In this study of an issue that has moved to the forefront of international relations, Luigi Bonanate challenges the realist argument that relations between states are essentially amoral and governed exclusively by considerations of power and self-interest. He argues instead for the possibility of a moral theory of international life and, in doing so, lays a foundation for making moral assessments of international politics.

The book opens with a discussion of different methods and approaches employed to study the subject, including analytical political theory, post-structuralism and critical theory. It then surveys some of the most prominent perspectives on global ethics, including cosmopolitanism, communitarianism of various kinds, theories of international society, realism, postcolonialism, feminism, and green political thought. Part III examines a variety of more specific issues, including immigration, democracy, human rights, the just war tradition and its critics, international law, and global poverty and inequality. -- Publisher description.

This collection of some of the best contemporary scholarship in ethics and international affairs explores the connection between moral traditions and decision making during and after the Cold War. Each author relates the timeless insights of philosophy and our collective historical experience to the hard choices of our own age. This volume should be of special interest to those working and teaching in international relations, diplomatic history, foreign policy, applied ethics, and related fields.

This book is designed to introduce readers to a representative range of work which raises what should be regarded as pressing ethical issues in the context of international politics. Although by no means comprehensive in coverage of the possible questions that could be appropriately asked, the chapters convey a sense of how variegated is the field of ethical inquiry in the global realm. Some of the issues are familiar to students of international relations, some of them less so. What they all show, however, is that the academic discipline of international relations has much to learn and benefit from how such problems may be addressed using techniques and approaches that have, until recently, been rather more exclusively restricted to domestic -- nation-statist -- political theory...(From the Introduction) Contents: Introduction: Topics in International Political Theory; Who Should Pay (And How Much) for Realising Human Rights?; World Citizenship and The Ethics of Individual Responsibility; World Hunger, Moral Theory, and Radical Rawlsianism; Kids 'R' Us? Children as Political Bodies; Dealing with the Past: Forgiveness and the Reconstruction of Memory in Divided Societies; Outsour

Recovering from its initial shock and resulting total absorption in the Watergate political scandal, the United States in the mid-1970s began to address itself to the moral implications of its politics, both national and international. The national concern with political values provided the 1976 presidential and congressional elections with perhaps the single most-discussed issue and continues to influence a generally more scrutinizing approach toward national policy. Are we using the best system of values to examine the nation's political problems? Must we forsake idealism for realism? These are two questions that Kenneth W. Thompson systematically discusses in his penetrating examination of the role that values play in America's political relations with the other nations of the world.In an effort to establish a common denominator for solving global problems, Thompson provides three major perspectives for policy: morality (what is right), power (what gains the most), and functionalism (what works the best to solve the problem), and he demonstrates the necessity for all three. As vice-president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Thompson was in charge of international cooperation in agriculture, education, and health in less-developed countries. In this position he gained firsthand knowledge of functionalism, which, he points out, can be practiced within the framework of power and ethics.Thompson says the issue of power -- particularly the United States' power -- in the coming century demands that nations act in a moral and rational manner. He reminds us that although experience is a competent guide, there is also much to be learned from the change that so dramatically confronts society as it moves into a world of interdependence.

This ground-breaking volume considers the ethical aspects of foreign policy change through five interrelated dimensions: conceptual, security, economic, normative and diplomatic. An impressive group of international scholars and practitioners makes it ideally suited to courses on international relations, security studies, ethics and human rights, philosophy, media studies and international law.

Questioning many of the traditional assumptions found in discussions of ethics in international relations, Warner introduces a new way of thinking about moral responsibility and invites reflection on the nature of communities and states.

Arguing for a middle ground between idealism and realism, this book considers the most pressing ethical and moral issues in contemporary international politics, including intervention, human rights and aid, and sets about reasoning how to resolve them in politically realistic ways.

The essays in this volume discuss and assess the philosophies and writings of Professor David Vital. They aim to develop his work within modern diplomacy, issues relating to modern Jewish history, and within the State of Israel and its conduct of foreign relations.

While the relevance of ontological commitments for epistemology and methodology in International Relations have been the subject of growing debate for several years, the implications for ethics and political agency of embracing an ontology of entanglement have remained unexplored. This work focuses on the importance of addressing the ontological and epistemological assumptions of the discipline of International Relations. There is increased awareness of the limits of abstract principles as ways of adjudicating real life political and ethical choices regarding International Intervention and international development for both practitioners and scholars. The work challenges IR prevailing ontological imaginaries rooted upon Newtonian physics and argues that non-substantialist ontological positions nurture a political ethos that privileges ‘modest’ engagements of practical solidarity and weights political choices with regard to the consequences and distributive effects they may produce in the context where they are made rather than based upon their universal normative aspirations. While the book is firmly rooted in metatheory, Zanotti also highlights the easiness with which political failures are dismissed as unintended consequences and argues that the current crisis in Syria, and genocides in Srebrenica and Rwanda have shown that advocating abstract ethical principles, be they the Responsibility to Protect, impartiality, or following rules can lead to disaster and can foster violent and exclusionary practices. She also exemplifies how an alternative ethos can be practiced through the example of an international NGO in Haiti. Highlighting the need for critically re-thinking the way we conceptualize political agency and validate ethics, this work will be of interest to scholars of International Relations theory, ethics and critical security studies.