International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Deontological international ethics is a distinctive type of modern philosophical and political ethics. As a system of ethics , it describes, analyzes, and assesses the principles governing the interactions of actors at and across various levels of society. As an international ethics, it focuses on the relations between states and other salient international actors. As a deontological ethics, it is concerned with identifying and specifying the moral duties that each kind of international actor bears toward all others so interrelated. While some conception of duty is part of every (international) ethical tradition, deontology uniquely grounds morality on a conception of duty. Consequentialist international ethics – e.g., utilitarianism – grounds morality on the effects of action. Accordingly, consequentialism does not posit a set of duties to which actors are inescapably bound – although it seems to posit an absolute meta-level duty to always increase benefit and/or decrease burden ( Bentham 1948 ; Singer 2004 ). Virtue ethics grounds morality on an array of character virtues that comport with human happiness and well-being. The focus of virtue ethics is on specifying how this or that action instantiates courage, wisdom, temperance, and justice as opposed to specifying merely the consequences of action ( Aristotle 1996 ). In deontology, by contrast, actors bear inescapable ... log in or subscribe to read full text