Does teaching ethics and international affairs carry any special challenges?
How does it differ from teaching straightforward IR? The thing I find—and I believe I have this in common with everyone else teaching these subjects—is that students are characteristically relativist about ethics. They see ethics as being a matter of opinion rather than as a subject that can be taught. So I think a large part of the exercise is to persuade students that you’re not trying to teach them what they ought to think about a particular topic. What you’re trying to do, rather, is to get them to address ethical issues in a systematic, scholarly way, to think through the implications of the positions they hold, and to see how those positions would work in more general terms; but also to spot the fact that the kind of ethical positions we take in international relations are very ambiguous—they’re about going in lots of different directions. I tend to focus the discussion around a clash between two sets of norms or two sets of basic rights. On the one hand, you’ve got a normative f
