Refusing an Ethical Approach to World Politics in Favour of Political Ethics

Abstract

Recent efforts to identify and challenge the universalist ethics inherent to the historical conventions of International Relations are to be applauded. Drawing largely from poststructuralism and phenomenology, several theorists have productively shown how traditional approaches committed to moral and rational autonomy may and ought to be interrupted with attention to questions of difference, heterogeneity and social interrelation. As exemplified most pronouncedly in the works of David Campbell, though, such attempts to rethink ethics in international affairs tend generally to also re-introduce an ethical totality. Missing from these otherwise provocative interventions is sufficient recognition that the moral universe projected in traditional International Relations theory is inherent to any view towards the international, even when reinscribed as world politics or global politics. Concern for the international, read in any manner, and a total ethics are mutually constitutive. Critical evaluation of these alternative ethical approaches therefore demonstrates that the moral dogma associated with International Relations may be overcome only insofar as the international itself is quit as an organizing concept. Moreover, the politics of difference advocated in these critical interventions may be served only once ethics itself is renounced as an appropriate entry point to the political.