Introduction

Abstract

Enlightenment thought is marked by a thoroughgoing rationalism: a belief that the accumulation of particular kinds of knowledge can help to create a world marked by predictability, order and stability. Rationalism also pervades mainstream International Relations (IR) theory: both its realist and normative variants seek ‘useful knowledge’ (Geuss, 2005, p. 3) with which to pursue their desired ends of survival and power (realism) or morality and justice (international ethics). Neither approach to global politics allows room for vulnerability, which is perceived as a problem to be solved through rational security policy or rational moral judgement. Although there is an acknowledgement in international ethics that suffering and vulnerability are distributed differently throughout the world, the response to them is one of abstract moral reasoning that takes little account of experience or emotion and leaves no space for contingency in ethical deliberation or outcome. Even in normative political theory, moral judgement is resolutely invulnerable, to borrow from Kimberly Hutchings’ chapter (Chapter 2) in this volume: vulnerability has no place in a moral rationalist conception of global order.