Reason and emotion in international ethics. By Renée Jeffery

Abstract

Reason and emotion in international ethics. By Renée Jeffery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2014. 252pp. Index. £69.95. ISBN 978 1 10703 741 0. Available as e-book. While emotion continues to generate scholarly interest in International Relations (IR), its role in ethics has attracted less attention than its impact on security and violent conflict. Renée Jeffery's book corrects this imbalance and does so with a creative assemblage of interdisciplinary resources from the history of political thought, moral philosophy, cognitive psychology and contemporary neuroscience. With these tools—and in reference to the specific problem of global poverty—Jeffery demonstrates that emotions are integral to even the seemingly most reasoned deliberations in international ethics. The core of the book consists of four chapters that together develop a position Jeffery calls ‘contemporary sentimentalist cosmopolitanism’. She derives the ‘sentimentalist’ element from the writings of David Hume and Adam Smith, both of whom invested emotion with a key role in moral judgement. Here, the book echoes a broader, multidisciplinary resurgence of interest in moral sentiment theory—and in rival, pre-Kantian Enlightenment ideas more generally. The attention to Hume's moral psychology is especially welcome in light of the selective emphasis on his epistemology within recent studies on causality and methodology in IR. While chapter three engages with Hume and his predecessors, chapter four asks why moral sentiment theory suffered a decline in popularity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jeffery is sensitive to the need to historicize this question and keen to distinguish between, for example, the hostility to emotion among later Kantians and what she describes as the more ‘equivocal’ position of Kant himself.