Bounded morality: justice and the state in world politics

Abstract

Surveying the tradition of international political theory, Martin Wight commented that it is marked not only by paucity but also by intellectual and moral poverty.'I That judgment is an exaggeration, but only slightly so. The few works of real philosophical interest about international relations (e.g., Kant's Perpetual Peace, some essays and fragments of Rousseau) stand out in a tradition that alternates between the scholastic and the utopian. Until recently, Wight's judgment might have been passed with equal validity on contemporary philosophical thought about international relations. Certainly the attention that moral and political philosophers have paid to international problems is a minute fraction of that paid to domestic ones. In the past ten years, however, there has been a growth of interest in philosophical problems of international relations, and a literature of generally high quality has begun to appear. 2