Moral Limit and Possibility in World Politics

At what point does one reasonably concede that the “realities” of world politics require compromise from cherished principles or moral ends, and how does one know when an ethical limit has been reached? Since social constructivist analyses of the development of moral norms explain how moral change occurs in world politics, that agenda should provide insightful leverage on the ethical question of “what to do.” This article identifies contributions of a constructivist research agenda for theorizing moral limit and possibility in global political dilemmas.I thank the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its support of a workshop on Moral Limit and Possibility in World Politics, held at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in September 2005. I thank the participants of that workshop for their input into this article; it is part of a collaborative project and their contributions are too numerous to mention by name. Versions of this article were also presented to the University of Minnesota International Relations Colloquium, the University of British Columbia International Relations Colloquium, at the Australian National University, at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting 2006, and at the University of Chicago Program on International Politics, Economics and Security; I am grateful to participants in these venues for their invaluable questions and comments, as well as to the students in my courses upon whom I vetted a number of the ideas in this project. Thanks also to the reviewers and editors of IO for their rigorous comments. Finally, thanks also to Alana Tiemessen and Scott Watson for research assistance along the way.