A Place of Greater Safety? Securing Judgement in International Ethics

Abstract

To be vulnerable is to be able to be wounded, painfully transformed from the outside, in ways over which one has no control. Nussbaum points out that in a tradition of normative thinking going back to the Stoics, acknowledgement of vulnerability is the enemy of good judgement (Nussbaum 2001: 19–88). The ideal of judgement is one in which self-sufficient reason alone holds sway. Within this tradition of thought, authority and invulnerability become bound together — the judgements you can trust are the judgements that are safe from the literal and metaphorical knives of the world. As other chapters in this volume demonstrate, this Stoic legacy, mediated through enlightenment rationalism, is influential in predominant responses to human vulnerability in international politics. Theoretical and policy-oriented explanations and prescriptions relating to inequity, injury, harm and suffering in the contemporary world anchor their authority in an ideal of invulnerable judgement, that is to say a judgement that may be mistaken but cannot be wounded.

To use a very Stoic image, the background emotion is the wound, the situational emotion the world’s knife entering the wound.

(Nussbaum 2001: 75)

I am trying to impart the awareness visited upon me that I don’t know what I think I know, or that what I think I know is not so.

(Dauphinee 2010: 808)

Neither opaqueness nor unfreedom, vulnerability nor violation, let us off the hook.

(Rushing 2010: 297)