In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5 THE MORALITY OF NATIONS: AN ARISTOTELIAN APPROACH Lloyd P. Gerson A ristotle has very little to say about what we would today call international relations. Nevertheless, I think that Aristotle does provide us with the conceptual tools for making some sense of the philosophical issues surrounding and saturating the global village. The principal insight gleaned from Aristotle in this regard is that much if not all of the discussion of international relations today rests on a serious mistake. The mistake is to suppose that nations are moral agents. If one supposes this, then whatever theory of morality one wishes to defend, one will assume that that theory applies to nations. Thus, if one, say, defends a version of utilitarianism or some sort of deontological theory, one will then go on to claim its applicability to nations, treating them as if they were moral agents. I think Aristotle can help us see that this is a mistake, whatever moral theory one happens to hold. So much for the negative. But if nations are not moral agents, what are they? Again, Aristotle can help us to see that they are agents, although not moral agents, and that understanding the peculiar type of agent that a nation is helps us to see how the real moral agents that comprise nations ought to direct their nations on the international stage. NATIONS AND PERSONS In his groundbreaking book The Gutenberg Galaxy, written in 1962, Marshall McLuhan coined the now famous phrase “the global village.”1 It hardly needs arguing that over the last forty years the understanding of international affairs, broadly speaking, has fed on this metaphor. There are two competing or interlocking ideas here. The first is that individuals are, or can be, or ought to be connected in various ways to the rest of humanity. Obviously, technology is the engine that pulls this train. The second is that nations or 77 78 LLOYD P. GERSON states are, or can be, or ought to be connected analogously to the way that individual members of a village are. I am fairly certain that McLuhan was focused on the first idea. But it does seem clear that the second idea builds on the first. If we are all members of a global village, then international relations ought to reflect that new reality. Of course, the idea of international relations antedates the “global village.” Perhaps a convenient date for its origin is the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. It seems, however, that in the last decades, theorizing about international relations has in fact intersected with the global village idea. Unquestionably, the idea of a normative basis for international relations draws heavily on the global village metaphor and others like it. The incorporation of such metaphors into theorizing about the normative basis of international relations has actually been so complete that hardly anyone who engages in such theory regards it as problematic. I mean that it is simply assumed that the appropriate normative basis at the international level is carried over from its origin in theory concerned with morality among individuals. Thus, if we have a good idea about how human beings ought to act toward each other, we can simply apply that idea to matters regarding how nations ought to act toward each other. We can treat nations as moral agents on a par with individuals. In other words, the scope of a moral theory includes nations as well as individuals. The assumption that moral theory indifferently (or almost so) covers nations as well as individuals is so pervasive that the inferences from a moral prescription at the individual level to an identical moral prescription at the national level are taken as being practically immediate. Such thinking is facilitated by a raft of additional metaphors such as “the family of nations” and the “community of nations.” Occasionally, one discovers a passing acknowledgment that the application of moral prescriptions to nations and individuals indifferently is a fiction, albeit with the additional stipulation that it is a necessary or inevitable or desirable one. Here, we find reliance on the analogous term “legal fiction” as used in law. But it is far from obvious that a legal fiction is translatable into the basis for the ascription of moral agency. For example, one can hardly infer from the patent legal fiction that an errant military guard dog could be made subject to court martial to a conclusion that dogs are moral agents. So, one wonders why the legal fiction of...

Share