that develop over time; at other times, historical thinkers are treated much more abstractly as sources of ideas that we can use, as if they were our contemporary interlocutors. We can see this in metatheoretical debates about approaches to thinking about international ethics as well as in substantive areas of concern such as the ethics of war and the ethics of cross-border distributive justice.
Some histories of international relations and of its discipline stress a sceptical relation between the practices of international relations and ethics, and argue that what distinguishes international relations is the overarching importance of struggles for power, regardless of ethical values (see below). However, recent work in IR suggests that this is an oversimplification, even when it comes to canonical figures within realism such as Thucydides (460/55–411/400 BCE), Machiavelli (1469–1527), or Hobbes (1588–1679). Even where the focus is on flaws in human nature and the impossibility of eradicating war and conflict, there are still ethical values and commitments assumed and pursued in these thinkers’ arguments, and contemporary scholars have developed readings of classical realism as a fundamentally ethical enterprise.3 Having rejected the idea that international relations are inherently amoral, one influential way in which the history of approaches to international ethics has been told has been that we can trace back two broad tendencies in international ethical thinking: universalism and contextualism. Ancient Greek and Roman Stoicism has been identified as the origin of universalist ethical thinking. Stoics identified themselves as citizens of the world, rather than of the state, and did not attach ethical relevance to specific cultural/political identities or loyalties. They endorsed the idea that ethical values and principles were universal in scope across humankind. Later Christian and then Enlightenment thinking has been argued to carry through this legacy of universalism, culminating in the cosmopolitan ethical and political theory of Kant (1724–1804), which is identified as linking directly to contemporary cosmopolitan theorisations of global justice, democracy, and human rights. In parallel, Aristotelian (384–322 BCE) ethical thinking, with its emphasis on practical reason and the relation of ethical values to the role played in Greek society has been seen as the origin of contextual approaches to international ethics, in which ethical judgement is assumed to be relative to some aspect of context, whether state, culture, or role. This Aristotelian legacy has been seen as being carried through the incorporation of Aristotle into scholastic thought and culminating in the contextualist ethics of Hegel (1730–1831), which is identified as linking directly to contemporary contractualist and communitarian approaches to global justice, democracy, and human rights. But this is not the only way in which the history of approaches to international ethical thinking have been told. In some cases, the standard categories of international theory, such as realism, liberalism, Marxism, or constructivism, are used; others draw on the distinctions of philosophical ethics, using terms such as ‘deontological’, ‘contractualist’, ‘utilitarian’, or some mixture of the above.4 In all cases, however, what is set up is an historical connection between the ideas (as interpreted by contemporary scholars) of classical thinkers and modes of ethical reasoning that people are using in arguments today.
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In the case of the ethics of war, theorists routinely situate their arguments in relation to a tradition of just war traced back to ancient times. The most significant canonical reference points in the predominant version of the history of just war thinking are Roman law, Christian philosophy, notably the thinkers Augustine (354–430) and Aquinas (1225–1274), and scholars of international law such as Grotius (1583–1645) and Vattel (1714–1767). The history of just war thinking is told as the development of a set of ethical constraints on starting wars (ad bellum) and on conduct within war (in bello). Within this history of ethics in international relations, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tend to figure as a period in which the anarchic state system took hold and ad bellum ethical constraints on war were minimised, with just war thinking going into decline until revived by debates following WW2. Debates around international distributive justice tend not to claim such a longstanding genealogy. In their case, it is canonical thinkers from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries in Europe who are claimed as progenitors. In particular, Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) are cited as sources of opposing positions when it comes to the question of what rich states owe to poor states, and whether, if they exist at all, these obligations should be seen as humanitarian obligations or duties of justice.5 Here, rather than a history of different stages in ethical thinking, we find a history of ongoing opposition between universal and contextual positions.
Whatever the problems inherent in claiming continuity across the history of ethical ideas, predominant histories of ethical thought about international relations testify to two things. First, they demonstrate that surviving texts and debates over the interpretation of classical thinkers are highly significant resources for contemporary scholars. These texts and interpretations provide common discursive reference points and tools through which ongoing ethical questions about war, distributive justice, migration, development, environmental issues, and so on can be framed and addressed. Second, they show that the canonical history of ethics in international thought is a highly selective one. This is pretty much an exclusively Graeco-Roman, Judaeo-Christian, and European history. Moreover, it is one that has focused on only certain elements and dimensions even of this history. For example, students are commonly taught that there is a pathway connecting classical just war thinking in Augustine or Grotius about just cause or the immunity of innocents to contemporary international law and notions of human rights. But their attention is less often drawn to pathways that connect Augustine’s or Grotius’s claims to the ethical valorisation of civilisational or gendered hierarchies in warfare in the contemporary world.6 This is something that has begun to change over the past decade, as historians of international ethical thought have started to consider the work of classical thinkers more holistically and contextually.7 At the same time, alternative standpoints in world history have been introduced as resources for contemporary ethical thought, including canonical figures and ideas from other religious and cultural traditions.8 And ...
