ABSTRACT
The contemporary field of international ethics is preceded of course by a long history of moral and political thought, which explores the many ethical and philosophical issues arising from the attempt to sort out how people should live their lives in a reflective and responsible way. Central to this ongoing argument is recognition of our social embeddedness, the fact that we are inescapably related to others and therefore that our moral beliefs and political decisions impact upon the lives and decisions of others. These basic features remain an essential part of the recent literature on ethics and international relations. The expression ‘international ethics’ did not come into general use until relatively late in the twentieth century, however, when it became clear that the sterile standoff of the first ‘great debate’ in IR – the intellectual struggle between so-called realists and idealists in the 1920s and 1930s over the nature of international politics and thus over the role of ethical principles therein – was not sufficient to meet the normative challenges confronting the world after the Second World War.1 Strictly speaking, it was also not possible to
refer in a formal sense to a subject called ‘ethics and international relations’ prior to the modern formation of an international system composed of sovereign states. Clearly the advent of the international system had led to more specialized and novel reflection upon the particular moral considerations unique to a world organized around nation-states. Nonetheless, we can find in the history of moral and political theory many important examples of normative thinking about the types of issues that permeate contemporary international affairs. In other words, thinking about the ethics of politics – and the politics of ethics – has been a characteristic feature of the negotiation of political life in pre-national as well as international contexts, and will continue to be so in the possibly post-national era that some glimpse on our own historical horizon.
