ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the dominant traditions in international ethics and at how an adherence to these traditions of ethical reasoning has produced a narrow and limited debate. It explores the defining principles and historical development of liberal contractarianism and rights-based ethics. The chapter also explores the opposition between cosmopolitan and communitarian approaches to normative international relations theory. It also discusses the deontological, liberal, universalist ethics which defines the cosmopolitan position. The chapter then examines the distinctive visions of the self and the nature of moral relations which characterize communitarianism. Liberal contractarian accounts of ethics and politics are dependent on the notion of individual rights; rights, moreover, are intimately connected to the view of freedom as negative liberty and, in the international context, to claims regarding non-interference and non-intervention. Cosmopolitanism is founded on a belief in universalizability of moral principles, and it takes the scope of morality to be universal and thus unrestricted by spatial or temporal boundaries.
