On Teaching Ethics in International Relations: Questions and Answers

wish to proceed in this paper by answering in turn the key questions posed to the authors at the beginning of this workshop. 1. Do teachers have a moral obligation to include ethics in their courses? The answer is, yes. Furthermore, a failure to do so is an ethical failure. The reason for this is that all interpretations of what is going on in the world that international relations (IR) theorists study are already loaded with ethical commitments of one kind or another. A failure to make these apparent to the people being taught must be read as an attempt to advance one ethical project (one set of ethical values) rather than another, without making this apparent to the students. Why is this an ethical failure? That it is so can only be understood from within my own ethical framework, which sets value on individual autonomy. This includes the autonomy of students to make reasoned judgements about the values embedded in the practices (including international ones) within which they find themselves. My ethical framework is not simply one that I have chosen from a ‘‘pick and mix’’ shop of ethical orders. Rather, it is the one that is embedded in the wider liberal society within which I (and in which all of my readers) live. Respect for the autonomy of the participants in this practice requires that I indicate to those I teach the points at which they are free to make their own ethical com mitments. I am required to make clear to them the possible points of friction between different values that are included in the practice. To support this argument, I ask you to imagine a hypothetical seminar in which I failed to do this. Suppose in this seminar, I taught international relations from the Christian National point of view espoused by the National Party that ruled apartheid South Africa before 1994, and suppose that I did not indicate to the students that the views on race which colored my Christian National interpreta tion of the international politics of Africa (a story of backward black people, in backward black states, attempting to catch up with modernity) were contentious ones. Suppose that I taught students this interpretation without alerting them to other possible accounts of international politics in Africa (for example, an inter pretation relying on Robert Jackson’s notion of quasi states [Jackson 1990], or, alternatively, an interpretation based on a theory of neo imperialism [Laffey and Barkawi 1999]) and that I failed to bring to their attention the different ethical Frost, Mervyn. (2011) On Teaching Ethics in International Relations: Questions and Answers. International Studies Perspectives, doi: 10.1111/j..2011.00450.x 2011 International Studies Association 8 On Teaching Ethics in International Relations commitments that are built into these interpretations. Then I would be guilty of an ethical shortcoming, the shortcoming of treating them as less than free rights holders who have a right to make up their own minds about ethical matters. 2. How does one integrate ethics into the international relations curriculum in general? What should an ethics unit look like in an introductory class, or in an advanced general class in IR? The way this question was framed displays a misunderstanding of the relationship of ethics and the discipline of IR in general. The way the question is framed suggests that ethics is an important subfield of the wider discipline. This is wrong. The minute one begins talking about international relations by describing, for exam ple, a meeting between heads of state, or by reporting on what hap pened in Libya yesterday, or by giving an account of the foreign policy of a given state, or by discussing the problems posed to Italy by an influx of illegal migrants, and so on, one is engaged in (one cannot but be engaged in and with) ethical matters. In each case, one is producing an ethically informed interpretation. The audience to whom these accounts are addressed are being misled if they are not made aware of these ethical components. In short, giving a neutral account of what is happening in the field of international relations is simply not possible. It follows that in designing an IR curriculum, it is wrong to suggest that there is a question about where to locate the ‘‘ethical bit.’’ The ‘‘ethical bit’’ is everywhere. 3. How does one teach international ethics as a specific topic? Again I think that we need to critically examine this question itself. What has gone wrong with our discipline that we can ask of ourselves this question? The answer to this latter question is relatively easy. What has gone wrong is that in the discipline there is still a widespread, but erroneous, belief that it is possible to teach the explanatory theories of the discipline in a way that does not involve ethics, and that the discipline is such that an ethics component can be added at a later stage. The failure here might be an uncritical acceptance of positivist modes of doing social science, and⁄or an uncritical belief in the fact⁄value distinction that says we can f irst teach the facts of international affairs, and then later get on to the ethical questions. As indicated above, this is wrong. Any account of the facts (and any account of the data) is already shot through with the ethical decisions and commitments o