Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping is a story about two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, who from a young age experience a quite complex family life.1 We become acquainted with them through the story Ruth narrates about their childhood. This is how the book opens.

Binding morality is responsible for the collapse of Germany at the end of World War I. Rationalist account maintains that self-serving elites, even while losing, might inflate their war aims precisely as the battlefield and home front situation are turning against them in an effort to buy off the ordinary public for their sacrifices. This chapter shows instead that as the war dragged on and Germany’s troubles accumulated, the German military, a bulwark of binding morality, raised its wartime aspirations so as to justify the costs of the conflict, adequately compensating the country for the loyal sacrifices of its soldiers. This irrationality is best seen in relief, by comparing the nationalist right not only to the German left but also to the consequentialist and realist ethics of the German Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, who was eventually swept aside by conservative forces precisely for being willing to concede to reality. A survey panel experiment, conducted on a sample of the Russian public, induces the same inflation dynamics. Those who identify as binding moralists persist for much longer in a theoretical war. Those who stay in the conflict until the very end increase their reservation price over time, even as the Russians are suffering disproportional casualties.

Recent advances in moral and social psychology have made clear that political ideology has moorings in the same moral foundations thought to have evolutionary roots. A number of different scholars have converged on what Duckitt has labeled a “dual-process model” of political ideology, a two-dimensional framework for explaining the fundamental cleavages in politics. The first dimension captures binding morality, driven by a motivation to protect from threats. The second dimension captures a motivation to provide for others’ welfare, which defines virtue as taking care of others. Since there is no autonomous political sphere, however, we project these same cleavages onto foreign policy. I present evidence from two American and one Russian surveys showing that the two-dimensional models of foreign policy belief systems found to structure foreign policy attitudes in the United States and other countries have moral roots. Militant internationalism, our beliefs about the necessity of carrying a big stick and being willing to use it, are strongly associated with binding moral values, our motivation to protect. Cooperative internationalism, our beliefs about the gains to be had from cooperation and our obligations to others outside our own borders, is strongly associated with the moral motivation to provide.

The focus on cosmopolitan humanitarianism obscures the totality of morality in international politics, leaving the empirical study of morality in IR with two central blindspots. First, it focuses on moral conscience – our desire to do good for others – to the neglect of moral condemnation, our response to the perceived unethical behavior of others, not only against third parties but also against ourselves. In both everyday life and IR, the response is generally to morally condemn, and often to punish and retaliate. Second, the IR ethics and morality literature have not come to terms with moral principles that operate at the group level, binding groups together. When “our” group is engaged in conflict with another, we owe the group our loyalty and defer to group authorities out of moral obligation. These “binding foundations” are particularly important for IR since foreign affairs are a matter of intergroup interaction. Together this means that groups, bound by moral commitment, do not compete with others in an amoral sphere in which ethics stops at the water’s edge. Once we cast our moral net more widely, we realize that morality is everywhere, more striking in the breach than the observance.

A striking number of accounts stress the continuity between the foreign policy of Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany. Hitler was simply a more virulent nationalist and militarist, so some sort of revisionist expansion was inevitable in German foreign policy. The Nazis, however, were a fundamentally different type of right-wing force. Hitler dismissed the very existence of humanitarian ethics as a mere social construction and illusion, refusing even the typical scorn more traditional German nationalists expressed vis-à-vis its wartime adversaries. Hitler’s regime explicitly redefined the national community not as a cultural and linguistic entity but as a biological one. Rather than a continuation of previous tendencies in German nationalism, it was a decisive moral break and led to a wholly different basis for, and type of, international aggression. Hitler dismissed the ambitions of Weimar nationalists of the Wilhelmine variety, whose only interest was to rail against the injustices of the Versailles Treaty and demand the return of lost German lands that were rightly hers. For Hitler, no one had any right to any piece of territory; one simply took it. As a consequence, he defined fundamentally different foreign policy goals than his contemporaries and predecessors: the creation of Lebensraum to provide for Hitler’s growing population.

In Chapter 1, we introduced the theme of dependence to characterise relationships among family members. As such, dependence can serve as a specification of the givenness of family. Together, the terms ‘givenness’ and ‘dependence’ were chosen as keys that could be helpful in unlocking current controversies about family and understanding what is at stake in them. Family relations confront people with the difficulty of the non-chosen side of life. In Chapter 3, we explored this controversial character of givenness, particularly what is at stake in current debates on family as either ‘nature’ or ‘culture’. In the impasses to which too strong an emphasis on either of these aspects leads, we discovered the need to get beyond them and develop an alternative view of givenness. Constructive impulses to such alternative views were traced in the first evocations of givenness in relation to Rembrandt and the topos of the Holy Family.

We opened this study, without any introduction, with the story of the Foster family featured in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. This novel evokes the question of what family is about, and it makes us aware of the difficulty of answering it. It is not just because of this double evocative power that we began in this way, however. It is also because this story helps us to get a start on a subject, an area of human life that is peculiar in many ways. Family is one of the most common aspects of our lives and one of the most problematic. It is both neglected in research and overstudied, framed both as a dated theme and as one of utmost contemporary relevance.

Family is at the heart of many nostalgic dreams about a return to the good old days in which the roles and patterns of male and female behaviour were obvious.

The aim of this chapter is to provide our investigation with enough focus to enable the ethical analysis of what family is about while also respecting its nature as mystery. In the foregoing, we have discovered that it is not easy to name what family might mean. A great deal of family research assumes that the meaning of family is already known: it is regarded as self-evident and is not usually a subject of investigation. In everyday life, family members do not usually refer to it explicitly either. Rather, meaning comes to light in different experiences and ways of acting without being named. Following our first explorations of the novel Housekeeping, we noticed that it is particularly when it is under pressure and not self-evident that what it means to be family members becomes visible – when, for example, family members are missing due to death or other causes or when the duties implied in being part of a family are not taken up as a matter of course.

A comparison of the behavior of the German army in World War I and World War II in occupied Eastern Europe shows the human cost of the difference between Wilhelmine and Nazi nationalism. Hitler aimed not at the paternalistic civilizing of conquered peoples but rather the elimination, evacuation, and instrumentalization of non-Aryan populations. Yet the fact that Hitler is the exemplar of this kind of instrumental violence indicates the rarity of behavior thought to be so common in international relations models. This has great normative implications. As much as moral philosophy seeks to maintain a separation between the way the world is and the way that it should be, all normative arguments rest on (even if only implicitly) empirical claims about what is possible. We know by the empirical rarity of those who think like Hitler that he was mistaken about the amoral nature of man, and therefore that normative theorizing still has a place. Once we understood where Hitler’s crude struggle-based biological determinism went wrong, by failing to recognize what is uniquely about humans among other animals – their morality – biology buttresses rather than undermines liberal ethics. Morality is more than a social construction.