Ethics in international relations

Ethics in international relations

Introduction

The position of ethics in the context of international relations has been a concept which has now been overlooked for a very long period of time, and topic which has been a topic of hot debate, especially among the Asian and African continents of the world. A group of realists say that there is a very little room for the concept of ethics in our world of today which is mostly dominated by an extensive amount of security risks, along with the national self interest. Whereas, on the other the cultural pluralists contend that morality and ethics are strongly related to each other, according to them it is a concept which depends strongly on the traditions of a society. However, the idealists are sobered by the intricacy of a list of ethical concerns which are being posed by the contemporary international challenges. All these ethical dilemmas have been swirling around the globe for a long period of time, along with a set of embraced actions, and moral norms.

Cultural relativism is the notion that values and mores are not universal but are instead completely determined by culture. This position, popularized by an earlier generation of Western anthropologists, stands in contrast to more traditional perspectives that root values in transcendent sources of meaning or in the universal experience of the human condition. In the human rights arena, there is general agreement that human rights are universal. At the same time, most parties to the human rights discussion would be willing to acknowledge some variability between societies. Thus disagreements over the universality or relativity of human rights have tended to be confined to debates over human rights that bear on a limited domain of specific cultural practices. Because most such disagreements have arisen in the context of critiques of non-Western societies by Western human rights advocates, the question has arisen as to whether the points at issue really revolve around human rights, or whether Western chauvinists are actually engaged in an effort to supplant non-Western societies' traditional values with Western values. In response, human rights activists have tended to question the sincerity of such analyses, implying that the concerns being expressed about Western cultural imperialism are little more than self-serving smokescreens put forward to divert criticism away from oppressive social arrangements.

As part of this ongoing discussion, it has frequently been pointed out that the West in general, and the United States in particular, are quick to call attention to alleged human rights violations if it serves Western interests, but is slow to do so when it does not serve these interests. Furthermore, although the United States likes to portray itself as the global champion of human rights, its own human rights record leaves much to be desired, especially when one examines such historical phenomena as the displacement of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans by European Americans.

Discussion

In this book Amstutz explores the two of the most distinct dimensions of the international political ...