| "Politics will, to the end of history, be an arena where conscience and power meet, where the ethical and coercive factors of human life will interpenetrate and work out their tentative and uneasy compromises." Reinhold Niebuhr; Political Philosophy is to a great extent concerned with the arena where conscience and power meet. It evaluates social organizations such as states and governments, but also studies the facts about social organization. "There are thus two not sharply distinguishable aspects of political philosophy; and how they ought to be related is a good question: the ethically normative aspect (ethics) and the descriptive explanatory." In general, philosophers working in contemporary political philosophy and in particular the field of international relations have focused on the normative aspect. They have focused on a certain set of questions concerning justice in war, human rights, self determination and global distributive justice. In attempting to answer these questions, they have brought to bear various ethical viewpoints and theories to resolve the question of what is right and wrong in principle; the point of this being to provide a sound basis from which to generate concrete prescriptions for what should happen in the world of international relations. While this work has led to many interesting insights, this approach, on its own, is incomplete. International Relations is a complex field of human activity that requires both an understanding of and application of ethics as well as a study of the descriptive facts regarding how and why international affairs and relations exist and play out as they do.; Traditional views of International Relations tend to champion or decry the role of either national interests or morality on the world stage. We are often presented with an "either-or" approach in which we must choose either morality or a pragmatic-realist view to describe or evaluate International Relations. Neither of these approaches is in themselves an adequate or sufficiently useful method of evaluating or predicting actions in the realm of International Relations.; My goal is to offer an account and model of International Relations (IR) that will prove useful in the analysis, evaluation and prediction of actions in the realm of world affairs. This account recognizes the constant and often complex relationship between morality and pragmatism that is at the core of International Relations. If we are to think seriously about the world of IR, a model is necessary. Without providing this intellectual construct there is, in the words of William James, only a "bloomin, buzzin confusion." The purpose of the model is to provide a means by which to understand IR and the complex interrelationship between morality and self interested pragmatism. The general framework of the model holds that: The behavior of states in the realm of International Relations is governed by the relationship between three components---the national interests of the state, the thick morality and culture of the state and the existence and force of conventions between and among states in the world.; The model I offer is designed to build upon but ultimately replace the traditional views of Realism and Idealism in IR. Whether one accepts it as a paradigm for IR remains to be seen. As Thomas Kuhn remarked, "To be accepted as a paradigm, a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted. I hope that my efforts will result in meeting Kuhn's first criterion. As regards to the second criterion, I am confident that my model will not explain all the facts and cases that confront it. However, I do feel that my model will prove useful to: (1) Understand the role of morality in IR. (2) Understand the relationship between morality, pragmatic reasoning in the form of national interest and convention that exists within IR. (3) Understand casual relationships between ph... |
