Justice and Morality

Human Suffering, Natural Law and International Politics

Amanda Russell Beattie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754675228
• eBook ISBN: 9781317109808
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Bridging the contending theories of natural law and international relations, this book proposes a 'relational ontology' as the basis for rethinking our approach to international politics. Amanda Beattie challenges both the conventional interpretation of natural law as necessarily and intractably theological, and the dominant conception of international relations as structurally distinct from the ends of human good, in order to recover the centrality of other-directed agency to the promotion of human development. Offering an important contribution to the study of international political thought, the book contains a number of challenging and controversial ideas which should provoke constructive debate within international relations theory, political theory, and philosophical ethics.

1 International Relations and Modern Institutional Design: Locating the Isolated Individual

DOI: 10.4324/9781315590844-2

Introduction

A contested notion, the idea of modernity invokes a wide variety of interpretations. Nicholas Onuf notes that modernity represents the unfolding of a story of how we, as individuals, have chosen to structure our political communities. The ‘we’ to which he refers must be a Western understanding of the political community and originates primarily in the works of Rene Descartes. For Onuf, Descartes’ works are of chief importance if one is to understand the traditional assumptions of modernity. His works influenced not only politics and philosophy, but dramatically changed the role of morality and religion within the state.¹ In a similar vein, Stephen Toulmin, highlights the varied interpretations which surround the notion of modernity. Toulmin offers an alternative insight to that of Onuf and focuses his energies on the received view of modernity. He challenges this particular account, noting that modernity does not represent one moment of time but instead ought to be understood as a development which took place over a few hundred years and brought with it wide-sweeping social change. Modernity, he argues, represents a response to the malaise which resulted chiefly from the social turmoil and domestic conflict in Britain and Europe. While he is skeptical of the ‘modernity’ label, his work indentifies some overarching themes that are important for this work; in particular, a call for universal order in order to sustain stable political relations. He does however identify some overarching themes with which this work is interested; in particular, a call for universal order in order to sustain stable political relations. He further argues that such themes can be found in the social contract tradition of political philosophy which outlines a particular version of legitimate political authority and an account of responsible citizenship as well.²

1 Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, The Republican Legacy in International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 2 Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990).

Modernity not only brought with it an emerging discourse on authority and citizenship, it also instigated a series of discussions on the following themes: the role of morality in politics as well as religion, and the many ways the political community ought to be structured. What emerges as one further investigates the various accounts of modernity is the desire for a general methodology which favors rational knowledge over reasonableness. Likewise, a clear demarcation between the public and the private emerges The individual, as a political agent, came to be associated chiefly with public engagements of a rational sort. These assumptions subtly informed the nature and function of morality in the community. Public morality was focused on notions of right and wrong and took on the language of jurisprudence. Reasonable moral discourse was accessible to the individual through a process of inner reflection and was limited to the private areas of daily life. It did not feature in public social institutions.

This inward moral turn is discussed in some detail by Richard Rorty. His work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,³ focuses on the moral philosophy of the Enlightenment paying particular attention to the works of Immanuel Kant. He notes how Kant processes the ideas of Descartes in such a way as to turn the desire to know and understand morality into a personal endeavor. This is contrasted with pre-modern and ancient accounts of political society which located the task of knowing and understanding morality as a central task for the community, itself the product of human relationships.⁴ Consequently the discourses of civic friendship and solidarity evident in pre-modern and ancient accounts of political philosophy disappear into the political landscape. These evolving ideas of the individual and his or her interactions within the community bear significant contemporary import. They sustain the philosophical foundation of contemporary cosmopolitan ethics, which it is argued contribute, in no small part, to the isolation and self-interested nature of the contemporary political individual.

3 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980). 4 These themes will be further explored in Chapter 2 when thick and thin accounts of natural law morality are offered to the reader. This exploration reveals how, in contrast to modern social contract accounts of justice and morality, historical authors such as Aristotle and Aquinas offer a vision of the political community focused on human relationships and reveal the primacy of friendship, solidarity and charity in the development of political communities.

Albeit it a contested notion, the themes associated with modernity have had a dramatic influence on ‘the political.’⁵ Natural law scholars such as E.B.F. Midgley⁶ and Jacques Maritain⁷ highlight how the modern turn in political philosophy marginalized the ontology of being that was characteristic of pre-modern philosophical works. Whereas previously the individual was conceptualized as a graceful being sustained by the assumptions of natural dominion and political agency this is no longer the case. The changing ontology of being led to a vision of the domestic community which, as Maritain argues, denied individual autonomy and freedom, thus precluding any vestige of one's telos.⁸ In the same vein, Midgley demonstrates how this non-ontological turn fails to account for any overarching universal account of morality. An investigation into the development of ius gentium throughout history demonstrates a focus on ‘its content’ and not ‘its source,’ thereby denying the possibility of scholars and practitioners to realistically account for a universal moral community and more generally a legitimate global political order.⁹ With this in mind, the second section of this chapter investigates the development of an international discourse of jurisprudence paying particular attention to the idea of ius gentium. This, it is hoped, demonstrates the influence of modernity's assumptions of morality and its extension into the wider sphere of international politics and law.

5 This work focuses primarily on the political interpretations of modernity and not those which choose to highlight the economic changes. Yet it does not deny that they exist. Rather, it recognizes the intrinsic link between the differing accounts as detailed in the works of the authors mentioned below. For example, Hardt and Negri articulate an interpretation of modernity which focuses on the powers of a temporal existence in order to challenge the capitalist structures of the state. The contemporary state, they argue, represents the ends of capitalism and demonstrates how the centralization of power in the hands of the prince sustains the economic incentives for warfare. See for example, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 110). Likewise, C.B. Macpherson notes the detrimental effects of twinning capitalism and the modern state. He associates these relationships with possessive individuals motivated to act for their own self-interested needs which stem from the dominance of scarcity and abundance discourses in political economy. See for example, C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism_ Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). Also, C.B. Macpherson, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). While Macpherson articulates a renewed sense of democracy in order to overcome this problem, Hardt and Negri emphasize the transcendental abilities of individuals as political agents and mount a challenge to the assumptions of modernity. 6 E.B.F. Midgley, The Natural Law Tradition and the Theory of International Relations (London: Elek, 1975). 7 Jacques Maritain, Philosophy and the unity of the sciences, Address by Jacques Maritain at the 27th annual meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, University of Notre Dame, April 7, 173. Transcribed from a written manuscript (Jacques Maritain Center, University of Notre Dame), http://www.2nd/edu/Departments/Maritain/jm209.htm; and, The Range of Reason (New York: Scribner, 174). 8 Jacques Maritain, True Humanism, translated by Lionel Landry (London: Sheed & Ward, 179). 9 For a more detailed account of this claim, see his exchange with Hedley Bull in the British Journal of Politics detailed in Chapter 2.

A.P. d'Entreves further investigates the relationship of law and morality in light of modernity. He argues morality was transformed and came to represent right and wrong and, like the arguments of Maritain, lacked a teleological component. What was natural, he argues, was to be controlled, and if found uncontrollable, it was situated outside the accepted boundaries of politics. The removal of ‘the natural,’ he argues, facilitated a subjective account of the world and the individual's place within it.¹⁰ These ideas are similarly articulated by John MacMurray, a theologian, albeit not of a natural law persuasion.¹¹ He, like d’Entreves, locates what he calls a pragmatic morality arising in the works of many modern political philosophers and, in particular, Hobbes. His focus is on the place of the individual within the community and his writings document the demise of reasonableness, the rise of the technologically rational state and the individual therein. His writings describe what many scholars of international politics have sought to understand—the tragedy of the human condition. This chapter builds on this idea of tragedy which is itself related to the vulnerabilities of the human condition. It highlights, in the first section, how the modern social contract tradition reflects one response to this problem. Moving onto the international influence of these ideas, this chapter concludes with an examination of the works of the tragic realists, both historical and contemporary, and describes the tragic vision of international politics. What ought to emerge from this descriptive account is an awareness of the isolation and self-interested account of the individual and its associated account of ‘being political.’

10 A.P. d’Entreves, The case for natural law re-examined, Natural Law Forum, 5 (1956), 5–52; and, Natural Law: An Introduction to Legal Philosophy (London: Hutchinson House, 1951). This is also documented by John F. Wippel, Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas: Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, Volume 10 (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1984). 11 John MacMurray, The Form of the Personal, Vol. 1. The Self as Agent; being the Gifford lectures delivered in the University of Glasgow in 1953 (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1953); as well as, John MacMurray, The Form of the Personal, Vol. 2. Persons in relation; being the Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of Glasgow in 1954 (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1961).

As a whole, the assumptions which are represented in the various accounts of modernity provide a descriptive account of similarly constituted individuals living an isolated existence in the community. When this isolation is examined alongside the morality of right and wrong it further establishes the self-interested existence of the individual. It reveals the inevitability of the amoral community and precludes any desire on the part of the individual to take an active interest in the well-being and development of another. It is this depiction of the individual which, when placed alongside the accounts of human suffering offered in the Introduction, further challenges any account of institutional design seeking to achieve a measure of equality and justice in the theater of international politics. This chapter seeks to inform the reader as to how these assumptions came to dominate ‘the political’ and how this account has also informed international politics. This work acknowledges the problems associated with the term ‘modernity’ and modern political thought; however, it accepts certain central themes within the authors’ works investigated in this chapter. These themes provide a point of origin for the ensuing critique of the political and social structures which shape the contemporary human experience. What ought to become increasingly clear as the chapter concludes is that, in order to begin to understand the phenomenon of human suffering in a more appropriate manner, one needs to develop a relational account of being, something that is missing, yet hinted at in the discourses of second generation cosmopolitan scholars who articulate an embedded cosmopolitanism yet fail to provide a foundational account of their relational nature.

Enlightenment Political Philosophy

As the introduction to this chapter has shown, there are a variety of alternative interpretations of modernity or, sometimes, the Enlightenment. Indeed the very notion of ‘modern’ political philosophy is a decidedly Western idea limited to the political philosophies of Great Britain, continental Europe and some areas of the Americas. That being said, one can draw a few thematic similarities in and amongst all of these interpretations: a universal human nature, an emphasis on scientific, rational thought, and the desire for one overarching account of political order. In what follows, three authors are examined: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau. These theorists have not been chosen at random. Their works reflect, in different ways, the ideas examined by scholars of modernity. Each in their own way reflects on a key problem of contemporary international relations—legitimate political authority. Theirs was a domestic interpretation of political order but their theories, it is argued, have influenced the central ideas of international politics. It is these origins which go some way to explain the current isolation of the individual as a political subject. An exegesis of their ideas begins to explain more fully the manner in which contemporary politics remains focused on the idea of stability as a political goal and the means used to achieve it.

Thomas Hobbes

The works of Thomas Hobbes represent a reaction to the violence of the English Civil Wars.¹² He bore witness to the atrocities of this time period and sought to limit the possibility of political violence. He believed that the potential for violence rested on the subjective world views of men which, owing to a lack of complete knowledge about the natural world, were open to interpretation and, therefore, disagreement.¹³ Consequently, he articulated a negative view of human nature which influenced his understanding of religion and the need for political authority coalescing in the idea of the Leviathan as the ultimate form of political authority.

12 A point well documented in Toulmin, 1990. 13 This point is highlighted in Richard Tuck, Introduction, in Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, revised student edn, Richard Tuck, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 293).

If religion was the primary quarrel among men then it ought, Hobbes supposed, to be eliminated from the practice of politics. In order ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction Realizing the Human Experience: Vulnerability and Human Suffering
• 1 International Relations and Modern Institutional Design: Locating the Isolated Individual
• 2 The Morality of Natural Law and International Relations: Establishing a Tradition of Influence
• 3 Thomas Aquinas and the Morality of Natural Law
• 4 A Relational Account of ‘the Political’ Agency, Community and Loving Reasonableness
• 5 The Morality of Natural Law and International Politics: Unbounded Moral Communities and Collective Moral Agency
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index