INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, PHILOSOPHY OF

The philosophy of international relations --or more precisely its political philosophy--
embraces problems about morality in diplomacy and war, the justice of international practices and
institutions bearing on economic welfare and the global environment, human rights, and the
relationship between sectional loyalties such as patriotism and global moral commitments.
Not everyone believes that such a subject can exist, or rather, that it can have significant
ethical content. According to political realism --a widely-held view among Anglo-American
students of international relations-- moral considerations have no place in decisions about foreign
affairs and international behavior. The most extreme varieties of realism deny that moral judgment
can have meaning or force in international affairs; more moderate versions acknowledge the
meaningfulness of such judgments but hold either that leaders have no responsibility to attend to
the morality of their actions in foreign affairs (because their overriding responsibility is to advance
the interests of their constituents), or that the direct pursuit of moral goals in international
relations is likely to be self-defeating.
Leaving aside the more skeptical kinds of political realism, the most influential orientations
to substantive international morality can be arrayed on a continuum. Distinctions are made on the
basis of the degree of privilege, if any, extended to the citizens of a state to act on their own
behalf at the potential expense of the liberty and well-being of persons elsewhere. ‘The morality of
states’, at one extreme, holds that states have rights of autonomy analogous to those of
individuals within domestic society, which secure them against external interference in their
internal affairs and guarantee their ownership and control of the natural and human resources
within their borders. At the other end of the continuum, one finds cosmopolitan views which deny
that states enjoy any special privilege; these views hold that individuals rather than states are the
ultimate subjects of morality, and that value judgments concerning international conduct should
take equally seriously the well-being of each person potentially affected by a decision, whether
compatriot or foreigner. Cosmopolitan views may acknowledge that states (and similar entities)
have morally significant features, but analysis of the significance of these features must connect
them with considerations of individual well-being. Intermediate views are possible; for example, a
conception of the privileged character of the state can be combined with a conception of the
international realm as weakly normative (that is, governed by principles which demand that states
adhere to minimum conditions of peaceful coexistence).
The theoretical difference between the morality of states and a fully cosmopolitan morality
is reflected in practical differences about the justifiability of intervention in the internal affairs of
other states, the basis and content of human rights, and the extent, if any, of our obligations as
individuals and as citizens of states to help redress the welfare effects of international inequalities.

1 The scope of the subject

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development of a doctrine of ‘just’ war (often in the context of the law of nations); and (3) the
articulation of peace plans - that is, institutional schemes aimed at ending war. There are
significant (albeit brief) passages concerning international relations in works devoted primarily to
the political theory of the state by most of the important modern writers, including Machiavelli,
Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick. Among the few works of great
stature devoted mainly to international relations, Kant’s Perpetual Peace (1795) is arguably the
most important, but its brevity and epigrammatic style render its normative content elusive.
The paucity of philosophical thought about international relations is not easy to explain,
although the burden must fall on the central distinction of the international realm vis-à-vis the
domestic - namely, the absence of a state-like structure, and consequently of an institutional focus
for philosophical speculation. In recent decades there has been an increase in interest in the
subject, doubtless reflecting the fundamental changes in the character of international politics and
society that have occurred in the mid- and late-twentieth century. An intensification of
international and transnational activity, particularly in finance and trade, has given rise to a vast
increase in the number of nonstate participants in international affairs - including both
international organizations (that is, organizations of states) and nongovernmental organizations.
‘Total war’ (characterized by the mobilization of entire societies) and the invention of chemical
and nuclear weapons have rendered it virtually impossible to contain the harms of war to those
who participate in combat, so that the traditional distinction between soldier and civilian has
broken down (see War and peace, philosophy of §6). The exploration of space, the exploitation
of ocean resources and growing political concern about the environment have spawned policy
issues which are essentially transnational, rather than international. For all of these reasons, the
occasion for international philosophy is greater now than at any earlier point in the modern age.
Regarded as a normative enterprise, the philosophy of international relations might be seen
as an outgrowth of speculation about the basis and content of the ‘law of nations.’ But this would
convey an excessively narrow conception of the subject matter of international philosophy. The
law of nations was a body of norms applicable to what was conceived as a society of states whose
principal forms of interaction were diplomacy and war. International relations consist of more
than the diplomatic and military engagements of states, however. The actors include international
and transnational organizations (the latter composed of members which are not states), business
firms, and sometimes individuals, and their forms of interaction extend well beyond diplomacy and
war - they include commerce, financial transactions and the exchange of information and culture.
Such variety gives rise to problems of choice of great complexity and potential moral significance.
The consequences of transnational interactions for the global distribution of income and wealth,
the movement of human capital in the form of immigration flows, and the quality of the global
environment are of particular importance for human welfare. A normative philosophy of
international relations adequate to its empirical referent would embrace all of these subject
matters.

2 Political realism and international skepticism

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Morgenthau (1946) and George Kennan (1951). The common element is a denial that moral
considerations should carry weight in decisions about foreign policy.
The most impressive statement of the realist position was given by Hobbes (1651), who
compared the international realm with the state of nature in respect of the absence of a central
authority, and concluded that states in international relations have the same freedom from the
obligation to follow moral principles (‘laws of nature’) as do individuals in the state of nature. On
the Hobbesian view, states are not obliged to comply with moral principles because they have no
reason to do so in the absence of a common enforcement agency or effective conventions of
reciprocal compliance. At the base of this view is a conception of morality as a mutual benefit
scheme, in which individuals comply with principles restricting the direct pursuit of self-interest
when and because general compliance with these principles is mutually beneficial in comparison to
mutual noncompliance. In this extreme form, political realism is no more than a special case of a
familiar type of moral skepticism, which denies that moral judgments can be either reasonable or
motivationally efficacious if they are not backed up by considerations of advantage (see Moral
skepticism; Moral motivation). If one were to reject this type of moral skepticism, then the form
of political realism associated with it would fall by the wayside.
Another form of realism, found more often in the literature of policy than philosophy,
holds that leaders of states are not obligated to follow higher-level moral principles because the
controlling obligation of their office is to advance the state’s interest. Views of this kind are likely
to seem particularly plausible in democratic states, where leaders are elected by the people and
their responsibilities are understood as the advancement of the interests of those for whom they
act as agents. Unlike the form of political realism considered earlier, this version is not in any
obvious sense a type of moral skepticism. Indeed, it acknowledges that leaders of states, and by
inference, their constituents can have moral obligations. The challenge faced by anyone who
wishes to defend this view is to explain why it should be thought that leaders of states may
justifiably do for their constituents what their constituents, as a group, may not justifiably do for
themselves.
Another non-skeptical kind of realism, and perhaps the most persuasive of all versions of
the view, is best described as heuristic. It does not deny that outcomes in foreign affairs can be
appraised in terms of the good and evil, or that actions and policies can be evaluated in terms of
their rightness or wrongness. It holds, however, that outcomes that are desirable from a moral
point of view are more likely to occur when foreign policy decisions are screened from the direct
influence of moral considerations. The argument for this position is essentially historical: typically,
that moral considerations have tended to distort practical reasoning in foreign affairs in a more or
less systematic way, and that reasoning which is blocked from the direct influence of such
considerations, and whose scope is limited to considerations of interest, has more often led to
morally desirable results. In his Lindley Lectures (1951) - a defining document of political realism
- George Kennan made an argument of this kind with respect to US diplomacy between the wars.
The historical thesis plainly cannot be examined here, but it is worth observing that, even if the
thesis turns out to be true, there would be no theoretical challenge to the possibility of
international philosophy.

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3 The morality of states and the domestic analogy
Assuming that the skeptical challenge can be overcome, the most important problem in
international philosophy is the moral status of the state and the character of its relationship to
other agents in the world. This problem is implicated in most of the leading normative issues in
international relations - for example, the meaning of sovereignty, the permissibility of intervention,
the basis and content of human rights, the extent of acceptable restrictions on the movement of
persons across borders, entitlements to natural resources, and the obligations of states and their
people to provide material assistance to others.
Writing about immigration policy, Sidgwick described a “general conflict between the
cosmopolitan and the national ideals of political organization”. According to the national ideal,
foreign policy should “promote the interests of a determinate group of human beings, bound
together by the tie of a common nationality”, according to the cosmopolitan ideal, it should strive
impartially to promote the interests of everyone, regardless of location or citizenship (1919: 309).
The distinction between ‘national’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ ideals is fundamental in contemporary
discourse about international ethics.
The dominant view in modern political theory, enduring well into the twentieth century,
has been one or another variation of Sidgwick’s ‘national ideal’, or what we might more
accurately call ‘the morality of states’. This conception has four distinguishing features. First, the
international realm is a ‘society of states’ in which states, rather than individuals, are the principal
actors and therefore the subjects of the major rights and duties. Second, states have a moral status
analogous to that of individuals in domestic society. In particular, states have rights of territorial
integrity and political sovereignty, analogous to the right of individual liberty, which secure their
governments against external interference in the exercise of political authority over their territories
and populations. Third, states are not generally responsible for the circumstances of outsiders or
of other states, and within limits set by the principle of sovereignty, any individual state is entitled
to assign priority to advancing the well-being of its inhabitants in preference to the equal well-
being of others. Fourth, there is a high level of tolerance for diversity within the international
order: states are not held to a single standard of political legitimacy, and, except perhaps in
extreme cases, neither individual states nor the international community are authorized to
intervene to protect a state’s people against their own government or to bring about domestic
political reform.
The morality of states is a genuine morality: like individual liberty in the domestic case,
sovereignty is hardly the same as license (see Sovereignty). It is, however, peculiar in presuming
that a discontinuity exists between the moral order among the individuals who cohabit a single
domestic society and the more comprehensive moral order among all the individuals in the world.
What can be said for this presumption?
We might begin with the picture of the international realm as a ‘society’ in which states
play the roles played by persons in domestic society. This ‘domestic analogy’ is the most
influential form in which the morality of states has been articulated, due mainly to the writings of
eighteenth-century international jurists like Vattel (1758) and Wolff (1749) (see Wolff §7). Many
find the analogy persuasive even today; for example, it is the organizing principle of Michael
Walzer’s formulation of the doctrine of the just war (Walzer 1977).

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 Although influential, the domestic analogy faces notorious difficulties, among which the
most serious is that individual persons and the collectivities to which they are compared are such
fundamentally different kinds of entities. States, for example, lack the unity of consciousness and
the capacity for moral personality which we presume individual moral persons to possess, and so
cannot be said to be self-determining in the same sense as individuals. [Anseynol’s note: Far more
important than this distinction is the fact that human beings are sentient beings, but states have no
‘nervous system’ independent of the rulers and/or the ruled. Human beings suffer (and have
capacity for happiness), and states, understood as a collective ‘body’ of human beings, are often
the causes of human suffering.] Indeed, as a general matter, states may not even be identified with
the societies they presume to organize and govern; leaving aside the special (and historically
unusual) cases of the representative democracies, an indigenous government may stand in as
arbitrary a relationship to its own people as would a foreign conqueror. [Anseynol writes: “… all
countries are under the occupation, as it were, of their own armies.] Because states and persons
have such different properties, it would be a surprise if it turned out that the reasons for valuing
individual autonomy also apply to the state; and if they do not, the domestic analogy will not do
much philosophical work in justifying the morality of states (see State, the).
Most contemporary writers who rely on the domestic analogy to describe an international
order in which states have a privileged ethical status appeal to considerations other than the
analogy itself to defend the view.Two contrasting approaches deserve particular attention: first,
the liberal idea that states’ rights of political sovereignty and territorial integrity derive from the
underlying individual rights and liberties of their members; second, the communitarian argument
that respect for sovereignty enables political communities to preserve their distinctive histories
and cultures, and thus to serve the human interests of their inhabitants.
For the first of these arguments, it is necessary to describe the extent and character of the
individual rights and liberties which are supposed to serve as the basis of the derivative rights of
states. Such a view emerges most naturally from voluntaristic conceptions of the social contract,
in which the state is pictured as a free association based on either a historical contract or an
ongoing implicit agreement (see Contractarianism). The state’s authority to interfere in individual
lives would, on such a view, be bounded by the terms of the underlying agreement; and the
collective right against interference by outside forces in the internal life of the state would simply
be the outward expression of the rights of its members not to be interfered with in their individual
lives without their own consent. But the machinery of social contract theory is not really essential.
Taking their lead from J. S. Mill (in ‘A Few Words on Non-intervention’, 1859), those who
believe there is an important connection between individual liberty and the sovereignty of states
need hold no more than that sovereignty makes individual liberty possible - if only because states
serve as bulwarks against conquest by other states and protect a zone where free societies can
flourish.
Liberal notions of the state’s special status face two kinds of difficulties, which on
examination reduce to one. Voluntaristic conceptions are open to the familiar criticism that very
few actually-existing states can realistically be described as voluntary associations [I, Anseynol,
know of none]; either the original contract lies too far in the past to exert any normative force in
the present, or it is not possible to demonstrate that the prevailing terms of association are the
object of a tacit or implicit agreement. Non-voluntaristic conceptions risk overgeneralizing by

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supposing that individual liberties are better protected through a system of more or less
unconditional respect for the sovereignty of states than in a system in which the right of
sovereignty is restricted. [Anseynol makes a case for the possibility that individual liberties can be
served much better in a global system of justice, after the abolition of nation-states.]
The communitarian alternative links the moral status of the state with that of the
underlying society. The view develops in two stages. First, it is argued that individuals are
unlikely to flourish (or to realize their goods) except as members of communities characterized by
at least a minimum level of mutual identification and fellow-feeling. This is only in part because
individual human good may involve intrinsically social elements; it is also because the instrumental
values of society, such as stability of expectations, can only be realized when there is an unforced
disposition to cooperate, and this in turn can only be sustained when individuals identify
themselves and each other as members of a common enterprise. Second, it is claimed that
individuals are not likely to develop or sustain the requisite level of mutual identification if they
are not governed through institutions which they can regard as the political expression of their
own community. Again, this is only in part because the motivational force of communal loyalty
may arise from a conception of the autonomous community as having intrinsic value; it is also
because a community’s capacity to defend itself from others and to elicit the necessary degree of
contribution from its members will certainly depend on the people’s acceptance of their governing
institutions (see Community and communitarianism; Nation and nationalism).
The communitarian view assumes that there is some meaningful sense in which states can
be seen as expressions of the values of their underlying societies, but this is controversial.
Particularly in societies without representative institutions, there may simply be no way to
determine whether the existing institutions are expressions of widely shared political values or,
instead, legacies of force and fraud. There is a further problem: the communitarian argument
trades on an image of domestic societies as reflecting a moral consensus in their communities, a
condition that is surely, today, more the exception than the rule. As David Luban has argued
(1980), both the liberal and the communitarian accounts of the state’s special status often seem to
reflect a romantic idealization that obscures the diversity of state forms in the modern world and
the great variation in their degrees of respect for individual rights and liberties.
A doctrine of international morality in which states occupy a privileged position might be
defended without relying on any view about the morally special character of the state itself. In
fact, some of the most influential views about international morality have this structure. They
argue that a world order of states is more likely, on balance, to achieve values of general
importance to human beings - a relatively high level of stability and conditions in which groups
and societies will face the most favorable circumstances for their own prosperity. Such a
generalization would not necessarily be undermined by examples of states whose governments are
repressively authoritarian or which enforce exploitative domestic economic arrangements, as long
as these examples could be shown to be exceptional. Moreover, views as highly consequentialist
as this would have no difficulty, in principle, accommodating principles establishing minimum
global standards of political legitimacy such as those found in the international doctrine of human
rights.

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4 Cosmopolitan morality
Cosmopolitanism stands in contrast to the notion that the boundaries between states,
nations or societies have deep moral significance. It holds that each person is equally a subject of
moral concern (or, that in the justification of choices of action or policy, the interests of each
person affected should be taken equally into account), and that spatial proximity or shared
membership are not in themselves sources of moral privilege. On a cosmopolitan view, there is no
fundamental moral discontinuity between domestic and international society because states qua
states have no special standing; if individuals have more extensive responsibilities to their own
compatriots than to foreigners, or if states are entitled to be treated with some special respect by
others in the international arena, this should be explained in a way that is consistent with the basic
conception of a single moral realm in which each individual is equally worthy of concern and
respect (see Impartiality).
There is a strong prima facie case for cosmopolitanism. For one thing, ordinary morality
appears to presuppose its essential premise. Cosmopolitanism applies to the world the maxim that
what we should do, or what institutions we should establish, should be decided on the basis of an
impartial consideration of the claims of each person who would be affected by our choices. In one
or another form, this maxim, although not beyond philosophical criticism, is a mainstay of the
political moralities found in virtually all contemporary democratic cultures. Moreover, as the
discussion in §3 suggests, the morality of states - cosmopolitanism’s major rival - is difficult to
maintain as a distinct view once the special status assigned to the state is brought into question;
indeed, the most plausible explanation of the right of sovereignty may be an application of
cosmopolitan principle rather than an alternative to it.
Against these considerations, there are at least three sources of doubt about cosmopolitan
moralities. First, such views can seem either pallid or otherworldly in their apparent failure to
connect with recognizable sources of motivation (for example, local affiliations or patriotic
loyalties). Second, and relatedly, cosmopolitanism can appear to be too demanding, imposing
requirements on individual conduct that may properly be described as heroic. [Indeed! Cowardice
of most patients do not disprove the feasibility of a remedy proposal.] Finally, these views can
appear politically innocent, inviting an effort to build global political structures (a ‘world
government’) that would do more harm than good.
The most common reply to these doubts is to argue that they rest on an excessively simple
interpretation of cosmopolitanism. In response to the first point, for example, it might be noted
that cosmopolitan views are no more remote than most other moral doctrines from recognizable
sources of motivation; although there is certainly a question about the capacity of cosmopolitan
reasons for action to influence the will, this question is not different or more complex than the
same question raised about the more familiar versions of Kantianism and utilitarianism. It is not
possible to reply to the second objection without considering the normative consequences of
cosmopolitanism; but it is worth noting that the view need not be interpreted as a doctrine of
individual conduct, and indeed, that its most natural interpretation is instead as a view (or family
of views) about institutional policy, in which case the objection is out of place. Finally,
cosmopolitanism need not make any assumptions at all about the best political structure for
international affairs; whether there should be an overarching, global political organization, and if
so, how authority should be divided between the global organization and its subordinate political

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elements, is properly understood as a problem for normative political science rather than for
political philosophy itself. Indeed, cosmopolitanism is consistent with a conception of the world in
which states constitute the principal forms of human social and political organization; the central
question is whether this conception or some feasible alternative would be preferred when the
matter is regarded from a perspective in which the interests of all are equally represented.
Although formally consistent with a state-based conception of world order, any plausible
version of cosmopolitanism is likely to differ substantively from familiar versions of the morality
of states. Consider, for example, the question of intervention. Because it assigns a high value to
state sovereignty, the morality of states takes it as a settled matter that states, coalitions of states,
and international agencies should refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of individual states,
except in certain well-defined, exceptional cases, chief among which is intervention in self-
defense. In the aftermath of Nuremberg, intervention to end shocking and egregious practices
such as genocide has come to be accepted as well (although such an exception, because it
presupposes an attenuated principle of sovereignty, fits uncomfortably with the morality of
states). Cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, is likely to be less suspicious of intervention in
principle, and to admit the possibility that intervention for protective and remedial purposes might
be justified. On a cosmopolitan view, the most important questions about intervention are
pragmatic, having to do with the chances that intervention would accomplish its legitimate
purposes without doing unacceptable collateral harm.
Or consider the question of international distributive justice (see Justice, international). In
its traditional form, the morality of states must regard a state’s involvement in the relief of
material suffering elsewhere as a matter of charity or mutual aid. This is because the principle of
sovereignty functions not only to protect a society against interference in its own political and
social affairs, but also as a kind of collective property right: it secures a state against non-
consensual deprivations of the resources and wealth to be found on (or under) its territory.
Understood more abstractly, it conveys a conception of domestic societies as bearing the primary
responsibility for their own development, and of social wealth as deriving more significantly from
the collective efforts of previous generations in a single society than from that society’s good
fortune in the distribution of natural and genetic resources and in the favorable prior course of
political and social history. A cosmopolitan view, again in contrast, would begin with a
conception of the world as a single human community. It would be unlikely to regard states as
having privileged claims to the accumulation of social wealth unless institutions embodying such a
recognition were the best feasible means to realize the requirements of whatever principles of
distributive justice, themselves global in their scope, would be preferred from a point of view in
which everyone’s interests were represented.
Between the morality of states and moral cosmopolitanism, a variety of intermediate
positions might be identified. The most interesting of these are two-tiered views which combine
acceptance of a minimum global standard of conduct with tolerance of substantial diversity above
the minimum. Such views vary according to the content of the global minimum - whether, for
example, it includes significant standards of domestic legitimacy (are states required to respect the
human rights of their people?) or significant expectations of participation in schemes involving the
international transfer of wealth (are states required to contribute to famine relief or international
development efforts?) A good example of such a view is the revisionist doctrine of a ‘law of

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peoples’ recently set forth by John Rawls (1993).

5 Human rights
As an element of the discourse of international affairs, the doctrine of universal human
rights is a legacy of the settlement of the Second World War. As a philosophical matter, however,
the notion of a human right is ancient, its universalistic strand running to the Stoics and its
deontological structure dating at least to the early modern notion of natural right.
The underlying idea is that all human beings, simply because they are human beings, are
entitled to be treated according to certain minimum standards. Very extensive statements of the
content of this doctrine can be found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by
the United Nations in 1948, and in several human rights covenants adopted by the United Nations
and various regional organizations. There is little dispute in contemporary public discourse about
either the grounding or the content of human rights doctrine.
There is, however, very little agreement among philosophers about any of the major
theoretical questions concerning human rights (see Rights §5). Philosophers disagree, for
example, about the grounding of human rights, particularly the sense in which these rights can be
said to pertain to human beings ‘as such’; their extent, particularly whether human rights include,
in addition to the standard individual liberties, civil and political rights and rights to a minimum
standard of living; about the priorities among human rights, a question which is especially vexed if
their extent is taken to be relatively broad; and about the relationship between human rights and
other moral values. The doctrine of human rights did not receive sustained theoretical attention
until the late 1970s and 1980s; the most notable contributions are due to Henry Shue (1980) and
R. J. Vincent (1986).
The doctrine of human rights is chiefly important in international philosophy as an
embodiment of the notion that there are universal minimum standards of political legitimacy --that
is, standards to which all societies are responsible. To put it slightly differently, the doctrine of
human rights sets a limit to the extent of acceptable diversity among the political constitutions of
states. As such, human rights doctrine might be seen from one perspective as the entering wedge
of cosmopolitan thought, or, from another, as the price that statist conceptions must pay for their
plausibility. Either way, human rights doctrine is the most familiar form in which two-tiered
theories of international morality present themselves, and perhaps the most likely avenue for the
future development of international philosophy.

See also: State, the

CHARLES R. BEITZ

References and further reading

Beitz, C.R. (1979) Political Theory and International Relations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press. (A critical analysis of political realism and the morality of states, and an effort to
set forth a cosmopolitan theory of international justice; extensive bibliography.)

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Brierly, J.L. (1963) The Law of Nations: An Introduction to the International Law of Peace, ed.
Sir H. Waldock, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 6th edn. (Historical introduction to
international law.)

Brownlie, I. (ed.) (1993) Basic Documents on Human Rights, 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University
Press. (Comprehensive compilation of authoritative international documents on human rights.)

Hobbes, T. (1651) Leviathan. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, vol. 3, ed. Sir W.
Molesworth, London: John Bohn, 1839. (Chapters 21 and 30 referred to in §2.)

Kant, I. (1795) Perpetual Peace, trans. H. Nisbet in Political Writings, 2nd edn ed. H. Reiss,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. (Referred to in §1.) Kennan, G. (1951) American
Diplomacy 1900-1950, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (The Lindley Lectures referred
to in §2 above; a defining document of American political realism.)

Luban, D. (1980) ‘Just War and Human Rights’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 9 (2): 160-81, and
‘The Romance of the Nation-State’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 9 (4): 392-97. (Cosmopolitan
critique of the morality of states.)

Mill, J.S. (1859) ‘A Few Words on Non-intervention’, Dissertations and Discussions: Political,
Philosophical, and Historical, London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1867, vol. 3, 153-78.
(Historically important statement of the liberal theory of special status of the state; referred to in
§3.)

Morgenthau, H. (1946) Scientific Man versus Power Politics, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press. (Influential defense of political realism.)

Nardin, T. (1983) Law, Morality, and the Relations of States, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press. (Argues that the aim of international law and morality is to regulate a pluralistic
international society consisting of states with differing internal moralities; comprehensive
bibliography.)

Nickel, J.W. (1987) Making Sense of Human Rights, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, and
London: University of California Press. (Documentary appendix.)

Rawls, J. (1993) ‘The Law of Peoples’, in S. Shute and S. Hurley (eds) On Human Rights, New
York: Basic Books, 41-82. (Example of a ‘two-tiered’ view; referred to in §3.)

Shue, H. (1980) Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press. (An argument for an expansive doctrine of universal human rights.)

Sidgwick, H. (1919) The Elements of Politics, London: Macmillan, 4th edn. (‘National’ and
‘cosmopolitan’ ideals contrasted in connection with immigration policy; referred to in §3.)

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Vattel, E. de (1758) The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law, trans C.G. Fenwick,
The Classics of International Law no. 4, vol. 3, Washington, DC: The Carnegie Institution, 1916.
(Important source of domestic analogy; referred to in §3.)

Vincent, R.J. (1986) Human Rights and International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, in association with the Royal Institute of International Affairs. (A survey of
theoretical and political issues in human rights doctrine; extensive references.)

Walzer, M. (1977) Just and Unjust Wars, New York: Basic Books. (Most influential
contemporary work on morality in war, with extensive references; referred to in §3.)

Wolff, C. (1749) The Law of Nations Treated According to the Scientific Method, trans. J.H.
Drake, The Classics of International Law no. 13, vol. 2, Washington, DC: The Carnegie
Institution, 1934. (Important source of domestic analogy referred to in §3.)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London: Routledge

[I, Anseynol, copied the text to clipboard, and pasted it to a Word document, then changed fonts and
attributes, converted some British spellings to American spellings, and added a few comments. I am fully
aware that far less consideration is given to ‘cosmopolitan’ approaches in the real world, then in this
article. I find the article less objectionable than some of the ‘classic’ books on international relations or
political philosophy. However, I must clarify that my objections are not limited to the few notes that I
inserted above. In a WordPerfect version of this document, I make my comments ‘unprintable’.]

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