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WHAT'S MORALITY GOT TO DO WITH IT? MAKING THE RIGHT DISTINCTIONS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2004

Jean Bethke Elshtain
Jean Bethke Elshtain
Affiliation:
Social and Political Ethics, University of Chicago
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Extract

I will be arguing against a school of thought and an epistemology. The school of thought is ‘scientific neorealism’, as it is called in the study of international relations. This perspective is shaped by the insistence that ethics and international politics have nothing to do with one another, save insofar as morality is brought in as window dressing in order to disguise what is really going on: the clash of narrowly self-interested powers. The world of international relations is construed as a zone of self-help in a Hobbesian clash of a war of all against all. For more than twenty-five years now, I have argued that, to the contrary, ethics does not stop at the water's edge and morality is not silent during war.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , January 2004 , pp. 1 - 13
Copyright
© 2004 Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation

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