This chapter examines the role of authority in public international law, based on the preceding discussion of authority and legitimacy in the context of exercises of power. Although there is a source of power, if not authority, at the domestic level in the form of government, this does not automatically transfer to the international level. This is primarily because the international system exists without a central authority. The question automatically arises of who ought to be able to make such rules, and whether the requirement for the exercise of autonomy is still as critical as it would be at the domestic level. The discussion is based on an analysis of foundational texts, exploring the ideas of authority at the international level expounded by Grotius and Vitoria, before moving on to work by more recent authors.

In “Modern Moral Philosophy” Anscombe famously argues against the main thrust of European ethical philosophy since the mid-seventeenth century. Her main complaint is that the conceptual structure of modern moral philosophy – focusing on obligation, duty, right, and wrong, rather than the classical Greek focus of virtue and the good life – cannot be sustained without divine legislation, which many moderns have tried to avoid. Modern Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to Kant will carefully analyze both canonical and lesser known texts to demonstrate that philosophers of the period have resources to answer Anscombe’s Challenge. Many of the philosophers studied were central in this: early modern natural lawyers Grotius, Pufendorf, and Hobbes; critics of natural law, like Leibniz and Shaftesbury; moral sentimentalists Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith; rationalists like Clarke, Price, and Reid; and, of course, Kant. One of the most interesting sources of response is a connection many philosophers made between morality and accountability and insights they had about the psychological prerequisites and presuppositions of accountability.

Hugo Grotius is best known as one of the originators of international law. Philosophers of the period also saw him as making a fundamental break with ancient philosophy and Thomistic classical natural law deriving from Aristotle. Grotius carried forward an important distinction made by Francisco Suarez between “law” and “counsel.” Good moral reasons may counsel action without yet requiring it. Law, by contrast, obligates, and obligation is conceptually related to accountability. It concerns what we would be blameworthy for failing to do without excuse. Grotius develops a theory of natural rights and law and sets the philosophical agenda by asking what could ground such a law (Anscombe’s Challenge). His response is human “sociability,” by which he means not simply any desire to affiliate, but the drive to live with others on terms of mutual accountability.

In several smaller essays written in the late 1760s and the 1770s, Herder discussed German political history. In How the German Bishops Became an Estate of the Realm Herder spelled out his views on the ancient German constitution and the history of the Holy Roman Empire, whilst On the Influence of Governments on the Sciences, and of the Sciences on Governments returned to the political history of wider Europe, including Germany. This chapter discusses these essays as Herder’s contributions to the debate on German national spirit, highlighting the relevance of Möser’s History of Osnabrück to the development of Herder’s views on German history. I argue that Herder sought to understand the causal origins of modern European states, including, most importantly, the Holy Roman Empire. Like Möser, Herder was fascinated by Tacitus’s account of ancient German freedom, while being very critical of the Frankish polity. Both also rejected Montesquieu’s history of modern monarchy. Although Herder acknowledged some advantages of the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, he was not a Reichspatriot. The 1779 essay restated Herder’s fundamental commitment to modern liberty and trade, whilst arguing that German imperial government was badly in need of reforms.

This chapter revisits Herder’s debate with Kant in his Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Mankind, paying particular attention to Herder’s ideas on individual self-determination and his history of modern liberty and enlightenment. In this work, Herder reinterpreted human self-determination as a distinctive capacity and moral duty, whilst also viewing it as the highest form of self-preservation and sociability exhibited across the spectrum of natural beings. Kant, by contrast, invoked human ‘unsocial sociability’, presenting morality as a late development in human history as well as underlining the role of the modern state in facilitating this development. Herder rejected all the constitutive elements of Kant’s idea for a universal history, whilst also seeking to refine his account of the history of ‘state-machines’ and political government in Europe. He accordingly proposed an alternative vision of the prospects for greater peace in Europe and the world, drawing attention to a moral learning process in human history and the role of commercial cities in the rise of modern liberty. He set up the ‘Hanseatic league’ as an example for a future European union as well as predicted the empowerment of the subjugated peoples of Europe thanks to growing international trade and improved government.

This chapter introduces the most significant aspects of Thucydidean interpretation in the Renaissance and Reformation. It outlines key developments in the accessibility of the text (through knowledge of Greek and through translation into Latin and other European languages). It also analyses a number of key responses to the work. These include the group centred around Philipp Melanchthon, who saw Thucydides as a source of both rhetorical and moral lessons; Calvinist readings, which enlisted Thucydides to rebut Machiavelli’s views on statecraft; Grotius, who appealed to Thucydides in formulating his theory of Just War; and Thomas Hobbes’ influential translation of the text.

In the age of Big Data and machine learning, with its ever-expanding possibilities for data mining, the question of who is entitled to control the data and benefit from insights that can be derived from them matters greatly for the shape of the future economy. Therefore, this topic should be assessed under the heading of distributive justice. There are different views on who is entitled to control data, often driven by analogies between claims to data and claims to other kinds of things that are already better understood. This chapter clarifies the value of approaching the subject of control over data in terms of (a notion of moral, rather than legal) ownership. Next, drawing on the work of seventeenth-century political theorist Hugo Grotius on the freedom of the seas, and thus on possibilities of owning the high seas, I develop an account of collective ownership of collectively generated data patterns and explore several important objections. Since control over data matters enormously and is poorly understood, we should treat questions about it as genuinely open. This is a good time to bring to bear unorthodox thinking on the matter.

This chapter gives an account of Pufendorf’s discussion and use of the law of nations. It first outlines his distinctive contribution to contemporary discussions of the topic, namely his rejection rejection, against Grotius, of a specific “positive” law of nations distinct from the law of nature. Secondly it explains how this position relied on Pufendorf’s voluntarist conception of law as the command of a superior and on his conception of the state of nature as devoid of such superiors. The law of nations was simply the law of nature applied to states as composite persons in the state of nature, and the treaties and alliances concluded between them could not amount to a separate and obligatory law of nations. Thirdly, against this background, the chapter shows how Pufendorf discussed the law of war, disentangling the perfect and imperfect obligations of the law of nations from custom, civil laws, and pacts and agreements. Finally, the chapter analyses Pufendorf’s own casuistic use of the law of nations in the various polemical works he published in the service of his sovereigns, especially the King of Sweden, often in line with the theoretical position he developed but also departing from it when opportune.

This chapter explores the link between international law’s long-standing doctrinal commitment to commerce and its inability to act decisively on behalf of the environment. One of the fundamental rights the early authors of jus gentium discovered was the right to engage in commerce. Vitoria, Gentili, and Grotius each drew on a providentialist theory of commerce. The doctrine held that Providence distributed scarcity and plenty across the Earth so that people could not be self-sufficient but would need to go in search of one another in order to acquire what they lacked. Commerce imagined in its pure form of reciprocal, mutually beneficial exchange would be the means to bring separated mankind to friendship. The embrace of such doctrine by early exponents of the law of nations, carried forward by Vattel, set the stage for international law’s longstanding commitment to international commerce, viewed as a virtuous activity that tends to the common good. An additional legacy was the view of nature as commodity. The providentialist doctrine of commerce remains embedded in international law and hobbles its ability to protect the natural environment.

Disdain for Cicero is widespread among contemporary philosophers. This chapter shows this attitude is mistaken. It focuses on three topics where Cicero speaks to contemporary philosophical problems with special urgency and relevance: cosmopolitanism, aging, and friendship. Cicero’s analysis of the duties of justice and the duties of material aid in his De officiis became the foundation for much of modern international law. But his analysis suffers from a bifurcation: it makes the former fully global (national boundaries are irrelevant) and the latter very elastic. The topic of aging has been entirely neglected by philosophers. Cicero’s dialogue De senectute offers a defense of old age against stigma and prejudices: some arguments are unconvincing, but many are excellent and have much to teach us. In his De amicitia, Cicero offers a convincing critique of common self-insulating pictures of friendship and an exploration of friendship as an element of political life, of which Cicero’s long-lived friendship with Atticus is a perfect example.

Grotius recast Aristotelian theories of human sociability in terms of self-preservation. Religious war in Europe had undermined the Thomist notion of mutual human affection as a basis for society. If society was established by the need to survive, then justice, which maintained society, must be understood in terms of its contribution to that necessity. Grotius therefore resolved the Ancient Roman and Greek problem of how to reconcile justice and expedience by reinterpreting justice in terms of expedience. For an individual, or state, to act out of self-preservation was necessarily just. His fusion of justice and expedience was one reason he was insistent upon distancing his thought from the Academic Sceptics, such as Carneades, who argued that there was no such thing as justice and that all moral action was expedient. For Grotius, part of the law of self-preservation was the necessity for individuals to secure the means for self-preservation and this meant that the acquisition of property, and trade, were central parts of that process. These principles applied also to the artificial person of the state which found itself in competition for survival with other states. The expansion of the state was therefore justifiable for its preservation. Indeed, following this reasoning, empire effectively became a necessity, and an inevitability, for the survival of European states.

There has been much speculation about how much Grotius knew about Asian law and maritime trading customs, and at what stage in his early career he familiarized himself with them. This chapter divides Grotius’ early career (before 1618) into four stages, each corresponding to a phase in his intellectual growth on the subject of Asia at large. First, defending the Santa Catarina incident which saw him drafting De Jure Praedae (and with it implicitly Mare Liberum) before 1606/7; second, defending the VOC’s interests in the lead up to the Treaty of Antwerp and the Twelve Years Truce 1606/7-1609; third, acting as the intermediary for VOC admiral Cornelis Matelieff (Cornelis Corneliszoon Matelieff) 1608-1612/3, and participation in the Anglo-Dutch fisheries and colonies conferences of 1613 (London) and 1615 (The Hague). It is argued that in his various capacities in government and as advisor to the Dutch East India Company (VOC), Grotius broadened his knowledge about Asia in different ways, and through his services to the state and company helped lay the intellectual and foundations for what has been sometimes dubbed the First Dutch Empire (c.1605-1795).

This chapter tracks Grotius’ career as an official serving the province of Holland and the city of Rotterdam up to his arrest in the late summer of 1618. After an introduction on his work as a lawyer in The Hague, his service as advocate-fiscal (public prosecutor) of the Court of Holland (1607-1613) and as pensionary of Rotterdam (1613-1618) is described against the background of the emerging religious conflicts within the Dutch Republic. A special section is devoted to Grotius’ diplomatic activities, especially his membership of a Dutch mission to London in the spring of 1613, where he tried to win king James’ support for the ecclesiastical politics of the States of Holland.

Grotius’ earlier theological controversies concerned the authority of secular rulers and the normative status of the undivided church, principles given fullest exposition in De Imperio Summarum Potestatum. Meletius reveals deeper disagreements with the prevailing Calvinism, insisting on the distinction of core doctrines from theological speculations. The atoning death of Christ, expounded in De Satisfactione Christi, was of central importance to him, and his apologetic interest flowered in De Veritate Christianae Religionis, an exercise in natural theology. The later writings centre on his Bible Commentary and his writings on Christian unity. They reveal some changes upon earlier views, but no accommodation to Catholic doctrinal norms. The polemics with Rivet sharpened his opposition to Calvinism as a dogmatic system with an inadequate conception of the Christian moral life. His status as a layman of no church establishment exposed him to appropriation in support of later agenda that were not his. But his influence was widespread in later Protestantism of many strands.

What is the legacy of Grotius’ doctrinal efforts, and how did they impact on current structures of international law? Was he providing a natural law foundation for the global order, or rather an instrument of power for sovereigns to assert their political and commercial dominion over the world?

Recent studies have observed that in Grotius’ legal doctrine the intellectual ambition to create a universal rule of law (natural law) coexists with a distinctively ‘modern’ use of the vocabulary of individual rights (natural rights). In this chapter, I argue that a more careful reading of Grotius’ engagement with the Aristotelian tradition might cast new light on this traditional dichotomy, and expand our understanding of Grotius’ theory of justice. Famously, Grotius relies on the Aristotelian notion of virtue ethics to introduce the concept of aptitude, which designs a more generic account of merit and moral fitness rather than a strict, enforceable legal claim. Far from being discarded as a ‘minor’ or ‘deficient’ source of right, aptitude plays a fundamental role in this context. Through his reading and translating of the Aristotelian commentator Michael of Ephesus, I will show how Grotius’ thin conception of right as aptitude and fitness provides his natural law doctrine with a heuristic requirement for right reason.

In De jure belli ac pacis, Grotius constructs international law with the vocabulary of private law. For this purpose, he uses distinctions from the Institutes of Justinian and the Digest, but redefines key concepts of Roman law, such as natural law or law of nations (jus gentium). In doing so, he uses a method that is typical for humanist jurisprudence. On the one hand, he describes history, on the other hand, he renews the traditional system of law and adapts the law to the needs of his own day and age.

This chapter presents Grotius’ ars politica that deals with what is useful in practice, different from the ars iuris that deals with issues of justice. Philosophically eclectic, descriptive and non-perfectionist, Grotius’ ars politica is directed at understanding and guiding the organisation of power (potestas) and interest (utile) in human live, on two levels: a. the metalevel of theoretical discussion comparing and integrating different approaches to the topic, and b. the practical level of providing answers to political challenges. As agency is central, so is autonomy, and sovereignty.