The Limits of Ethical Theory

Claims about ethics underlie the most pivotal and fundamental debates in contemporary political life. From immigration to climate change, democracy promotion and humanitarian intervention to war and economic policy, political arguments often rest, explicitly or otherwise, on a conception of the good or right. This is a remarkably enduring and seductive way of organising political thought, in which ethics provides the foundation on which arguments are built, as well as the limits to the scope of what is available for argument.

These appeals to ethics in everyday life are very often justified in terms of one or a combination of many theories of ethics, which permeate current dominant understandings of the world – theories of utilitarianism, individualism, rights (of individuals or communities) and so on. Similarly, within the disciplines of Politics and International Relations (IR), appeals to ethics are most commonly employed and interrogated with reference to theories of ethics. Theories of ethics, then, do a great deal of work in contemporary political life, in terms of offering, arguing for and justifying a variety of better ways to proceed.

The broad focus of this investigation is the ways in which theories of ethics and responsibility are, and might be, used in the study of Politics and International Relations. More specifically, the book develops a distinctive analysis of, and theoretical approach to, the relationship between theories of ethics and practical political decisions. In particular, the investigation focuses on the area of so-called ‘poststructuralist’ approaches to ethics and the way in which these impact on the practical political realm.