Ethical Reasoning in International Affairs Arguments from the Middle Ground

by Navari, Cornelia

• ISBN13: 9781137290953
• ISBN10: 1137290951
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-11-06
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This collection rejects excessive idealism in considering contemporary ethical dilemmas and returns to more classical styles of ethical reasoning, including pragmatism, legal realism and the virtuous life. Valuing pluralism and the ethical dilemmas that ensue from the multiplicity of values in contemporary international society, this book does not seek to solve by raising one value over others, but rather by seeking reconciliations.

Arguing for a middle ground between idealism and realism, this book offers a fruitful starting point for studying international ethics, of war most obviously, but also of justice, human rights, intervention, succession and development ethics where universal ideals encounter real world obstacles to the accomplishment of principles of the good. The collection considers real-life situations and how to resolve them in ways that do not demand a total overthrow of the contemporary international order but that point to ways to ameliorate it.

Bringing together renowned international scholars in the field, this book will appeal to scholars of international relations and international ethics, as well as diplomats.

Author Biography

Cornelia Navari is Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, UK and Visiting Professor of International Affairs at the University of Buckingham, UK. She is the author of Internationalism and the State in the 20th Century (2000) and Public Intellectuals and International Affairs (2012), and the editor of Theorising International Society (Palgrave, 2009).

Table of Contents

1. The Terrain of the Middle Ground; Cornelia Navari
2. Are We Linguistically Left-Handed? In Search of Responsible, Ethical Subjects; Daniel Warner
3. Realism and Right: Sketch for a Theory of Global Justice; Terry Nardin
4. Middle Ground Ethics and Human Rights; Mervyn Frost
5. Theorizing Secession: What should be the Relationship between the Ideal and the Empirical?; Mikulas Fabry
6. Global Constitutionalism as a Middle Ground Ethic; Anthony Lang Jr. 7. Beyond Order versus Justice: Middle Ground Ethics and the Responsibility to Protect; Mikael Baaz
8. Hedley Bull and John Dewey: Two Middle Grounders and a Pragmatic Approach to the Nuclear Dilemma; Molly Cochran
9. The Ethics of War, Innocence and Hard Cases: A Call for the Middle Ground; Milla Emilia Vaha
10. Authoritarianism, Anti-Imperialism and Intervention: The Precariousness of the Middle Ground; Chris Brown
11. Power Transitions, Emerging Powers and the Shifting Terrain of the Middle Ground; Andrew Hurrell