ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to outline a way of approaching ethics in International Relations (IR) that allows us to understand the ways in which universality has been theoretically produced in the discipline. It is neither novel nor unique to point out that universality matters. One could claim, with some grounds, that the history of Western philosophy is the story of a veritable obsession it. The theorists considered in this book, and indeed its author, are no exception. By reading grammatically I hope to show that, for IR, the dominant ethical position, whether implicit or explicit, is that the location of a universal is a fundamental requirement of ethics. More to the point, regardless of what the ultimate source of universality may be, humanity must embody it. Of course, different theorists occupy this position in different ways and, sometimes, my interpretation of what they are doing may seem directly at odds with their own description of theirs. Nevertheless, a notion of universality which serves as the foundation of ethics appears for each, albeit differently configured. And, it matters. On the one hand, it matters because their understandings of universality delineate the very possibility of ethics in world politics. On the other hand, more importantly, such delineations matter ethico-politically. By its end, this book will have embarked on several grammatical odysseys as a way of climbing each rung of each language game. The point of doing this will simply be that, by reading grammatically, we can ask for a re-opening of the question of universality and ethics in world politics and change ‘what we want to do in ethics’ and world politics (Diamond 1995: 24). We might say that reading grammatically sets a different task.
