Without rules, there would be no society. Rules establishing what is valued in any given society, rules telling members of that society how they should generally conduct themselves to protect or advance values: these rules constitute a system of ethics for that society. We members of modern societies are disposed to call such rules principles in order to emphasize their significance, their margin-defining properties for society at large. We also tend to look askance at local rules at odds with ethical principles and condemn people who devise and follow such rules for their unprincipled conduct.

Chapter 5 got its start at a workshop, held at St Andrews in 2006, on rules in the use of force. The essay considers a hard case: the conduct of people who authorize and engage in torture. I suggest that even they are responsive to an elaborate set of rules: rules for selecting victims, rules for selecting torturers, rules on places for torture, rules on tools and techniques, rules on relations of victims and torturers, and rules on the presumptive value of torture in practice. While ethicists often treat any such rules as slippery slopes in the justification of torture, I further suggest that people are capable of drawing lines and imposing limits on their conduct and that this is central to the human disposition to make and use rules. There is, however, a noticeable tendency for what I call functional slippage in the institutionalized practice of torture. Such practices lose their observable structure as rules loosen and people rationalize their conduct in changing circumstances.

The next chapter also made its appearance in St Andrews, this time in 2008, at a conference on international political theory and for a plenary panel on Seyla Benhabib's work. In this essay, I show how this exceptionally influential political theorist could hope to derive universal principles of ethical conduct from a powerful critique of liberal modernity. I then suggest that Benhabib's struggle to save liberalism from itself falters because she fails to see that modernism in literature and the arts is an age-defining political project. Responding as it does to functional differentiation in modern society, rather than the rationalization of modern societies, modernist concerns subvert progressive liberal sentiments.