Abstract
We are going to show that ethics belong to the register of diplomacy, that it is neither the same as moral points of view – with what morals could it be mixed to achieve its ends? – nor as religious or irreligious points of view, for the same reason. Though morals may have a strong rational component, as a reading of Kant’s works could show, the rationality of diplomacy, which settles in the contingency of situations, cannot be the same. Its rationality is that of calculation, based on the sole requirement that it creates as little unhappiness as possible in situations where one knows that sometimes they do not end well. One sometimes must accept solutions to situations which are morally outrageous in the same way that they upset our morals: morals, though it feeds ethical debate, like religion, share only outward affinities with ethics. The latter may even go against some aspects of the law in order for war not to prevail over civil peace. Then it puts two dangers in the scales and allows that which seems less dangerous to carry the day.
In reality, any ethical consideration is a circumstantial consideration. The categories on the basis of which ethical difficulties are solved, when they are – and in one sense, it is only when there are difficulties that ethical questions are set –, are the thoughts of a particular, singular, contingent situation and cannot be used again for another one, even if it is similar, without great precautions. Nevertheless, we have no reasons to give up the search of rules, which are only less general than moral laws or less imperative than juridical laws.
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Notes
- 1.
See the Preface we wrote to the French version to the Considérations sur le gouvernement représentatif, [16], p. 25, p. 46. Democracy has been described by Millin minute détail of its running, with its advantages in comparison with other regimes and its wories, even though he had no exemplaire of it before him.
- 2.
Even in the names of illnesses. We have written an article on that point [4].
- 3.
When what is at stake is to differentiate between the general will and the will of all , for example [14, p. 371].
- 4.
This explains how to sign a « certificat de refus de soin » that French care givers fear and sometimes denounce so strongly has no other equivalent in English than ‘to sign a waiver’. It is an interesting difference. It can be solved only once French-speaking people understand that a person who no longer wants any care is not necessarily refusing it to their care-giver. The play of personal implications in the English language does not operate in the same way in French, nor in any other language. The way ethics is formulated is obviously different from one language to the next, but it is not an obstacle to the fact that ethical issues are framed in roughly the same terms by English and French speakers.
- 5.
That endeavour tempted rather than it was attempted.
- 6.
Plato underlines that point in Gorgias [12], 459a-460b, p. 298–303. Gorgias’s brother was a doctor, and Gorgias claimed that he had on many occasions managed to convince patients to accept a treatment more successfully than his brother.
- 7.
One will not mention the argument that by assimilating ethics and diplomacy one wrongly assimilates ethics to the ethics of a profession, as if that profession were the real driving force of it. Why should it be that one and not some other?
- 8.
Pensées, Sellier, 67: ‘On agit […] comme si chacun savait certainement où est la raison et la justice. On ne trouve déçu à toute heure, et par une plaisante humilité on croit que c’est sa faute et non pas celle de l’art qu’on se vante toujours d’avoir’. ([10], p. 852). [«We behave (…) as if everyone knew for certain where reason and justice lie. We are constantly disappointed and an absurd humility makes us blame ourselves and not the skill we always boast of having » (Pensées, 33, [11], p. 7)].
- 9.
When it is about the CCNE (Conseil consultatif national d’éthique, the French National Advisory Commission on Ethics), for example.
- 10.
That is why it is so easy to read the systems of ethics written by foreigners and almost instantly use them.
- 11.
In Diplomacy and the Making of World Politics , [13, p. 4], the authors of the Introduction (O.J. Sending , V. Pouliot, I.B. Neumann) start an uncompleted list to show how the framework of States has become too narrow for diplomacy: there are paradiplomacies, diplomacies of small States, non-governmental organizations, business diplomacy, public diplomacy, bilateral diplomacy, multilateral diplomacy, poly-diplomacy, catalytic diplomacy, star diplomacy, real-time diplomacy, and triangular diplomacy, so that, today, diplomacy has become ‘A claim to represent a given polity to the outside world’, as the States are no more than partners, not necessarily preferred interlocutors. Was there ever a period of time when they were exclusively so?
- 12.
The form that such teaching takes in Locke is that, from his youngest age the child knows where he is situated socially, and will behave according to that accurate representation. On this point see Some Thoughts Concerning Education , ([8], pp. 73–8). Bacon ([1], p. 56–8) had already highlighted, through the idea of travelling, the art of culturally – that is geographically, ethnologically and historically – situating oneself.
- 13.
Richelieu was perhaps the first to be acutely conscious of it.
- 14.
See the chapter we have already written on the ethics of R.M. Hare in the first volume of Rethinking Medical Ethics ([3], p. 81–138).
- 15.
We have already mentioned this point: see p. 7 above.
- 16.
«We never do evil so fully and cheerfully as when we do it out of conscience» (Pensées, § 813, [11], p. 245).
- 17.
One could object that these are a small minority of people who commit only themselves, without questioning the movements of the doctors involved in humanitarian endeavours. This is indisputable, but the idea of humanitarianism itself implies an attitude of relative contempt towards State structures, since what is at stake is to put pressure on them, or to bypass them: in short, to use them for ends that are not those of the States.
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Cléro, JP. (2021). Of Ethics as Diplomacy. In: Reflections on Medical Ethics. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 138. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65233-3_1
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