page 20 note 1. A mistake to which I was alerted by Shklar, Judith N., Legalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), pp. 21–22.Google Scholar

page 20 note 2. Wight, Martin, ‘Western Values in International Relations’, in Butterfield, H. and Wight, M. (eds.), Diplomatic Investigations (London, 1966), p. 89.Google Scholar

page 21 note 1. Plato, The Republic, Book I, Chapter III.

page 21 note 2. Ibid.Book I Chapter IV.

page 22 note 1. Williams, Bernard, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 34–39Google Scholar. I should draw attention here to a possible confusion between universalization as application to all members of a particular class (citizens of Rome), and universalization as application to all members of the human race (citizens of the world). That Williams means the latter and not the (relativist) former is clear from his remark that morality involves internalized norms that “cannot merely evaporate because one is confronted with human beings in another society”, Ibid. p. 37.

page 22 note 2. See, e.g., Waddington, G. H., The Ethical Animal (London, 1960)Google Scholar, passim. I return to naturalism vs. positivism in Part II below.

page 22 note 3. For Marx as a moralist in the tradition of natural law, see Sigmund, Paul E., Natural Law in Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp. 165–166Google Scholar. For a trenchant denial of this view, see Wood, Alien W., ‘The Marxian Critique of Justice”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, i (1972).Google Scholar

page 22 note 4. The Republic Book II, Chapter VI.

page 23 note 1. The Politics, Iii; The Nicomachean Ethics, Iii.

page 23 note 2. See Sabine, George H., A History of Political Theory 3rd ed. (London, 1948), p. 60Google Scholar, who notes the absence in Plato of the modern notion of right.

page 23 note 3. The Nicomachean Ethics, Viii and Viv.

page 23 note 4. The Politics, IIIxii and IIIxii.

page 23 note 5. I should add here that while the polis might have been the only complete moral constituency in Greek thought, it was not the final one. Maurice Cranston begins his discussion of the history of human rights with Antigone's defiance of Creon's edict that her brother Polynices should remain unburied on the battlefield because he had fought traitorously against his own city. See What are Human Rights? (London, 1973) pp. 9–10Google Scholar. Antigone's forum is one of conscience not enclosed by the state.

page 23 note 6. Russell, Bertrand, History of Western Philosophy, 2nd ed. (London, 1961), p. 240.Google Scholar I shall return later to the distinction between individual and collectivist ethics.

page 24 note 1. City of God, Book V Chapter 17.

page 24 note 2. Russell, op. cit. p. 329, Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), p. 60Google Scholar.

page 24 note 3. The worldly consequence of this doctrine was, however, the failure to translate equality for slaves in the early church into an improvement in their civil status, and as Reinhold Niebuhr says, to this day the churches pride themselves on being able to transcend economic and social inequalities within their walls without it following that they should move vigorously against them, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York, 1948), pp. 77–78.Google Scholar

page 24 note 4. This is Nietzsche's phrase, but I do not mean it here in his sense. His objection to Christian morality was that its doctrine of equality before God pulled down the worthy to the level of the worthless, and prevented thereby the noble and artistic from “fashioning man”. Slave morality was the triumph of the worthless. See Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Zimmern, Helen (Edinburgh and London, 1909), pp. 84Google Scholar, 117, 227–232. The attack on Christian worldlessness that I have in mind in using the phrase “slave morality” is the one to which I have already drawn attention - that equality stopped at the church door: slave morality as the continued oppression of the humble not their triumph.

page 24 note 5. Russell, op. cit. p. 190.

page 24 note 6. By d'Entreves, A. P., Natural Law, 2nd ed. (London, 1970)Google Scholar, Chapter 3, on which the following discussion of Aquinas is based.

page 25 note 1. Laski, Harold J., A Defence of Liberty Against Tyrants (London, 1924), introduction, p. 2.Google Scholar

page 25 note 2. Ibid. p. 23.

page 25 note 3. Ibid. p. 27.

page 25 note 4. De Jure Belli ac Pads, Prolegomena, para. 11.

page 25 note 5. The Rights of Man (Everyman edition), pp. 42–43.Google Scholar And just as Paine shows thus his emancipation from Christian dogma, so in a different way does the tract against which his was a protest. In founding society on human wants, and on interdependence, rather than on individual rights, and in preserving the differences of degree which Paine made a unity, Burke inclined more closely to the Greek account of society than to one that was dependent on a Christian view of the relations of individuals. See Reflections on The Revolution in France, in Payne, E. J. (ed.), Burke: Select Works, ii (Oxford, 1898), pp. 70–71.Google Scholar

page 26 note 1. “The Christian”, says Herbert Butterfield, ‘is particularly called to carry his thinking outside that framework which a nation or a political party or a social system or an accepted régime or a mundane ideology provides”. Christianity, Diplomacy and War (London, 1953)Google Scholar,

page 26 note 2. This is a recurring defence of natural law in d'Entreves, op. tit.

page 26 note 3. Nor is this a primitive doctrine of old-fashioned ‘Machiavellism’. Hans J. Morgenthau, though this is not a view he holds consistently, does declare that “the reference to a moral rule of conduct requires an individual conscience from which it emanates, and there is no individual conscience from which what we call the international morality of Great Britain or of any other nation could emanate”. Politics Among Nations, 4th ed. (New York, 1967), p. 240Google Scholar. E. H. Carr's answer to this point of view is that the attribution of personality to the state, so that it might be thought of as subject to moral rules, is a necessary fiction in international society, just as the notion of the corporate responsibility of a joint-stock company is a fiction necessary to municipal law. The Twenty Tears’ Crisis, 2nd ed. (London, 1946), pp. 148–149.Google Scholar

page 27 note 1. See Leviathan, Chapter xiii, and Hedley Bull, ‘Society and Anarchy in International Relations’, in Butterfield and Wight, op. cit. pp. 45–48.

page 27 note 2. It is this moral offensiveness, or so it seems to me, that renders somewhat out of place the liking among some English writers for the cosy simile of the club in describing this aspect of international society. Thus Butterfield. “It was certainly true that, though the international order [after the Treaty of Utrecht] performed its function, aggression was not eliminated, and the nations still often came into conflict with one another. But it was as though the members of the international club were competing for the best armchairs, or the best service at dinner -jockeying one another, shall we say, to obtain the best room in the house … ” op. cit. p. 81.

page 27 note 3. See Niebuhr, op. cit. pp. xi-xii.

page 28 note 1. ‘The Mainsprings of American Foreign Policy: The National Interest vs. Moral Abstractions’, American Political Science Review, xliv (1950), pp. 853–854Google Scholar.

page 28 note 2. I say most rather than all, for the assertion of a principle of non-intervention is itself a moral claim as I shall argue in the next section of the paper.

page 28 note 3. ‘Order vs. Justice in International Society’, Political Studies, xix (1971), p. 275Google Scholar.

page 28 note 4. This is true even though a new entrant, having made a claim of this kind in order to gain admission, might want to revert to the old principles once successful. I have in mind the group that would be a state basing its claim to such status on the principle of national self-determination, but then having become a state, insisting on the principle of state sovereignty to deter further disintegration.

page 29 note 1. See Wood, op. cit. pp. 251–255.

page 29 note 2. See Magdoff, Harry, ‘Imperialism: A Historical Survey’, Monthly Review, 24 (1972), pp. 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar and 12.

page 30 note 1. See Beitz, Charles R.‘Justice and International Relations’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, iv (1975), p. 374Google Scholar. Though Beitz does not deal with this aspect of it, the argument for world justice to accommodate transnational relations involves a judgement about their importance compared to inter-state relations, as well as the mere observation that they exist (or have expanded) and are norm-creating. As Raymond Aron has said, transnational relations have been regulated in all periods by custom, or convention, or by a specific code. The question, as Aron puts it, is one between public and private international law - whether in, for example, contemporary international politics, the heterogeneous inter-state system divides trans-national society. Peace and War (London, 1966), p. 106.Google Scholar

page 31 note 1. See George Modelski's layer-cake model of it in Principles of World Politics (New York, 1972)Google Scholar, Chapter 13.

page 31 note 2. One thinks here of the use of the domestic analogy in international relations, asserting that what is required for the establishment of a world political society is the same single sovereign that was established within the state. A modern version of this doctrine asserting the need for a “central guidance mechanism” is Falk, Richard A., A Study of Future Worlds (New York, 1975)Google Scholar, Chapter 4.

page 31 note 3. (London, 1972).

page 31 note 4. Rawls says that his aim is to generalize and carry to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theory of the social contract as found in Locke, Rousseau and Kant, Ibid. p. 11. It is the difficulty of applying this “familiar theory” to non-Western societies in which it is not familiar, in my view, that those who argue for the global application of Rawls’ principles of justice have failed adequately to confront. Thus Beitz, for example, notices that different principles may be appropriate for different societies, but does not give this the central place in his analysis that it seems to be to require, op. cit. p. 377, note 24.

page 32 note 1. I am not here making the silly point that two of the moral frameworks are for individuals, and the other two are for societies, for morality is a notion that presupposes society. Nobody, as Marx said, seen in his isolation produces values, and nobody, as Hannah Arendt adds, in his isolation cares about them - things, or ideas, or moral ideals “become values only in their social relationship”. Arendt, op. cit. p. 165.

page 32 note 2. Rawls, op. cit. p. 31.

page 32 note 3. Laski, op. cit. p. 27.

page 33 note 1 See Thucydides, Jowett's translation (Oxford, 1881), i, pp. 398–407 from which the quotations following are taken.

page 34 note 1. As in H. L. A. Hart's “minimum content of Natural Law” derived from his truisms about human nature. See The Concept of Law (Oxford, 1961), pp. 186–195.Google Scholar

page 34 note 2. These three form the structure of d'Entreves, op. cit.

page 35 note 1. See Evans, Graham, ‘Some Problems with a History of Thought in International Relations’, International Relations, iv (1974)Google Scholar.

page 35 note 2. Thus, for example, E. H. Carr's realism did not prevent him from defending the idea of an international morality.

page 35 note 3. Shklar, passim.

page 35 note 4. Bull, H., ‘The Theory of International Politics 1919–1969’, in Porter, Brian (ed.) The Aberystwyth Papers (London, 1972), p. 37.Google Scholar

page 35 note 5. See, e.g. Falk, R., What's Wrong with Henry Kissinger's Foreign Policy?, Policy Memo. No. 39 (Centre of International Studies, Princeton University, 1974)Google Scholar.

page 36 note 1. Falk, R., ‘The Domains of Law and Justice’, International Journal, xxxi (1975-1976), p. 5.Google Scholar

page 36 note 2. Hoffmann, Stanley, ‘Choices’, Foreign Policy, No. 12 (1973), p. 7.Google Scholar

page 36 note 3. R. Falk, ‘The Domains of Law and Justice’, op. cit. pp. 6–9.

page 36 note 4. R. Falk, A Study of Future Worlds, Chapter 1. A decade or so earlier, and in another context (that of the problem of civil war), Falk wrote that “a contemporary Machiavelli perceiving the novel necessity for a community of mankind, might be dismissed by the best minds as recklessly Utopian”. ‘The International Law of Internal War’, in Legal Order in a Violent World (Princeton, 1968), pp. 114–115Google Scholar.

page 36 note 5. Christian Wolff, Ius Gentium Methodo Scientifica Pertractatum, 1764, trans. J. H. Drake, 1934, rept. (New York, 1964), Prolegomena, para. 16.

page 36 note 6. E. de Vattel, The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law, 1758, trans. Charles E. Fenwick (Washington, 1916), Preface, p. 7a.

page 37 note 1. See Dickinson, E. D., The Equality of States in International Law (Cambridge, Mass., 1920), pp. 4–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 37 note 2. Brierly, J. L., The Law of Nations, 6th ed. (Waldock, G. H. M., ed.) (Oxford, 1963), pp. 132–133.Google Scholar

page 37 note 3. Thomson, David, Equality (Cambridge, 1949), p. 147.Google Scholar

page 38 note 1. Article 16.

page 38 note 2. And with these concepts we are back to Aristotle. For their relationship with the idea of equality see Hart, op. cit. Chapter viii.

page 39 note 1. Arendt, op. cit. pp. 29–37.

page 39 note 2. See Lakoff, Sandford A., Equality in Political Philosophy (Boston, 1968)Google Scholar, Chapter 8.

page 39 note 3. Russell, op. cit. p. 600.

page 39 note 4. Schwarzenberger, G., Power Politics, 3rd ed. (London, 1963)Google Scholar, Chapter 6.

page 40 note 1. See Cranston, op. cit. p. i.

page 40 note 2. Lauterpacht, H., International Law and Human Rights (London, 1950), pp. 4Google Scholar, 33 and 147-

page 41 note 1. As Maurice Cranston says: “There is indeed something deeply absurd in an arrangement by which something so personal and individual as the rights of man should be settled in committees to which only governments have access; it is a situation worthy of Lewis Carroll”, op. cit. p. 81.

page 41 note 2. The outline of the argument here is borrowed from my Nonintervention and International Order (Princeton, 1974)Google Scholar, Chapter 9.

page 41 note 3. Benn, S. I. and Peters, R. S., Social Principles and the Democratic State (London., 1959), pp. 361–362.Google Scholar

page 43 note 1. ‘Approaches to the Notion of International Justice’, in Falk, Richard A. and Black, Cyril E. (eds.), The Future of the International Legal Order, i. Trends and Patterns (Princeton, 1969) pp. 425–426.Google Scholar

page 44 note 1. Cranston op cit. pp. 15–16.

page 44 note 2. For this question see H. Bull, ‘The Grotian Conception of International Society’, in Butterfield and Wight, op cit. pp. 51–73.

page 45 note 1. Beitz, op. cit. p. 383.

page 46 note 1. Arthur Burns, Lee, Of Powers and Their Politics (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1968), pp. 77–78Google Scholar, 81.

page 46 note 2. Burke: Select Works ii, introduction, p. xv.