ABSTRACT
The skeptic who argues that there is no role for ethics in international politics tends to smuggle his preferred values into foreign policy, often in the form of narrow nationalism. International politics is a difficult domain for ethics means that one must be cautious about too simple a transposition of moral maxims from the domain of individuals to the domain of states. The aretaic or Aristotelian tradition stresses an ethics of virtue rather than an ethics of consequences. One of the most common pitfalls in moral reasoning is “one-dimensional ethics” in which an action is justified because it has good motives or because it has good consequences. A good example of one-dimensional moral reasoning is equating the American intervention in Grenada with the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. In between is economic assistance, military assistance, providing funding or arms to opposition groups, and small-scale military intervention.
