Correspondence.

• Author: Lautensach, A.K.

Sir,

We feel obliged to comment on Stephen Haigh's report from the 38th Otago Foreign Policy School in the last issue (vol 29, no 1). The debate was presented as taking place between those who subscribe to 'ethics' and adherents of 'rational thought'. We suggest that this misrepresents the issue and that it communicates a counter-productive message to the reader. It misrepresents because the concepts that are being debated are not sufficiently defined and the underlying assumptions cannot be justified. Most striking seems the absence from the discussion of a clear idea of what is to be understood by ethics. In this context, most ethicists would agree on Peter Singer's definition of ethics as 'the set of rules, principles, or ways of thinking that guide, or claim authority to guide, the actions of a particular group' (Ethics, 1994, p.4). It includes subsets of the values, ideals and beliefs that are themselves partly grounded in culture. In this sense all actions that result from conscious decisions are informed by values, irrespective of the ideology involved or whether we consider those actions moral or amoral. This draws into question the assumption of a dichotomy between a group of possible actions (or agents) that are driven by values and a separate group of 'realistic' actions that are informed by other considerations.

What considerations motivate the realist? As reaffirmed at the conference, considerations of 'national self-interest' include the survival of the state and the maximisation of national wealth and power. However, according to the general definition these goals constitute an ethic themselves. The survival of the state and its flourishing are moral norms that a policymaker may pay a varying degree of attention to. The question is merely what priority he or she imparts on those norms relative to other values. Ethics transcends this debate because every political...