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3 - The role of consequences, comparison and counterfactuals in constructivist ethical thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 May 2010

By
Kathryn Sikkink
Edited by
Richard M. Price
Richard M. Price
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia, Vancouver
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Summary

First let me plead guilty to one of the charges that Price aims at constructivists. Although I believe that some of my work has demonstrated the possibilities of moral change in world politics, I have not explicitly articulated a normative or prescriptive position of particular changes as good. And this is the case despite the fact that my students and my colleagues get irritated when I (not infrequently) bristle with moral indignation. The story of why I and other constructivists have not engaged in normative theory is complicated. I don't claim to fully understand it and I don't want to dwell on it here, but just mention a few possible explanations. When I started working on human rights in the late 1980s, the choice of topic alone was a sufficiently normative signal that I felt obliged to spend the rest of my time demonstrating that I was being rigorous in my theory and method. Perhaps I believed that my normative argument was implicit and the discerning reader would know where I stood. Maybe Frost is correct and even constructivists have concealed our ethical stances under a disguise of (our own kind of) scientific objectivity? After over twenty years of doing serious empirical research to document key trends in world politics, I'm still annoyed at being categorised in a recent article by Jack Snyder and Leslie Vinjamuri among those ‘idealists’ who don't understand the ‘political realities’ of world politics.

Type
Chapter
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Moral Limit and Possibility in World Politics , pp. 83 - 111
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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