Confronting Evil in International Relations pot

[...]... Understanding Collective Evildoing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Besides evil, his research interests include current shifts in the cultural understanding of freedom, autonomy, and pain PART 1 The Problem of Evil in International Relations This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION Evil, Responsibility, and Response Renée Jeffery E vil is a reality in the world of international politics... remains a matter of debate in contemporary thought and gives rise to the following questions: Who (individuals, groups, states, institutions, or other entities) ought to be held responsible for evil acts in international affairs? Can individuals, states, and other collectives be considered equally responsible for evil in moral or in international legal terms? In legal and philosophical terms, addressing... ‘the evil of mutable spirits arises from the evil choice itself,’ and that evil diminishes and corrupts the goodness of nature And this evil choice consists solely in falling away from God and deserting him, a defection whose cause is deficient, in the sense of being wanting—for there is no cause.”64 In this sense then, evil action is in itself not action at all.”65 However, Augustine maintained that... the individual as a function of cosmopolitan liberalism and, following from that, the establishment of an international human rights regime and the development of international criminal law, Ainley turns in the second part of the chapter to critique this overtly individualist approach In particular, she argues that “the concept of the international individual agent on which” the development of international. .. account of evil because it included elements of “happiness and suffering, wickedness and virtue” in its worldview.67 In response to Bayle, Leibniz attempted to reestablish an Augustinian understanding of evil that was both monist in orientation and optimistic in outlook Thus, Leibniz argued that evil did not diminish the goodness of God or his creation but that “all the evils in the world contribute, in ways... with the meaning of evil in the history of predominantly Western international political and social thought It addresses a range of ways in which evil has been commonly conceived and, in doing so, argues that despite variations in presentation and form, disparate conceptualizations of evil are marked by a common central concern Indeed, what unites almost all understandingsof evil in religious and... Augustine argued that evil is nothing else than corruption Different evils may, indeed, be called different names; but that which is the evil of all things in which any evil is perceptible is corruption.”56 By arguing that evil is corruption and nothing is by nature corrupt, Augustine once again refuted the Manichaean claim that evil exists as an independent entity in constant conflict with good Thus,... of individual human agents What this ultimately meant was that Augustine did not conceive sin as the result of evil existing in the world, but rather argued that evil was caused by sin.61 By doing so, he thereby attempted to absolve God of all complicity in evil by attributing responsibility for it to human agents It seems then, that Augustine entertained dual notions of agency and responsibility in. .. basic form, human suffering inflicted at the hands of individuals and groups, both barbarous and ordinary, a reality faced on a regular basis, through no fault of their own, by individuals and societies alike Confronting evil in international relations thus requires us to consider the general phenomenon of evil in the world along with its specific forms and manifestations without losing sight of the particular,... agents.”14 In order to do this, however, we must rethink the relationship between evil, agency, responsibility, and, indeed, punishment, a task Lang takes on in his chapter By clarifying this set of relationships, Lang argues, the international community will also be in a position to avoid what he identifies as the dual pitfalls of punishing the wrong agent for evils perpetrated and pursuing vengeance in response . Practice of Institutional Responsibility,” in Responding to “Delinquent” Institutions: Blaming, Punishing, and Rehabilitating Collective Moral Agents in International. actions. Finally, incidents of evil in international relations also raise questions of how the international community ought to respond to such heinous acts. In