The Skepticism of the Realists

For many years, it has been impossible to make moral arguments about international relations to its American students without encountering the claim that moral judgments have no place in discussions of international affairs or foreign policy. This claim is one of the foundations of the so-called realist approach to international studies and foreign policy. On the surface, it is a most implausible view, especially in a culture conscious of itself as an attempt to realize a certain moral ideal in its domestic political life. All the more remarkable is the fact that the realists' skepticism about the possibility of international moral norms has attained the status of a professional orthodoxy in both academic and policy circles, accepted by people with strong moral commitments about other matters of public policy. Although the realists have often used arguments with deep roots in modern political theory, I believe that their skepticism can be shown to rest on fallacious reasoning and incorrect empirical assumptions.

To support this view, I shall argue that one cannot consistently maintain that there are moral restrictions on individual action but no such restrictions on the actions of states. I begin by considering the distinction (implied by this argument) between (generalized) moral skepticism and what I shall call international skepticism and show in more detail exactly what is involved in the assumption that moral skepticism is incorrect. It should be emphasized that this is indeed an assumption; I make no attempt to provide a general argument against moral skepticism.

One might be skeptical about the possibility of international morality because one is skeptical, in general, about the possibility of all kinds of morality. Perhaps one thinks that all or most people are incapable of being motivated by moral considerations, or that moral judgments are so subjective as to be useless in resolving conflicting claims and in fulfilling the other social functions usually assigned to morality. Whatever its rationale, moral skepticism, and its derivative, skepticism about political ethics, represent a refusal to accept moral arguments as sources of reasons for action. Moral skepticism might take a variety of forms, including a denial that moral judgments can be true or false, a denial that moral judgments have meaning, or a denial that the truth of moral judgments provides a reason for acting on them.

Generalized moral and political skepticism might be countered to some extent by examining the arguments that support them. Probably these arguments would turn out to contain important confusions or deep inconsistencies. But one could not thereby demonstrate the possibility of social or political ethics; other arguments for skepticism could be advanced, and at some point in the attempt to counter them one would need to rely on substantive ethical or metaethical views to demonstrate the weaknesses of the skeptical arguments. This, however, would be to assume that skepticism is wrong, rather than to argue it. Generalized moral and political skepticism can only be shown to be wrong by exhibiting an acceptable theory of ethics and of its foundation, because one of the functions of such a theory is to explain the possibility of just those features of ethics that the skeptic claims not to understand. At a minimum, such a theory must distinguish morality from egoism and explain how it can be rational to act on reasons that are (or might be) inconsistent with considerations of prudence or self-interest. Indeed, the idea that considerations of advantage are distinct from those of morality, and that it might be rational to allow the latter to override the former, seems to be at the core of our intuitions about morality.

In what follows I shall have to assume without discussion that some such theory can be provided. The leading controversies in metaethics are likely to linger for a long while, and progress in normative areas ought not to await a resolution of these other problems even though they are in some sense logically prior. Obviously, one would like to offer a sufficiently complete theory to meet objections on both fronts. But this seems beyond reach at present. Instead, I shall proceed on the assumption that we share some basic ideas about the nature and requirements of morality (which I refer to as moral intuitions) and see whether international skepticism is consistent with them.

One important source of international skepticism is cultural relativism. International lawyers and cultural anthropologists have documented wide disparities in the views of rationality and of the good prevalent in the world's cultures. These differences are reflected in the structures of various legal systems and in the attitudes customarily taken by different cultures toward social rules, collective ideals, and the value of individual autonomy. In some cultures, for example, autonomy is readily sacrificed to the requirements of collective goals. In general, given any consistent ranking of social goods or any plausible view of how such rankings might be morally justified, it is possible (and often likely) that a culture or society can be found in which there is dominant a divergent ranking of goods or view of moral justification. If this is the case, a skeptic might say, then there are no rational grounds for holding one social morality superior to another when their requirements conflict. Any doctrine that purports to be an international morality and that extends beyond the least common denominator of the various social moralities will be insecure in its foundations. But, typically, the least-common-denominator approach will leave most international conflicts unresolved because these have at their root conflicts over which principles are to apply to given situations or which goods should be sacrificed when several goods conflict. Since principles adequate to resolve such conflicts are fundamentally insecure, the skeptic claims, no normative international political theory is possible.

This argument can be met on two levels, depending on the kind of intercultural disagreement to which it appeals. If the skeptical appeal is to disagreements over, say, the rankings of...