ABSTRACT
The academic analysis of moral responsibility in international relations has approached the three principal conceptions of international morality. The first, international moral skepticism, holds that moral judgments are appropriate only within sovereign political communities and thus denies entirely the intelligibility of moral discourse in international relations. Second, the morality of states or pluralist notion of international morality conceives of international relations as a moral order in the sense that states have obligations to conform to moral rules derived from a domestic morality analogy, in which international society is understood as a larger domestic society, and where states play the roles occupied by individuals in domestic society. The third, cosmopolitan or solidarist conception of morality, opens up the state to external moral assessment, understanding persons, rather than states, as the ultimate and equal subjects of international morality. In the realms of social and political philosophy, cosmopolitanism is considered the idea that all human beings belong to a single moral community.
