Mervyn Frost

Tragedy, Ethics and International Relations

This article considers the charge that scholars in the field of ethics in international relations have been remiss in not paying attention to tragedy in international affairs. The classical tragedies in drama had political content and were fundamentally concerned with ethical issues. Prima facie it would seem that tragedy would be pertinent to scholars researching international ethics. The case is made that the notion of tragedy is useful in normative international relations theory as it enables us to see ethical dilemmas clearly and to consider possible transformations of our international practices.

A turn not taken: Ethics in IR at the millenium

In everyday life we often engage in ethical argument about what ought to be done in international affairs; in a rough and ready fashion we engage in normative theory. It is odd then to find that for most of its history, scholars in the discipline of International Relations (IR) have seldom explicitly engaged in this kind of theorizing. The reasons for their avoiding it are now well known. Certain developments in the discipline over the past few decades, however, suggest that the discipline might now have taken the normative turn. But has it?

Two conceptions of international practice: Aristotelian praxis or Wittgensteinian language-games ?

Scholars from the recent ‘practice turn’ in International Relations have urged us to rethink the international realm in terms of practices. The principal exponents of the turn, Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot, have refurbished Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice to produce their own account of international practices. In a review of the practice turn, Chris Brown has argued that Bourdieu’s notion of practice shares basic affinities with Aristotle’s concept of praxis. While practice turn scholars may not adhere to a rigid canon of thought, they seem to share an Aristotelian conception of praxis. This reading of the turn to practice, though plausible, captures one part of the story. The central thesis of the present article is that instead of one there are two, distinctive conceptions of practice – Aristotelian and Wittgensteinian – and therefore two distinctive ways in which the character of international practices might be understood. More concretely, the aim is to show that the conception of international practices, rooted in Wittgenstein’s view of practices as language-games, can be particularly illuminating to all those who seek to understand international relations.

Constitutive Theory and Moral Accountability: Individuals, Institutions, and Dispersed Practices

In this chapter I shall argue that the most interesting and important ethical judgements are not those upon the conduct of either individuals or institutions, but are on the ethical forms of the practices within which both individuals and multi-person actors are constituted as actors of a certain kind.

THE DELINQUENCY OF ANARCHICAL SOCIETIES: TRANSFORMATION, NOT PUNISHMENT; RESTYLING, NOT REHABILITATION

This article explores the ways in which we hold participants in dispersed practices to ethical account for the accumulated consequences of their individual actions over time. This ‘holding to account’ is quite different to that found within centralised practices such as a state or a corporation. In the case of a state, for example, we hold presidents, prime ministers (and others) to account in terms of well understood norms of ethical behaviour internal to the practice. For example, we might accuse them of corruption. In such cases an actor is criticised for failing to adhere to a well understood ethical norm. In dispersed practices, the holding to account is different. Here the allegation is that the participants, through adhering to the ethical norms inherent in the practice, are collectively bringing about an unethical result. Through their doing the ethically right thing, they are bringing about a wrong. Marxs analysis of capitalism can be understood in this way. In the normal day to day activity in a capitalist system, individual buyers and sellers are not doing anything ethically wrong, but the accumulated outcome of their individual actions is ethically (on Marxs analysis) unacceptable. The wrongdoing arises from a failure to understand the structural consequences of the operation of the practice over time. It also arises from a failure to understand and act on the political possibilities of transformation that exist within the practices in question.

Ethics and Global Governance: The Primacy of Constitutional Ethics

Global governance is a vague phrase generally taken to refer to the means by which, as one author puts it, a ‘nobody-in-charge world’ is managed.1 Governance, roughly speaking, is an activity that falls short of government (the latter presupposes the existence of a determinate authority with a clear cut jurisdiction, which the former does not) and is often understood as ‘the guidance and harmonisation of certain activities’ in the global arena.2 Structures of global governance emerge as a response to globalisation. As globalisation gathers pace the need for new forms of guidance and harmonisation will grow and we can expect that new forms of global governance will be created.

Can Dispersed Practices Be Held Ethically Accountable

This article offers a positive answer to: can dispersed practices, such as global civil society and the society of democratic states, be held ethically accountable? To clarify this kind of ethical judgement, a contrast is made between the ways we hold individuals ethically accountable within social practices, awarding praise/blame to individuals (individual persons or collective actors such as states), and the way in which we deploy critical theories to hold a dispersed practice ethically responsible for certain consequences flowing from its operation. Such judgements are ironic given that within such practices individual actors are not, from an ethical point of view, doing wrong. The kind of ethical criticism made possible by critical theory in general, and constitutive theory in particular, is a necessary precursor to many political campaigns aimed at transforming the global dispersed social practices within which we are constituted as who we are.

Some Thoughts on Richard Ned Lebow’s The Politics and Ethics of Identity

It has been a singular pleasure having Ned Lebow as a colleague here in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London. His extraordinarily wide range of academic interests and his encyclopedic knowledge of political thought and political thinkers, from the classical Greeks to the present day, is enriching for all of us in the department, staff and students alike.

Middle-Ground Ethics and Human Rights in International Relations

What is the discussion about middle-ground ethics (MGE) all about? How is it important for those who study international relations? Few would be interested in ‘far-out ethics’ or ‘foreground ethics’. What of interest is caught by the phrase ‘middle-ground ethics’? The answer I would suggest is that this phrase, like the phrases ‘communitarian ethics’, ‘Kantian ethics’, ‘utilitarian approaches to ethics’, and ‘deontological ethics’, can be used to refer to a well-known set of problems in the field of international ethics together with a well-known body of ongoing discussions directed toward seeking answers to the problems posed. It refers, we might say, to a problematique, to an ongoing set of ethical discussions. In the first part of this chapter, I wish briefly to set out the core features of what I see as the MGE problem. In the second part of the chapter, I shall offer a criticism of one constitutive feature of the discussion about MGE. I shall argue that taking note of this criticism is important for anyone concerned to understand the human rights discourse in contemporary international relations.

The Ethical Imperatives of Foreign and Defence Policy

In this article I seek to set out the bare bones of an argument to show how, as participants in the practices of international relations, we cannot but be involved in making decisions about ethical matters. This is true in foreign policymaking generally and also in the making of defence policy. It applies when thinking about strategy and when thinking about tactical issues. In what follows I shall also give a brief outline of the kind of ethical engagements that are called for in these fields of action.Doing these things in a comprehensive way would require book length treatment. In order to condense the argument here I shall produce a number of propositions, each of which I shall defend briefly.