Abstract
ABSTRACTMany states use a classificatory approach to foreign policy: they put other states into particular categories and structure their engagement and relations partly as a result. There is one prominent modern international political theory – Rawls’ Law of Peoples – that seems to adopt this approach as an account of justified state behaviour. But should we expect this type of theory ultimately to prove attractive, justified and philosophically distinct compared to more instrumentalist rivals? This paper explores the challenges generic to any such account, not merely those relating to Rawls’ specific version, and surveys possible responses and their shortcomings.
Highlights
The completeness problem can in principle be addressed by using some sort of lexical ordering of the moral principles underlying international relations, though the question of how to justify the precise ranking philosophically is a difficult one
The lexical solution notably generates a problem of ‘mixed-incentives’, namely that other states will face incentives to make small improvements in lexically decisive criteria even if causing a major worsening on some lower-ranked criteria – opening one’s economy to international trade may apparently ‘excuse’ widespread human rights violations or a crackdown on domestic dissent
If the goal of the state classification approach is to act as a normative guide to foreign policy behaviour in the real world the aforementioned problems would need to be addressed
Summary
If the goal of the state classification approach is to act as a normative guide to foreign policy behaviour in the real world the aforementioned problems would need to be addressed. Because F.P.N.R. captures, relatively straightforwardly, the way many reflective individuals talk and approach foreign policy, capturing the intuition that certain principles cannot be ‘traded’; that, say, economic growth, human rights protection, territorial sovereignty and democratic governance draw upon different ideals and cannot, be justified by reference to welfare (or wellbeing, or whatever the underlying metric).
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