ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses some of the tensions between critical and traditional approaches to ethics, highlighting the rationalism that dominates traditional approaches and the alternatives proffered by critical international ethics. It argues that critical engagements with international ethics challenge the orthodox approach of seeking abstract universal rules for solving ethical problems. Rationalist rules-based ethics elevate a particular form of knowing that closes off debate and contestation, silences the historical, social, political and economic conditions that create ethical problems, prevents the accommodation of difference, and obscures the self and its place in moral judgement. The chapter illustrates some of the diverse ways that a critical sensibility enriches the understanding of international ethics by drawing out some key strands of contemporary critical thought and their challenge to moral rationalist hegemony. It highlights a different kind of knowing, drawing on radical Hegelian critical theory and its destabilization of epistemic certainty.
