Universality, Ethics and International Relations

A Grammatical Reading

Véronique Pin-Fat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135282462
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Universality Ethics and International Relations introduces students to the key debates about ethics in international relations theory. This book explores the reasons why grappling with universality and ethics seems to be a profound endeavour and where we end up when we do.

By offering a new way of thinking about ethics in International Relations, Pin-Fat shows that there are several varieties of universality which are offered as the answer to ethics in global politics; the divine universality of Hans Morgenthau, the ideal universality of Charles R. Beitz and the binary universality of Michael Walzer. Taking the reader on a grammatical odyssey through each, the book concludes that profound searches for the foundations of universality can't fulfil our deepest desires for an answer to ethics in global politics. Pin-Fat suggests that the failure of these searches reveals the ethical desirability of defending universality as (im)possible.

An ideal text for use in a wide variety of courses, including ethics in international relations, international relations theory, and international political theory, this work provides a valuable new contribution to this rapidly developing field of research.

1
Reading grammatically

Reading, representation and the limits of language

Grammar is the shadow of possibility cast by language on phenomena.

(Wittgenstein 1974: §329)

The aim of this chapter is to outline a way of approaching ethics in International Relations (IR) that allows us to understand the ways in which universality has been theoretically produced in the discipline. It is neither novel nor unique to point out that universality matters. One could claim, with some grounds, that the history of Western philosophy is the story of a veritable obsession it. The theorists considered in this book, and indeed its author, are no exception. By reading grammatically I hope to show that, for IR, the dominant ethical position, whether implicit or explicit, is that the location of a universal is a fundamental requirement of ethics. More to the point, regardless of what the ultimate source of universality may be, humanity must embody it. Of course, different theorists occupy this position in different ways and, sometimes, my interpretation of what they are doing may seem directly at odds with their own description of theirs. Nevertheless, a notion of universality which serves as the foundation of ethics appears for each, albeit differently configured. And, it matters. On the one hand, it matters because their understandings of universality delineate the very possibility of ethics in world politics. On the other hand, more importantly, such delineations matter ethico-politically. By its end, this book will have embarked on several grammatical odysseys as a way of climbing each rung of each language game. The point of doing this will simply be that, by reading grammatically, we can ask for a re-opening of the question of universality and ethics in world politics and change ‘what we want to do in ethics’ and world politics (Diamond 1995:24). We might say that reading grammatically sets a different task.

The questions about universality, ethics and world politics that a grammatical reading poses are therefore, going to be somewhat different from the standard one. Instead of asking, and providing answers to, the question ‘What is ethics in world politics?’ I will be asking ‘How does grammar constitute universality and thereby, delineate ethical possibility in world politics? What are the effects of this? Where do we end up?’ Two reading steps are involved in order to explore this alternative. First, it suggests reading in order to locate the most salient grammatical features of each theorist and show how grammar is the constitutive dynamic that accounts not only for their specific configuration of what the problem of ethics is in IR (the question) but also their answers (which, in the final analysis, rely on a configuration of universality). And second, it also suggests reading in such a way as to notice that what theorists want may not only be where they think it can be, nor dependent upon what they think it must depend on. This second aspect of reading can help uncover the latent narrowness of the approaches considered and the surprising (albeit dangerous) effects that this has on the possibility of ethics in world politics.

The grammatical focus that is proposed, it should be emphasised, is not a focus on just ‘words’ and therefore, an avoidance of ‘real-world’ ethical conundrums. On the contrary, an engagement with what might count as ‘reality’ is itself a central ethico-political theme that motivates this book. However, the route I have chosen by way of engagement with these questions is through a consideration of what the relationship between language and reality/the world might be.

The approach of reading grammatically that is being proposed here is an applied interpretation of the implications of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s thoughts on language and reality and his notion of a ‘grammatical investigation’ for IR theory generally, and ethics within it more specifically.¹ The result, I hope, is a particular way of reading paradigmatic contributors to IR that can be mobilised throughout subsequent chapters in order for us to appreciate the constitutive dynamics of each form of universality they propose and the consequences of their resultant delineations of ethical possibility in world politics.

So, what sort of themes can we expect a grammatical reading to involve? On the one hand, it will involve addressing some methodological questions such as: Is the role of theory to uncover the nature of international political reality and/or the nature of the ethical? Is the separation of theory and practice unavoidable? If, following Wittgenstein, the answer to these questions is a firm ‘no’, then we can expect a grammatical reading to offer us an alternative way of proceeding that still makes engaging with ethics in world politics possible. On the other hand, a grammatical reading will involve a number of refusals: A refusal to be seduced by metaphysics, epistemology, a search for foundations and the notion that language represents reality.² We might say that reading grammatically is an ethos of reading which is determined to avoid the seduction of ‘digging’ deep into phenomena to find ‘reality’ and the answer. On the positive side, it also involves an ethos that fully embraces contingency and uncertainty. While for traditional theorists this sounds far removed from a positive move, I hope to show that a return to this ‘rough ground’ is fruitful. I shall now address each of these themes in turn.

‘Sketches of landscapes’: an ethos of reading

In order to try to convey an ethos of reading grammatically or, what others have described as, the ‘spirit’ of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy (Diamond 1995; Edwards 1982:1), it is worth recounting a story about how Wittgenstein wrote his profoundly influential Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 1958a). Doing it ‘the bloody hard way’ is how Wittgenstein summarised it. Indeed, the style in which his later philosophy was written shows the difficulties he was grappling with and how he reconciled himself to them (Binkley 1973; Staten 1985:64). The final result was a book that ‘only’ consisted of ‘a number of sketches of landscapes’ written in the form of remarks and short paragraphs (Wittgenstein 1958a: vii). He says:

My thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination. – And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross[ing] in every direction. – The same or almost the same points were always being approached afresh from many different directions, and new sketches made … Thus this book is really only an album.

(Wittgenstein 1958a: vii)

That Wittgenstein was only able to piece together an ‘album’ of his thoughts had nothing to do with a lack of ability to write in a linear fashion as the style of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the pinnacle of his early philosophy, testifies (Wittgenstein 1922). His Tractatus is perhaps the apotheosis of the linear model of argumentation. His unique (and often copied) complex numbering of each paragraph, sub-paragraph, sub-sub-paragraph and so on, illustrated how he had previously explored how each proposition could be broken down into its component parts, and thus reflect the structure of reality (logical positivism). The radical change in his form of writing, from linear to zigzagging, suggests something far more significant than just a matter of stylistic taste (Wittgenstein 1958a, 1958b, 1969, 1974, 1978, 1980a, 1980b, 1980c, 1980d, 1981, 1993). It marks a profound sea change in the way he sought to communicate the relationship between language and reality in his later work. This sea change is perhaps best summarised as a rejection of not only the linear model of argumentation which assumes a high degree of determinism as to what can logically follow from a premise or set of premises, but a different approach to unsettling the central idea in the history of Western metaphysics which underpins it – the impulse to find ‘a “below-the-world” foundation’ of reality (Finch 1995:158). The rejection of such an impulse results in two casualties. The first casualty is a concern with epistemology understood as ‘knowledge as accurate representation, made possible by special mental processes, and intelligible through a general theory of representation’ (Rorty 1980:6). Once we give up the possibility of representing ‘reality’ (‘below-the-world’ foundations), we also have to let go of the idea of knowledge as accurate representation. The second casualty is certainty. If we open our ears to the echo of Wittgenstein’s spirit, we no longer inhabit a world where it is possible to apprehend a reality which is ‘out there’ (i.e. outside language) and is the object that is represented so that assessments of claims about it can be measured as accurate (true) or inaccurate (false). Without the possibility of knowledge of this kind, certainty becomes impossible because it rests upon it. It is Wittgenstein’s resistance to and, refusal of, both metaphysics and epistemology that characterise the ‘spirit’ of his philosophy and, indeed, an ethos of reading grammatically.

To engage with an ethos of reading grammatically, then, suggests reading otherwise. It recommends letting go of the idea that accounts of ethics in world politics are accurate (or inaccurate) representations of reality. And it, therefore, pleads that we avoid the temptation to dig ‘beneath’ the surface for the foundations of reality that might serve as the true answer to our questions about ethics in world politics. This is not as easy as it sounds (‘the bloody hard way’). It cannot be achieved by using traditional philosophical methods since they rely so heavily on the very assumptions that a grammatical reading leaves behind. It is unsurprising then that Wittgenstein could not write the Investigations by using traditional philosophical arguments and found himself with ‘only’ an album of sketches. These sketches are, in the main, grammatical remarks. Why ‘grammatical’? As we shall see below, anethos of reading grammatically means staying on the surface of language in contrast to traditional philosophical methods. This is far from superficial. Rather, taking my cue from Wittgenstein, I will argue that staying on the surface of language implies a commitment to a full engagement with reality rather than taking flight from it. Bluntly, Wittgenstein’s rejection of metaphysics means there is nowhere else to go.

The limits of language: refusing the search for foundations, essences, and explanations

In this section I want to explore some of the reasons why Wittgenstein rejects the metaphysical impulse to find foundations beneath language and why this is relevant to questioning the delineation of ethical possibility in world politics. Put differently, I want to explore why the act of digging and what our spade unearths cannot satisfy our metaphysical desire for the answers we seek. I argue that, as an investigation into forms of representation, Wittgenstein’s work can be applied so that it assists us in looking at how universality in international ethics is constituted and how to trace its effects. The move towards the constitutive aspects of universality in world politics that I am proposing parallels Wittgenstein’s move away from metaphysics towards an investigation of grammar. This move requires challenging the assumptions that inform the representational view of thought and language. It will become increasingly clear that a central argument of this book is that forms of universality, and the ethical possibility of enactment that they circumscribe, are forms of representation (pictures). As such, they are open not only to some of Wittgenstein’s criticisms, but more positively, his way of philosophising otherwise.

While it may seem tangential to IR to engage with philosophy of language and the torment of metaphysics, I believe that it becomes very quickly apparent why it is central. Wittgenstein held the view that philosophical puzzlement is generated by certain pictures which lie in language holding us captive. In particular,

‘The general form of propositions is: This is how things are.’ – That is the kind of proposition one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it. A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

(Wittgenstein 1958a: §§114–15)

The target of his remarks here are propositions that take the form ‘This is how things are’. It does not take a massive leap of the imagination to recognise that in the area of ethics in IR, propositions like this abound: ‘In understanding morality and politics … confusion is compounded when personal and international morality are equated’ (Thompson 1985b). ‘The moral dilemma of foreign policy is but a special – it is true – particularly flagrant case of the moral dilemma which faces man on all levels of social action’ (Morgenthau 1962:319). ‘Ideal justice … comes into nonideal politics by way of the natural duty to secure just institutions where none presently exist’ (Beitz 1979:171) and ‘The community is itself a good – conceivably the most important good’ (Walzer 1983:29). We could say that such propositions act as an ontological marker of ‘how things are in world politics’ and what is possible, ethically, as a result.

What’s ‘captivating’ about such propositions or pictures? What captivates us into reading accounts of ethics in world politics as representations of international political reality? Primarily, it is that we think that theorists are outlining the ‘thing’s nature’: the nature of the international, the nature of the ethical, the nature of anarchy, the nature of states, the nature of theory, and so on. According to Wittgenstein, this kind of captivity arises because traditional philosophers (and, as I will show in subsequent chapters, some IR theorists) are seduced by a metaphysical notion of what makes a philosophical or theoretical inquiry profound (deep), namely, the search for essences (Wittgenstein 1958a: §97). In the case of some philosophers, it is the search for the essence of language. In the case of the IR theorists that are considered in this book, it is the location of some ‘thing’ essential about international politics and/or ethical phenomena. What that ‘thing’ is, of course, varies from theorist to theorist. Nonetheless, directing theoretical inquiry towards the nature of things, however understood, is for Wittgenstein a metaphysical urge and, I am suggesting, to be resisted by an ethos of reading grammatically.

For Wittgenstein, we think we are outlining a ‘thing’s nature’ and are captivated by it, because of the view that language and thought represent reality. In other words, that the role of language and thought is representation...

Table of contents

• Interventions
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• Introduction
• 1 Reading grammatically
• 2 Universality as conjunctive solution
• 3 Divine universality
• 4 Ideal universality
• 5 Binary universality
• 6 In defence of universality
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index