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Middle-Ground Ethics: Can One Be Politically Realistic Without Being a Political Realist?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2011

Terry Nardin
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Extract

Thinking about international affairs has oscillated between idealism and realism throughout the modern period. Moralists continue to search for a way to combine what is reasonable in each in an ethically defensible middle between those extremes. Such efforts often yield a soft version of political realism: an ethics of compromise between moral ideals and real-world interests. But this resolution fails to escape an awkward dichotomy between “morality” and “reality,” as if moral considerations were not real and interests never illusory. It also rests on a simplistic conception of politics. Politics is distinguished from other activities in being concerned with obligations prescribed and enforced within a legal order, and those who make political decisions cannot ignore these obligations. Political decision-making must therefore take account of law, which is distinct from both morality and interest. Law may have its ultimate justification in moral principle, but it provides reasons for acting that are distinct from moral reasons. This is true of law at any level, including international law. Law also has material as well as normative force as part of the world in which decisions are made. A more nuanced middle-ground ethics, then, would take account of law as making demands of its own. If we bring law into the picture, we discover limits to action that are grounded on neither morality nor interest.

Type
Essays
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , Spring 2011 , pp. 7 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2011

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References

NOTES

1 Cochran, Molly, “Charting the Ethics of the English School: What ‘Good’ Is There in a Middle-Ground Ethics?” International Studies Quarterly 53 (2009), p. 204CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 This resolution—moral up to a point and realist beyond that point—is a common element in just war theories, as illustrated by Michael Walzer's argument for violating the laws of war in emergencies in Just and Unjust Wars, 4th ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2006), pp. 251–68Google Scholar.

3 Nardin, Terry, Law, Morality, and the Relations of States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 49–68Google Scholar.

4 I sketch such a theory in Nardin, Terry, “International Political Theory and the Question of Justice,” International Affairs 82 (2006), pp. 449–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Nardin, Terry, “Justice and Coercion”, in Bellamy, Alex J., ed., International Society and Its Critics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 247–63Google Scholar.

5 See, for example, Honig, Bonnie, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Williams, Bernard, In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and Geuss, Raymond, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Galston, William A. provides an overview in “Realism in Political Theory,” European Journal of Political Philosophy 9 (2010), pp. 385–411Google Scholar.

6 Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed, p. 12.

7 Weber, Max, “Politics as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, Owen, David and Strong, Tracy, eds. (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006), pp. 80–84.Google Scholar Weber's dichotomy does not exhaust the alternatives: one could reject an ethic of responsibility without embracing an ethic of conviction, holding instead that there is no moral objection to pursuing desired ends and therefore to considering consequences, if it can be done by morally permissible means.

8 Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics, pp. 25, 30, 31. Geuss argues, as did Machiavelli (The Prince, chap. 25), that to decide is to grasp opportunities as they present themselves, which means that fortune is as important as skill.

9 Geuss, Raymond, “Moralism and Realpolitik,” in Politics and the Imagination (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 38–40.Google Scholar That moral beliefs are part of reality, constitutive of and not external to interests and identity, is a “constructivist” point familiar to moralists since antiquity.

10 I briefly consider the implications of a theory of justice as justifiable coercion for such questions as unequal economic exchanges and poverty, which are major subjects in the current global justice literature, in the papers mentioned in note 4.

11 Elements of such an argument can be found in the writings of many liberal international theorists, including those who defend a broad definition of humanitarian intervention, such as Tesón, Fernando A., “Ending Tyranny in Iraq”, Ethics & International Affairs 19 (2005), pp. 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar, or who favor a “liberal-democratic intervention regime” as an alternative to the UN Security Council, such as Buchanan, Allen, Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 452Google Scholar.

12 Cohen, Jean L., “Rethinking Human Rights, Democracy, and Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization,” Political Theory 36 (2008), p. 599CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. x, xi.