2 - The Making of Altruism in International Law

Summary

This chapter considers how certain values may come to shape the law. It explores the institutions, processes and actors that facilitate the emergence of altruistically oriented legal norms. In doing so, the link between ideology and law will become more apparent. The evolution in international law presented in this book is the product of an underlying cosmopolitan altruistic ideology which coexists with a statist individualistic ideology that shape the content of legal rules. A legal system can be influenced by one or more philosophical ideologies, and the international legal system has been and continues to be shaped by different variations of these two major ideologies. As such, cosmopolitan altruism and statist individualism have a dialectic existence in the formation of law and its interpretation. Despite the fundamental differences in the nature and effect of these ideologies, they are capable of having simultaneous normative influence on the behaviour of states and the formation of international law.