Reason and Emotion in International Ethics

Renée Jeffery examines the role played by the emotions in making moral judgments and motivating ethical actions. Focusing on the problem of world poverty, she draws on the work of eighteenth-century moral sentiment theorists and recent advances in the neurosciences to develop an original account of international ethics.

The study of international ethics is marked by an overwhelming bias towards reasoned reflection at the expense of emotionally driven moral deliberation. For rationalist cosmopolitans in particular, reason alone provides the means by which we can arrive at the truly impartial moral judgments a cosmopolitan ethic demands. However, are the emotions as irrational, selfish and partial as most rationalist cosmopolitans would have us believe? By re-examining the central claims of the eighteenth-century moral sentiment theorists in light of cutting-edge discoveries in the fields of neuroscience and psychology, Renee Jeffery argues that the dominance of rationalism and marginalisation of emotions from theories of global ethics cannot be justified. In its place she develops a sentimentalist cosmopolitan ethic that does not simply provide a framework for identifying injustices and prescribing how we ought to respond to them, but which actually motivates action in response to international injustices such as global poverty.