Moral Reasoning in International Law

Individuals comply with rules for different reasons. Some do so out of fear of punishment, others out of respect for social order, and still others out of a perception that a norm has intrinsic moral force. States, acting through human agents, likewise differ in the reasons they comply with international norms. State compliance with such norms may be motivated by a desire to avoid sanctions, as well as by obedience to authority, utilitarian compliance, socialization, reputational concerns, or norm internalization. Traditional accounts of international law compliance have focused on one or another of these motivations to the exclusion of others, thus failing to present the whole picture.

In the spirit of this volume on the role of ethics in international law, we challenge these traditional accounts and instead present a “moral reasoning” theory that seeks a wider understanding of the reasons states comply. We focus less on traditional debates in international law, largely because our theory better accounts for how people make and carry out international-law compliance decisions in real life. Moral reasoning is how people give reasons or arguments in the context of moral judgment. In turn, moral judgment is the cognitive process that people use to choose between inconsistent interests, values claims, and norms, in those instances in which the inconsistency means the person is pulled toward opposite behaviors. These decisions are “moral” because they involve the ordering of self- and other-regarding interests.