ABSTRACT
Immanuel Kant has thus largely succeeded in his effort to supplant earlier natural law theorists and to position himself as one who transcended his historical, regional, and political context and provided a timeless, universal, and pure framework for moral reasoning. This chapter focuses on the thinking of the Swiss diplomat and jurist Emer de Vattel. Vattel was a particularly influential pre-Kantian theorist who not only embraced rights and duties to assist and protect strangers beyond borders but also gave sustained attention to the nature, scope, and implications of these rights and duties. The chapter examines Vattel's discussion of the tension between duties to distant strangers and duties to one's own people. It details his arguments about the permissibility of assisting or rescuing others in the absence of sovereign consent. The chapter concludes by considering how Vattel's work can make a valuable contribution to the thinking about the ethics of human protection today.
