Practice Approaches in International Political Theory

Abstract

This chapter deals with the question of ‘how we ought to go on’ in a world that is characterised by cultural pluralism and uncertainty. To that end, it explores how practice approaches in International Political Theory have recently highlighted the centrality of ‘practical judgement’ in guiding actors’ moral reasoning. ‘Practical judgement’ thus conceived turns out as an important element in advancing a practice-minded ethics, which discards moral reasoning based on a priori fixed principles and instead foregrounds humans’ experiential dimension as a source for the normative evaluation of practices. Along these lines, practices are normative and the decision of how we ‘ought to’ go on in the world is as practical an affair as it is deeply infused with ethical questions of how to do ‘good’. In combining analytical and normative enquiries into global politics, such practice-minded ethics promises to reconcile the long-standing division between International Political Theory and International Relations.