An argument for ethical theory
If people aren’t capable of leading ethical lives, why do we need ethics?
I took a course on global distributive justice this past spring. A fairly recent field of inquiry, global distributive justice seeks to articulate the moral obligations that exist in international relations. This is a noticeable departure from traditional IR theory, which heavily relies on a model of self-interested states in a state of nature. Though it’s becoming increasingly clear that our world is one of interdependence, nations nonetheless continue to take decidedly selfish actions that are more in line with a view of IR as a zero-sum game.
Perhaps that’s the way IR is. Or more broadly speaking, perhaps people are inherently incapable of looking beyond themselves and considering possible “moral obligations” to fellow human beings living halfway across the world, or even halfway across the city. If such is the case, it would seem that theoretical discussions of justice are fairly meaningless.
This common critique, that human passions are problematic and threaten to derail proper behavior, is precisely one of the best reasons why we need theory. Good theory will offer compelling arguments for why certain conduct is right. As Martha Nussbaum describes, “people are shaky about the good and need the systematicity and consistency of theory to steady them against the seductions of the bad.”1
John Rawls thought of his work in a similar vein. In The Law of Peoples, Rawls describes his goal of laying out a realistic utopia: a theory of international relations that recognized practical limitations, like the presence of states2, while maintaining high standards for justice. To Rawls, theory serves as a guide for us to aspire to.
Though this is a fairly basic argument, this kind of meta discussion has been around for hundreds of years. One could certainly continue pushing the idea that humans are hopeless, amoral beings and theory really is a waste of time. In that case, Kant has a reply:
“If justice perishes, then it is no longer worthwhile for men to live upon the earth.” 3
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Nussbaum, “Why Practice Needs Ethical Theory: Particularism, Principle, and Bad Behavior.” This article does a pretty good job responding to other, more compelling critiques of theory. Two points that I liked in particular: ethical theory can and does shape laws and institutions (Nussbaum notes the importance of human rights theory in helping generate the modern movement for human rights, or feminist theory in destroying the “conceptual impossibility” of marital rape and transforming legal theory), and theory uniquely uses a form of “estrangement” or “defamiliarization” that allows us to examine the logic of our intuition in unfamiliar territory.↩
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Rawls actually discusses peoples and not states; this is important to his theory but not important to elaborate here. His statist approach surprised a lot of his cosmopolitan colleagues, who expected him to merely extend the original position globally.↩
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Kant, Rechtslehre, in Remark E following ยง49, Ak:VI:332↩