Tragedies and International Relations

Abstract

In what ways would our ability to understand, analyse and resolve problems in world politics benefit from a study of tragedy or from adopting ‘the tragic vision’?¹ Although disagreements on this basic question abound between contributors to this volume, many of them surprisingly agree on the constitutive features of tragedy. According to Mervyn Frost, who eloquently launched this discussion, at ‘the heart of all tragedy is an ethical agon’,² which he characterizes as a conflict between equally compelling but incompatible ethical principles or duties. From this perspective, ancient Greek tragedy presents human characters who must choose a course of action in the face of conflicting legitimate ethical commitments; their ‘tragic choices’, however, typically yield some negative consequence that thwarts basic human strivings. Chris Brown gives a similar account of tragedy as constituted by clashes of duties that produce lose-lose choices — ‘human action sometimes, perhaps often, involves a choice between two radically incompatible but equally undesirable outcomes, that whatever we do in a given situation we will be, from one perspective, acting wrongly’. Tragic conflict is ‘a conflict between two demanding duties where to act is to act wrongly whatever is done’.³ While Frost and Brown disagree on how to respond to such tragic conflict, they are united in their interpretation of tragedy as an ethical dilemma between equally legitimate and compelling values, principles or duties that produces moral loss or inescapable moral wrongdoing.