Ethics, Morals and International Law

Abstract

In April 1998 a large interdisciplinary conference on 'The Turn to Ethics' took place at Harvard University. The conference investigated such phenomena as the recent establishment of courses in ethics in numerous academic institutions, the explosion of literature on the subject, and the use of the rhetoric of ethics in public life at large. Our aim in this article is to bring the international legal discipline into contact with this overall phenomenon and to relate the interdisciplinary discussion reflecting on it to international law. To start, we offer a broad sense of the critical views on ethics that enliven the contemporary discussion. We then apply these views to international legal scholarly trends, revisiting formalist, idealist and what we call strategic stances towards international legal work. In the third part, we illustrate in two case studies how legal opinions of the ICJ and of individual judges can be understood in the light of this discussion. In concluding we suggest what a turn to ethics may and may not mean for the international lawyer and how the various 'turns' may be negotiated.

Ethics is a classic topic of reflection, though recently it has emerged as a hot-selling category for books and articles. On-line library information systems are awash with 'the ethics of . . .' titles. The Harvard library system, for instance, has over 500 such titles, including the ethics of divorce, deconstruction, democracy, and so forth. On the Internet, keen ethics scholars can join in an 'ethics chat-line'. And Newt Gingrich has published a book on his weight and the crisis with the Select House Committee on Ethics, the popularity of which, however, will undoubtedly be quickly surpassed by works on President Clinton's ethics. At conferences in any of the humanities one is bound to hear sentences along the lines of 'the de-centring of the subject has brought about a re-centring of the ethical', 'ethics is a dialectic and a dialogue, rather than an answer', or paraphrasing Wittgenstein, 'were a complete book on ethics ever written it would, with an explosion, destroy all other books'. But what is ethics? And how does it sustain and interplay with law, or, more specifically for the purposes of this paper, international law?

1 The Question of Ethics and the International Legal Context

Intuitively we may think of ethics as something closely personal and only very uneasily juxtapose it with a calling to something as broad and abstract as the discipline of international law. Moreover, as ethics has become increasingly fashionable it has turned into a mantra, a high-minded centre of theory which freely slides and sloshes around, ubiquitous and of such broad meaning as to be almost meaningless, except in certain specific professional fields, such as the field of legal ethics, where it has coalesced into a niche of canonized disciplinary self-consciousness. Thus, while ethics can be discussed and debated on many different levels, perhaps only the narrow realm of professional ethics seems 'legal' in any sense, but even this is at the cost of distance from any personal moral responsibilities which we recognize in our 'other life'. This article proposes that there are no such 'other lives' where we might take refuge after working hours, looking there for meaning and moral responsibility. Its simple thesis is that issues of responsibility and ethics run right throughout our lives, without compartments or bright lines making divisions between our professional and personal identities. Identities are little more than social roles backed with an individual's persistence in consistency; yet the key to ethics is that it fails to fulfil its function if conceived of as a mere consistency-backing code.

In international law we encounter an open system par excellence, rendering any consistency-backing code necessarily less than complete. The same is true to an even greater extent of our lives as a whole. An open system is one whose boundaries cannot be drawn, the variables not counted, and whose future patterns can only be predicted to a very limited extent. International law is open, because it does not exist independently of either the human person or the human society; in other words, it is not (a system) of nature but of culture.

In the modern era, we have come to embrace a social conception of law, law as a cultural construct, rather than one of natural law. Simultaneously, true to our humanist traditions, we maintain that the human agent is a locus of unending growth, development and any other kind of transformation. Therefore, the human agent introduces an infinite number of variables, open boundaries and the possibility of surprise and unpredictability into any system which depends on her. This applies to any society and any social institution, including law. Such an argument does not mean to say that international legal predictability is hopeless and the ascertainment of norms meaningless. Rather, an observer, by accepting the inevitable human condition, is better guided in making sense of the system of international law and in assessing his own predictions and determinations.

In international law, openness via the human element is quite clear. International legal norms are applied and interpreted within a multicultural diaspora comprising its mix of subjects and actors (regimes, institutions, organizations, transnational corporations, states, individuals), and influenced by the uncontrollable complexity of environment, both in its meaning as situation and as unpredictable nature. Within the diaspora there are different cultures with their accompanying cornucopia of historical narratives, perspectives and viewpoints, which exist in tension but which different peoples and international actors rely on, endorse in their day-to-day international enterprises, draw case studies from about the nature of law, and perhaps use to quell anxieties over the homogenization and governance of the world.

These differences, tensions and crossovers manifest themselves in different interpretations concerning positive law, international judicial awards, international incidents, and the different tellings of international legal history. The mix of subjects and actors creates these different interpretations in the multi-level interactions between and within international legal regimes, institutions, organizations, transnational corporations, states and individuals. The place of ethics may be difficult to set in the multicultural diaspora, since this diaspora is just an abstract (imaginary) concept attempting to frame, for the sake of discussion, the unframeable complexity of the international legal world. On the experiential level, however, transnational and inter-regime interaction is just people meeting with other people in different rooms and, perhaps surprisingly often, they find agreement in these encounters as to the meaning and significance of matters at hand. The larger context of international law with all its accoutrements is rooted in such personal encounters, which are perhaps more visible than in domestic law precisely because of the variegated nature of the international context and the greater difficulty (though by no means impossibility) of deferring responsibility to an overarching authority which 'made me do it'. It is in these constant and all important personal encounters that the juxtaposition of ethics and law finds an intersection, or better yet, a common 'ground'.⁷

We intend the terms 'ground' and 'grounding' to (also) carry their meanings as used in the phenomenological tradition of philosophy critical of traditional metaphysics and emphasizing the importance of ontological inquiry into such phenomena as, for instance, ethics. We shall thus follow philosophy in separating two related phenomena in what is generally referred to as 'ethics': the first, and perhaps more usual, use of ethics is on the level of moral philosophy, as a study of social values and norms as well as their different manifestations. For an international lawyer, both in his role as lawyer and more widely as person, this conception of ethics sharing the plane of morality implies discussion on a generalizable, definable level, a level on which an actor can ascertain whether agreement exists or not. This is the level of morality, politics, law — the level of the social. It embraces a conception of ethics as shared operating principles, whether in the form of some Habermasian metaphor or in the form of common goals such as dispute settlement, maintenance of peace, or the fuelling of economic development. Such shared operating principles often involve a union between is and ought, where oughtness is given salience without fixing what the ought is, and without determining its precise relation to the is, thereby maintaining the possibility of a claim to universality as, for instance, in the case of the anti-corruption measures by the World Bank which often result in the marginalization of any local initiative.

Ethics as moral philosophy would also include discourse on professional conduct and professional codes, often in the space between morality and the particular profession at issue, such as, for example, legal ethics. This is ethics as defined in pocket dictionaries. Part of the frequency with which the term ethics has been encountered recently is perhaps due to the various critiques of moral philosophy which have worn down the term 'morality'. The moral philosopher thus covertly seeks refuge in a turn to the moral orthopaedics of ethics, the meaning of which term is broad enough and vague enough to mean precisely morality, or some space between morality and the law or any profession, between morality and aesthetics, or more generally between society and the actor within it. For ease of reference, we will refer to this first conception as social-ethics.

The second phenomenon with which we understand the term 'ethics' to be pregnant is easier to juxtapose against the social plane above than to define categorically. It is something much closer to the individual, but in a way that is more primordial than the detachment of the self from its world; it is closer than societal manifestations, such as morality, law or even language, and thus inherently difficult to define. It is something more 'authentic' and experiential than codes, canons or social orders (morality, law, religion) or other relatively stable value systems of right and wrong, good and evil. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to by the aphorism 'ethics as first philosophy'. Intuitively we may understand this in the vein of Martti Koskenniemi when he argues that the prohibition of the 'Killing of the Innocent' is not to be subjected to legal argumentation, even in the mode of justification, because this prohibition is a priori already stronger and clearer than any, however ingenious, legal argument.⁸

If the first conception of ethics above was on the level of the social, this second is on a deeply individual level often missing in the social discourse; its absence in the moral philosophy debate often makes morality fail, or allows it to fall into ideals as does, for instance, discussion of Habermasian ideal communities. The absence of the individual actor forces morality and the moral conception of ethics to remain an ideal and only an ideal by failing to apply to any particular conflict that a person faces at a particular time. Although interesting in the abstract, it leaves the actor facing a conflict, the judge facing a hard case, or the lawyer facing an ambiguous and discordant choice wishing that there were only one clear master-ideal under which the conflicting ideals would align themselves, wishing for the easy case. She is left thinking that 'if this were the ideal situation, I know what I'd do and how I'd do it', but frustrated by the inability to address the other, by the fact that the issue is far from being reducible to law (e.g., nuclear weapons opinion, see infra) or by the obstinate refusal of the conflicting ideals (let alone the conflicting legal rules) to even speak in the same terms.

In a philosophical sense, this ethics is about an individual's search for 'authenticity' in his life, in light of which every choice is an ethical one bringing the person either closer to or further from an authentic life. In what follows, we will thus call this second phenomenon 'life-ethics' attempting to follow the German Lebensphilosophie and Lebenswelt as used in the philosophical hermeneutic tradition of philosophers concerned with the life-world.⁹ Both the words 'individual' and 'authenticity', however, are used here in ways requiring clarification. By 'authenticity' we mean¹⁰ that feeling which resists description, which can be easily deconstructed if brought into a debate, but which nevertheless many of us have had when we sense something to be significant, such as the prohibition of 'the killing of the innocent'. Not always so valuable, important or good, but significant in the way that one thinks back upon life at the point of death and remembers certain things as significant with the space between these points as absence. Such significant things can be a loved one, an act, a day, a relation or any possible moment of existential clarity/angst which, when viewed by our everyday, busy, analytic, mind, is nevertheless easily brushed off as somehow 'odd' or out of place. In contraposition to it would be an inauthentic life, the subject of which 'is lived' in a hollow scaffolding of imposed anonymous codes, values and standards which we have done nothing to establish or even verify.¹¹ It is a life which has been absorbed into the stream of the social and for which this second conception of ethics, and thus the question of a making a personal ethical choice, become deeply meaningless.

It is important, however, to distinguish between unquestioning absorption into the social and the relation of the 'individual' with his world which is at the heart of authenticity and life-ethics. Life-ethics can be pictured as a relation between the 'individual' subject and some object in the world, but a relation so primordial that it antedates any separation of the 'I' from the world. This is in sharp contrast to social-ethics which has a world and a subject acting upon each other, although at its extreme the discrete subject is reabsorbed into the social, it is managed, controlled, yet still discrete while in abeyance. In other words, life-ethics is a relation as sectionless union rather than as an aggregate of I and the object to which the I is relating. The purest example (i.e., the most 'natural' union) is the relation which exists between a prenatal baby and its mother's womb, where the horizon of the world is the extended body of the baby. Martin Buber uses, as a 'transitional' example,¹² the relation of the baby with its shaggy teddy bear, the inanimate collection of fabric and foam which is imbued with living activity and a personality by the baby from the baby's own fullness. The baby creates the teddy bear, although the teddy bear was already independently there, in a paradox reminiscent of Kant's moral law, which comes from within but was there before. It would be meaningless to ask the baby 'did you conceive of this bear, or was it presented from without?' because there is no separation between the baby and the bear. At the same time, however, the bear opens up a space for experience by the I-consciousness of the baby which is at first inexorably woven into the bear, as part of the I-bear relation, but which through repeated experiences comes closer and closer to the surface until one day it turns upon itself and sees a discrete 'subject'. This detached subject is transformed, 'reduced from substantial fullness to the functional one dimensionality of a subject that experiences and uses objects'¹³ which she starts to experience as aggregates of attributes/qualities rather than in their exclusivity, reciprocity and relation to her. Such aggregates of attributes hint at measurability, at commensurability, at the possibility of ordering, of placing objects within the world into a context of space, time, causality and conditionality. These measurable commensurables are the tools of moral, legal, religious and 'ethical' codes; only the social can be put in order.

Yet indeterminacy, deconstruction and conflict are increasingly showing any such order to be an illusion. It is inevitably an illusion because things, especially people(-things), are not aggregates of their attributes, and because the social to be ordered and then expressed in social language cannot recognize the individual relation with the world which is prior to any detachment of the subject from his world, which is after the detachment becomes 'objects'. Social orders can only conceive of the social element within a human (that is, his intersubjectively imaginable attributes) and, in order to transmit rules and standards, must inevitably picture him as an abstract (imaginary, non-existent) subject interacting with a world full of objects, upon which interactions these social orders set their guidelines. We recognize, however, that this fundamental assumption in our paper — namely that people are more than the aggregates of their attributes — is 'merely' experiential, and thus un-proveable. This is in keeping with the intransitive (i.e., non-social) nature of life-ethics, and our only possible response to a critic of this assumption would be to say 'look at yourself, add up your attributes, and ask yourself whether that is really the you that is looking at those attributes'. For it is the you that is deciding about whether those qualities are you which makes all your ethical choices.

For an adult in a world where the subject and her world are generally seen as discrete phenomena, ethics as relations between these phenomena can be defined in their widest sense as 'response-ability'.¹⁴ In short, life is a series of 'responses' (including omission and refusal to respond) to the world, to others and to ourselves in situations where no-one seems to know how to tackle the hardest cases. It thus also implies an ability to take on the contradiction, plurality and ambiguity of the hard cases. Ethics is about that ability to respond, not so much about the content of the response. In other words, ethics is about what happens when openness occurs and there is no ready-to-hand answer in codes or standards.¹⁵ Thus, it is also about the decision regarding whether to apply a given code or standard in particularized circumstances.

The ethical task is to encounter the problems of life as they come: open, indeterminate, uncontainable, irreducible. 'Authenticity' in this pragmatic world is about facing the problems in their full complexity, without simplification or abdication of responsibility to higher unverified authorities, ideals or standards, in a manner which builds a relation of significance between what we do, both in terms of our work and our personal actions, and what we are and currently want to be as people. This might be interpreted as a call to consistency if one assumes that different parts of people tend to add up easily. We believe that they tend not to. More importantly, however, identifying the harmony between actions and existence as a fetishization of consistency misses the level of the discussion even more than the substance. The open system that is the human person changes constantly: physically, cells degenerate and regenerate; mentally, one matures, grows and learns; situationally, identities are always at least partially a function of their context, which is ever changing. Thus a consistency ethic would always attempt to harmonize actions to an existence not of here and now but of then and there; it would, in a sense, only be authentic to a person who has been left in the past and who no longer exists. It would thus be inauthentic for the particular actor in his particular situation.

The argument has been made that the function of law, particularly the rules of evidence and procedure, is to fix the substance of the case to a certain point. There are critical dates, critical facts, freezing of the clock and intertemporal determinations of the meaning of critical concepts or documents. Their function is to create settlements of disputes and thus maintain social peace. Our purpose here is not to dispute or even question that function, but merely to add to it. For it is often the case that these fixed points break and the settlements do not hold. In fact, fixed settlements may increase the risk of social upheaval, for instance, most notably perhaps the Treaty of Versailles (1919). At such points, it is often thought that law and ethics are defeated by a Hobbesian human greed and the uncontrollably evil nature of man. If, however, the life-ethics conception is accepted, one can see in these breakdowns quite different forces at work — the forces of complexity and dynamism. In our view, it is much easier and more agreeable to work with them than to combat the persistent myths of the Hobbesian man and Leviathan.

Admittedly, our use of the term 'authentic' may seem vague, if not ethereal. This is both deliberate and inevitable, for by its nature authenticity is not something that can be delineated in advance, even for one person to himself (for not even the 'I' can be posited in advance), let alone transmitted from author to reader. The corollary to this is that life-ethics, too, cannot be transmitted, at least directly in the sense of imperatives, through language. Authenticity, I, and ethics are all intensely personal in a way which includes presence (understood both temporally and situationally), but through presence there is also a relation to the entire world, into the definition of the person.

Thus, after having cloven a divide between life-ethics and morality, we bring them back together again. No person is a solipsistic monad. Our personhood is shaped, among other things, by our situation, our environment and our past. The latter two substantives, and perhaps even the former, go a long way towards adding up to something like culture, and they are all woven within the social. Together, multiplied and statistically bevelled, they form what we call 'the social'. The weaver and the woven, the cause and effect, run in so many directions as to leave an uninterpretable tangled skein. What remains, however, is that the morality of the social forms a part of the person and her life-ethics, but albeit only a part. It is a part which cannot in any way be delineated or disentangled from the whole. Thus, although the person is shaped by social morality, this morality can nevertheless never be codified. It has always melted into the person and her activities as whole.

Although personal, uncodable or unidealizable life-ethics may not be legally pronounceable — at least in any conventional way, such ethics are nevertheless not outside of international law, unless one believes that law can be cut loose from its symbiotic partner, the human person, and the person's everyday, which is her opening to infinite possibilities in life — her carpe diem. Unlike a code book, a person's ethical ability cannot be left to idle or shut down for any period of time, except perhaps to the extent that the 'self' can fall into abeyance within the social; it seems not only disingenuous to cover up such significant ability under a compartmentalization of a person's identities or roles into a work-sphere and a personal-sphere, but it also seems inauthentic and unethical.

As an example of the inadequacy of code ethics, recent discussion on professional ethics of administration and management offers the so-called whistle-blowing phenomenon, in which an individual (officer or employee of an organization) feels compelled to 'blow the whistle', i.e. publicize the confidential operations of the organization, whose member he is, in contravention of the organization's rules.¹⁷ The whistle-blower compromises his professional responsibility and loyalty in favour of his personal ethical choice to try to mobilize public support for halting or criticizing a particular operation or practice of that organization. This example has been enthusiastically discussed at least since the Dreyfus affair. It has been used to demonstrate that the belief in the sufficiency of code ethics has been receding and has even prompted some writers to claim that professional ethics will inevitably always fail.¹⁸ The reason for the failure is that professional ethical codes often try to delineate reality in ways in which it resists delineation. Elsewhere, however, the insufficiency of code ethics has prompted others to design equitable considerations and provisions of openness to complement the finite professional codes.¹⁹

2 Problems of Code-based Ethics

We propose that ethics is the most concrete, most practical part of existence and action in the human reality, professional, personal or whatever. Any action or lack of it is an ethical choice. Moreover, the mere acknowledgement of the existence of other persons and the rest of the world around oneself is an ethical position upon which everything else, starting from knowledge and behaviour, builds. As implied above, 'ethical' is not synonymous with 'virtuous'. In other words, to make an ethical choice does not mean to make the right choice; it simply means to engage one's ethical capacity. If one decides to dump toxic waste in the Baltic Sea, it is an ethical choice; one might experience it as right or wrong or even mid-way, but one recognizes oneself as an agent doing something unto someone/something other. Virtues are righteous qualities and virtue ethics discusses them.²⁰

Whereas virtue ethics are prêt-à-porter ideal labels attached to categorized behaviour, the life-ethics we are presenting are both more general and more particular; in other words, custom-made for each situation. Some scholars claim that moral value has no place in law, for instance, because efficiency or economic analysis will enable better legal analysis and because morals are futile for that purpose. They believe either that morality can be disentangled from the rational market actor (i.e., human) or that the personhood of the actors who make up the market can somehow be taken out of the social in its incarnation as 'market'. Although such a denial of morality and personhood amounts to a near-complete immersion of the person within the social/market, according to the view presented in this article such a denial is already a very concrete ethical decision about the role of the self vis-à-vis the world, thereby reflecting a certain type of world-view, as well as a moral decision reflecting a hierarchy of values where economic efficiency is preferred.

Taking a broad stance on ethics might seem like a reversion of many lawyers' intuition. We are simply suggesting, however, that before a lawyer ever conceived of the whole abstract idea of legal systems with their complex, non-tangible, institutional relationships and professional ethics, he had already conceived of his surroundings in the world, and thus taken a basic ethical position in relationship to them.²¹ If so granted, it is obvious that we cannot reduce away this basis of all intellectual activity from the work of lawyering.

The unreduced conception of ethics is sometimes also criticized for its complexity, since it forces decision-makers to address so many further considerations and therefore pushes away closure from already complex controversies. We argue that the complexity is inevitable because the world, and particular situations within it, are complex. The only difference is whether this complexity is made explicit or hidden as we argued above in connection with the problem of fixing critical points of time and fact and settling disputes. To demonstrate the emptiness of this criticism and the inevitable complexity we shall point to the following fictional rules of ethics for international public service:

Rule Model 1.

The unauthorized communication of official information is prohibited. This duty is unconditional. If the public servant cannot consciously administer it, she should consult a superior officer. Thereafter, the public servant must do as she is told or resign — and even then she must preserve official confidences.

Rule Model 2.

An international public servant is first a human being, second a citizen, and third a public servant (etc.). As such he is morally accountable for all the reasonably foreseeable consequences of his free actions. If and when he feels that his professional obligations and other duties conflict, it is his responsibility to take fully into account the precedent-setting and confidence-eroding effects of the violation of a professional ethic, as well as all the other consequences of the act he contemplates, before deciding what to do.²²

The first model lists a set of technical rules of professional ethics. It treats the problem in an on/off fashion without any reference to the input of the individual(s) in a particular case. At first sight it may seem clearer and simpler in its rigidity and thus some would prefer it by virtue of its appearance of giving a straightforward answer. Upon closer examination, however, the vagueness and ambiguity of terms such as 'unauthorized' and 'consciously' defeat this clarity: Whose 'authorization' is needed? Whose interests count in determining how many and what level authorizations should be acquired? And what exactly is 'conscious' administration of something which is on the verge of being 'unauthorized?' What is 'conscious administration' of dumping leaking toxic bombs into the Baltic Sea or launching a nuclear weapon? Taking these problems into account, one notices that there is actually very little difference between the first and the second model. In fact, the second just seems to spell out the questions which the first covers up. Therefore, it becomes unintelligible to claim that only the first rule is law, whereas the second must be excluded from it.

In what follows, we shall describe several different (theoretical) styles through which ethics are at times understood. The styles are different ways of understanding coherence and relatedness in the things lawyers perform. First, we shall look at Formalism and Idealism as applied to ethics, and illustrate their failings, and then we will probe the alternatives. We prefer, however, to conceptualize these approaches as 'styles' rather than 'isms' by way of recognition that very few real life people approach any ethical problem exclusively Formally or Ideally, but rather as some combination. Thus, to have a 'style' does not require a deliberate subscription to some theory or another, but rather a tendency to approach one's material from a certain angle. Most lawyers naturally have several angles.

A. The Technical-formalist and the Idealist

A formalist style and technical-professional ethics go hand in hand; both understand the lawlikeness of legal work, its nomological attribute, to emanate from formal rules, standards, determinate relationships between them, and determinable modes of reasoning. The standard definition for professional ethics in its narrowest technical form is the professional code, and in its broadest form 'the laws, rules and ethical and moral principles which govern the manner in which lawyers practice their profession'.²³ In both the narrow and the broad variety of technical-professional ethics, however, the rules, principles and codes are considered accountable, determinable and finite. Therefore, we call them 'technical', a term which entails that their command can be learned and transmitted from one person to another, i.e., as a technical skill.

To believe in finite rules and principles means to believe that there shall always be a reasonably ascertainable right answer to any dilemma. The ethical consequence is that if no right answer can be found, the actor (lawyer/judge) has no professional responsibility. In the whistle-blowing cases, for instance, the technical-professional ethics unequivocally denies unauthorized publicizing, but correspondingly, whatever ethical problem may result from inaction is not attributable to the official. This strictly formal view of professional ethics is of course in stark contradiction with, for instance, the Nuremberg principles and the ideal 'commands of humanity', which demand that officials look beyond a code (i.e., 'blow the whistle' and disobey) at least in the most extreme cases. There is no clear rule or single ideal specifying which cases are 'extreme enough', although there is much literature about the need for action when the case is extreme enough. Nor does the strictly formal view sit well with the recent developments towards assessing equities 'with particularity to the particular circumstances of an instant case'.²⁴

Thus, the oscillation between formalism and idealism in legal argument also has its place in ethics. To take another example, a rule that a judge of the International Court cannot take part in any proceeding in which she has participated previously as an agent, adviser or attorney of a party, as a judge or member of a commission or any other comparable manner (ICJ Statute 17(2)) is a typical rule of professional ethics, establishing a shared ethical command for the profession. If we take it formally we can quite easily find its counter-rule in the ICJ rule allowing for ad hoc judges (ICJ Statute 31). As we know from decades of legal theory such a position always has the risk of resulting in an insurmountable formal conflict and in fact it often does. Questions of 'how often' such formal conflict occurs, 'to what degree' and 'with what significance to the system' have been debated ad infinitum.²⁵ What is important to the ethical discussion is primarily that this irresolvable debate about formal conflict proves at the very least that some other kind of ethics is needed in order to regain response-ability and confidence in answers to ethical dilemmas. Moreover, in ethics it is even more difficult than in general law to use the virtues of predictability in order to slide out of the dilemma by claiming that the existence of a clear rule is more important than its substance.

The idealist would resolve the formal opposition by shifting levels. Let us assume that a formalist debate on the above question — whether it is formally ethical to have ad hoc and national judges sit in cases in which they may have previously participated in their pre-judgeship functions as government officials or diplomats — leads to an opposition between two codes. The technical formalist's dilemma is which rules to read broadly, which narrowly: whether no-one should be judge in their own case or whether everyone should have a right to have their case tried by judges of their own choice and, thus, to perceived objectivity. The idealist's addition may be that

[t]he justification for the presence especially of judges ad hoc is to be placed on more general and psychological grounds connected with the nature of international relations and the special function performed in that context by international litigation: it is not to be sought in any strained concepts of legal theory [read: 'consistency'], with which indeed it may conflict.²⁶

This addition, however, has not provided the final word. As the debates of legal theory have shown, each opposing idealist can argue that his justification is better: because it fits more rules, it justifies more rules, it is more elegant, or it makes law work with fewer exceptions. None of the opposing parties could ever definitively count the rules (where does one rule end and the other start? Are some 'heftier' than others? etc.) or define 'elegance' in a way that would prove the others wrong. This is because any developed system of legal norms is complex and open, and rules are not quantifiable or easily commensurable. Instead of just one Hercules,²⁷ we would have Orpheus, Hector, Prometheus, Minerva, Antigone and many others, each with their own meta-ideal, not to mention their individual situations, their human imperfections and their often tragically intertwined missions. All of the idealists, and their demi-gods, further their underlying rationale by practical choice. At the end of the day, the idealists do not choose the same ideals any more than the formalists choose the same fits in their rule puzzles. As a conclusion, there is no way to say which one is 'the common ethical choice' without sounding grossly culture-imperialistic, hegemonic and unethical.

B. The 'Disillusioned' Approaches: Strategy, Narratives, Interpretation

After disillusionment by formal failure and ideal conflict, several approaches to international legal questions remain; these take into account the problems of repetition, (in)consistency and (de)legitimation of post-realist international law, but still carry a strong ethical tenet in their argumentation. Accepting the difficulties of proceeding from the stalemates of formalism and idealism in the post-realist era and burying the fantasy of universalism on that level, there is still much left for common international legal interest. The question of ethics is not defeated when we say that the world can share neither a common code nor common ideals. Ethical tasks await everywhere and in interpersonal encounters we often find agreement which is the more solid the fewer illusions we have regarding its context. Here are some attempts to respond to the situation without forgetting this caveat of disillusionment, along with a brief inquiry into their 'ethicality'.

First, there is the strategic response to the failures of formalism and idealism. Strategists see their ethical task to be a positively manipulative one. They seek to achieve more progressive results in practice by seeing law's mechanisms from a more progressive angle. These lawyers are internal critics of the discipline. They pay close attention to the structures and patterns of how international legal argument works and creates visions, persuasion, justification and rationalization. They hope that whatever they consider 'important' in the world will be realized through a strategy, often a strategy of deconstructing the foundations of the 'other side' in the debate and replacing it with an (at times admittedly) essentialized structure brought in from an ostensibly wider circle of justification.

There are several types of strategists, each with their own inner paradoxes. These include, inter alia: Strategic Essentialists, like feminists who want to get rid of gender-basis in entitlement allocation, but do so through a strategy which uses gender as its own basis. They aim to break the chains of 'gendered structures', but by requiring international actors to invite women writers and speakers and to appoint women representatives, making the female gender an attribute of these invitations and appointments. Strategic Formalists include those who advance some norms or practices because social circumstances, policy concerns or some higher source of authority commands it. They advance the non-chosen norm by making the appropriate rule consistent with the entire corpus of international law through a complex operation of their rule and ideal manipulation techniques; but these rules and ideals derive their usefulness from the very agnosticism which makes them equally malleable to the opposite authority. Strategic Culturalists are those who by means of anthropological or ethnic studies seek to find common ground and increase hegemonic ideals by increasing participation avenues beyond the Western world, but find that to do so they must mould their subjects into inherently Western international legal forms of participation and entitlement as they existed ex ante, thus pushing these subjects into our Western idea of international society which they (non-Westerners) did not share before. Finally, there are the Situational Critics, who take one legal practice or area of scholarship at a time and meticulously expose its inner contradictions in detail (e.g., the CLS). They examine one area of the law after another, getting into it like a psychotherapist and exposing the area's 'sub-conscious' problems and 'denials' to its practitioners, mostly to the latter's dismay or indifference.

All of these strategic approaches have abandoned the search for a universal ideal within the law itself, but nevertheless generally share an underlying purpose of furthering some extra-legal (socio-political) ideal. They are not so far from the idealist. As was the case with the idealists, the strategists differ in what is considered the appropriate goal; what is important. The difference lies in their acknowledgement that the choice of 'the important' is strategic rather than universal. Also, the 'important' is often not express. The strategists may only have a hunch of a direction or they may have clear goals, but the 'important', at least in its intermediate sense, is very dependent on the shifts of social or other power balances.

The problem in strategic shifting is that the 'important' becomes the by-product of the strategic work, that what is 'ultimately' important often conflicts with what is important in the intermediate sense which is always more concretely present. The meaning of the work is left in the background when one is fighting for the number of women (feminist), rule N (formalist), a UN committee discussion group on the lack of cultural documents on the unnamed paradise island on 170+ longitude west (culturalist), and the inner conflicts of the latest 200 treatises on foreign securities scholarship (situational 'crit'). Through thus making 'the important' a by-product, ethics becomes a sheer implication and, in fact, there is no time really to think about it, since the most effort is spent in manipulating a paradoxical means. In ethical terms, it is necessary to ask ourselves what it portends to breathe significance into our lives from by-products, what it does to our ethical sensibilities to have our everyday choices shaped by 'intermediate' considerations so fundamentally in opposition to the purported 'ethical' goal which thus recedes ever further into futurity and abstraction. Even in moral terms, however, if one follows Aristotle and Gadamer, it seems that such strategic expediency should not enter considerations about what furthers moral ends. In Gadamer's words, 'the consideration of the means is itself a moral consideration and it is this that concretizes the moral rightness of the end'.²⁹ Here we include the 'moral' argument because Gadamer's use of 'morality' exemplifies what we mean by ethical 'authenticity', by his refusal to abstract and deracinate morality, and his union of ends, means, and (later) situation.

Another response to formalism/idealism is to retrace the narrative of international law. The idea is to demystify the 'progress narrative' of international legal work. The Narrativist style presumes that too often the number of alternative choices seems more restricted than it actually is. The international lawyer feels too often that her situation is a product of an inevitable progress of history and that the same progress will keep on wheeling forward in the same consistent direction. Furthermore, often she will not give full airing to as many alternatives as she could or she will not consider the consequences of certain choices fully and independently, because she has internalized the narrative too well.

The narrativist style is inspired by Thomas Kuhn's history of science, Roberto Unger's legal theory, Michel Foucault's archaeology and others, who have shown the power of the illusion of consistent progress. Correspondingly, by breaking the idea of the 'false necessity'³⁰ one may encourage international legal practitioners to make choices out of other concerns than the compulsion to conform or to be consistent with a body of law which — on closer look — unravels its inconsistency and complexity. By showing the illusion of either the necessary consistency or the necessary progress in the narrative of international law, the narrativist offers for view the marginalized alternatives and choices which seem to question our self-assured satisfaction of having 'overcome' history.³¹ Better yet, he induces lawyers to courageous independent thinking and more careful inspection of history.

The narrative style derives its material from the life-experiences of people who may not have been heard. Many feminists, for instance, aim 'to provide ... the material, internal, phenomenological, subjective story of women's experience and present reality of the Rule of Law.'³² The narrativist's implicit message is first that international law can 'handle' much more imaginative and independent choices than one thinks and, secondly, that international law is no Titanic which aims to transport us to the haven of future but which will immediately sink if it crashes into an iceberg, taking us with it. The narrative style recounts international law, its history and structure, so as to create space for a wider array of practical choices, for an experience of mental freedom to move — into the 'imaginary domain'.³³ As Druscilla Cornell explains, this space would produce better outcomes because it would be more equal and fair according to the principles of the Rawlsian 'original position'. To the extent, however, that the narrativists concern themselves with what could have been or what could be, their approach has little to do with 'ethics' in the life-ethics sense. Although valuable as a tool for breaking out of false inevitability somnambulism, and to that degree an ethical task of breaking away from simplifying illusions, there can be no life-ethics of an imaginary state.

To the extent that the construction is imaginary, it is ethically inauthentic and insignificant. In this respect the narrativist falls into a paradox similar to that of the strategist, albeit again one which is often acknowledged: any alternative narrative will repeat the problems of representation found in the mainstream telling of international legal history. Once the narrativist approach reaches the 'more equal and fair' style argument of Cornell or Rawls it becomes perhaps more socially moral but less ethical in its counter-factual creativeness.

The style that emphasizes the significance of interpretation could be called interpretationist. To a greater or lesser degree, this style is based on the idea that everything turns on interpretation. By interpretation the interpretationist style does not understand exclusively the situation in which the international lawyer comes across a rule and starts checking its meaning by the canons of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties rule 31 (and 32). Rather, it comprises interpretation as to facts, rules, principles, participation, alternatives, identities, roles, preconceptions, prejudices, and ideas of law and society. All of these things come to the international lawyer everyday and by acting in a certain way she implicitly interprets them to have quite specific meanings.

Korhonen has illuminated elsewhere the significance of interpretation for international law in the light of a continental hermeneutic tradition. The basic relevance of the hermeneutic discussion is, for example, in Gadamer's view that nothing is understood before the creation of an interpretative relationship to it, i.e., before it has been taken as a part of the subject's experience. Consequently, no new initial interpretative relationship can exist in our minds independent of everything we have already understood during our lives, career, education and personal history at large. Our mind is not made of isolated compartments. Instead, all the 'perennial dilemmas' of the human condition and questions of significance and consequence influence the creation of interpretive relationships and their results both in international legal work as well as in everyday life.

Thus understood, interpretation also conveys a place for ethics. It is in this interpretation that the fundamental ethical choice is made. Ethically speaking, this 'assuming' and 'creating' are the places where one can go most astray and where ideals or forms do not yet exist to guide the international lawyer. It is in this initial interpretative space that the ethical choice is made about whether (and how) real, particularized, and situated problems are to be tailored to fit into formal structures, ideals, or strategies, or whether they are to maintain their ethical complexity. This choice is itself inevitably within the ethical domain, for it is in itself complex and without possibility of abdication to an 'authority'. It is only the interpretation itself which takes the complex input and simplifies, compartmentalizes and bevels it. It is in this initial interpretative moment that every choice contains its ethical dimension, and it is because of the priority of this interpretation that a person's ethical capability can never lie fully idle.

Although every interpretation assumes and creates a world, there are nevertheless greater and lesser extents to which this is done, greater and lesser degrees to which the assumptions and creations must go in the absence of some extant categories to which one can abdicate the ethical anxiety-filled decision. One cannot have a code-rule solving the issue of participation before one has ever thought of its vague possibility, as for instance in Vitoria's times in the question of the status of the 'savages' or later in the international status of slaves;³⁸ their rights cannot be protected within law unless they are preconceived and recognized as a category within law. The familiar example of state recognition is a similar case of the circular problem of which comes first — de facto existence as a state or de jure recognition as a state (declaratory or constitutive meaning). All that follows is dependent on the initial interpretative choice.

For the interpretationist the ethical task is to avoid the mistakes which happen before legal principles and rules take hold, since such mistakes would taint the rest of the work and most likely straightjacket its ethical issues into the formalist/idealist dilemmas. The question of what constitutes a 'mistake' in these terms, however, is difficult. The temptation of dogmatism and simplification is ever present.

To the extent that the interpretationist style points out the primal importance of the initial interpretation in shaping the entire world of conceivable choices, however, it is a crucial step to making the social template of unexamined compartmentalization and obscuration, if not transparent, at least translucent. The search for the meaning of international law in any interpretative situation is tightly intertwined with the overall search for meaning in one's life and work as an international lawyer. The interpretationist style is concerned with the ethics of the individual. Moreover, the translucency which the style enables permits the underlying ethical choices to be seen from underneath the social scaffolding. In this sense it is already 'authentic' in that it admits complexity and thereby permits the questioning which makes existence substantive and significant rather than being absorbed in the neuter anonymity of personally unverified social or statistically approved values.³⁹

3 Legitimacy

After strategy, narration, interpretation and the idealist stalemate, it is necessary to consider briefly what has happened to ideals. After all, the paradigmatic figure of an international lawyer is one of a zealot for peace, a missionary for free trade and international cooperation, and a liberal idealist. As the discipline has lost, one by one, its great sources of legitimacy, its underlying rationales, however, this image has become more and more incorporeal: first natural law/order was defeated by positivism, then realism slew rule-formalism, then the third and the second worlds challenged the Western liberal values of international law and now different critical schools keep 'blowing the whistles' on the rest and we have heard different sorts of cries announcing the end of history.⁴⁰ It seems that although this narrative is usually told from the perspective of the winners as the progress of our discipline, it is more important to see that every time some source of legitimacy — God/transcendental reason, purity/neutrality of form and text, universal values, or bipolarity — has been disqualified in international law, it has made the system limp. Repeatedly it has been necessary to reinvent the same source in some sort of a disguise,⁴¹ if only for strategic reasons. This is also the pattern followed by the covert cloaking of morality in its turn to 'ethics as moral orthopaedics', or what we described as 'social-ethics', and goes far toward explaining much of the recent popularity, or 'earnest noise',⁴² of ethics and the millenarianism.

Despite the re-inventions, however, the problem of overall legitimacy often remains a chronic undercurrent within the profession. The anxiety created by this legitimacy question allows international law to present a clearer example of the insufficiency of code-ethics than does domestic law, which latter law can better maintain a blanket of common socio-political values to grant temporary relief from the existential angst and provide a temporary foundation for law — until one asks for a justification of Western democracy. Most international jurists are aware of the difficulty of building on 'ideas', especially in the absence of a domestic law type justification or foundation. Nevertheless, they think that it is better to go on building on quicksand 'for the sake of the society' than to try to face the ontological questions of international justice.⁴³

The re-introductions of defeated sources of justification create paradoxes. Writers argue against formalism, but end up formalists, point out the faults of narratives by presenting narratives, or write against privileging a gender/culture over another, but end up endorsing the one side.⁴⁴ In trying to point out the paradoxes without falling prey to them, they end up accused of leaving empty spaces in the places where there was once a justification.⁴⁵ It seems that rather than a post-ontological we have arrived to a post-justification situation. Whether for reasons of strategy or desperation, some international lawyers have returned to the beginning: maybe the legal, properly nomological response should be formalist after all?

From the point of view of international legal ethics this is not quite right. We do not disagree with a tragic analysis of the 'post-situation', but we think we still have to find a way to meaningfully live and work in it.⁴⁶ Choices still have to be made in those rooms where the international lawyers are sitting, and it is we, the international lawyers as people, who are making these choices. The choices do not make themselves, nor is it the neuter abstract impersonal 'they' who make them. But with both formal and ideal failure, with narration and interpretation 'useful' only in helping us see complexity and avoid too-easy simplifications, what is there to guide our choices within this complexity?

4 Relationship, Dienst, and Sorge

Ethics, like justice, is about a continuity of problems and dilemmas which evolve from living together in a common world. To solve the issue of ethics or of justice once and for all would be a contradiction in terms. As lawyers, however, we have an obsessively strong proclivity to technical knowledge (tekhne) which can be taught and which maintains its force regardless of who is subject to learning it or hearing it, so long as this listener has the technical ability to understand. This proclivity is so strong that some would maintain that this tekhne is in fact the only form of knowledge. Life-ethics, in the sense we have been using it, is not a technical knowledge, and no thickness of code books could 'teach' it. Instead, it is a deeply personal deliberation, a relationship which links the person (again, including his presence, temporality, and situation) with his actions as an international lawyer or as any other role. Ethics cannot be used dogmatically. In Gadamer's words:

[W]e are dealing here with a fundamental relationship. It is not the case that extending technical knowledge would obviate the need for moral knowledge, this deliberating with oneself. Moral knowledge can never be knowable in advance like knowledge that can be taught. The relation between means and ends here is not such that one can know the right means in advance, and that is because the right end is not an object of knowledge either. There can be no anterior certainty concerning what the good life is directed towards as a whole. Hence Aristotle's definitions of phronesis have a marked uncertainty about them, in that this knowledge is sometimes related more to the end and sometimes more to the means to the end. In fact this means that the end toward which our life as a whole tends and its elaboration in the moral principles of action described in Aristotle's Ethics cannot be the object of a knowledge that can be taught. . . . Thus knowledge of the particular situation (which is nevertheless not a perceptual seeing) is a necessary supplement to moral knowledge.⁴⁷

The type of knowledge of the particular situation that is necessary for the possibility of ethics (moral knowledge) is an un-interpretative (i.e., undistorted), un-simplifying, and un-deferred relationship between the situated subject and his situation. In other words, it is about an authentic relationship between the subject and himself in his presence, such that he maintains the ability to respond to his situation authentically. In terms of legal work, ethical knowledge is an authentic relationship between the person, his professional identity, and his actions. It is a form of grasping oneself in the stream of the ambiguous, impersonal social and its public interpretation, and caring (Sorgen) for the situation in all its complexity by concretizing it as a significant part of oneself — this is what we mean by response-ability. In Heideggerian terms, authenticity comes from caring about the situation in its fullness, as a part of oneself, as it really exists; ethics is simply the search for this kind of authenticity in life.

For Gadamer, the greatest ethical challenges for the lawyer follow from his observation that the self-understanding of legal work is one of 'keine Herrschafts-sondern eine Dienstform' (no master but rather a servient form).⁴⁸ The lawyer and the judge must be both servants of the law and of the situation (of which they are a part), but at the same time they must be servants of neither. In the legal context, ethics is about maintaining this difficult relationship and through it a sympathetic willingness to search for the truth and authenticity without taking the easy way out into Formalism, Idealism or Realism. Obviously, blind adherence to written ethical codes would be as un-ethical as blind adherence to authority. The exemplary character of legal interpretation, for Gadamer, evolved from the practicality of the tasks — the servience to practical life and reality. Respectively the gravest danger flows from false masters — not just political authorities but also the calcifications of the lawyer's (ethical) sense. In his words, 'the opposite of seeing what is right is not error or deception but blindness'.⁴⁹

The sense of Dienst lends an air of modesty and subordination to international legal work. Following Gadamer, Dienst-sense is the prerequisite of forming ethical and undistorted interpretative relationships with the world and coming up with just applications of law and fact. Yet as many a moral philosophy has demonstrated, it is more than evident that this humanist Dienst-sense can be easily warped to something else, as has happened in several cases of totalitarian regimes taking charge of liberal legal systems. This possibility of moral warping of Dienst presents a good example for clarifying the difference in terms of levels between ethics and morality, as Aristotle does by presenting a naturally debased version of moral knowledge (ethics), the deinos:

. . . this natural counterpart to phronesis is characterized by the fact that the deinos is 'capable of anything'; he uses his skills to any purpose and is without inhibition. He is aneu aretes. And it is more than accidental that such a person is given a name that also means 'terrible'. Nothing is so terrible, so uncanny, so appalling, as the exercise of brilliant talents for evil.⁵⁰

Life-ethics is about an authentic unmediated relationship between the person and her situation. As mentioned earlier, the constitution of that person includes moral and social elements that are outside the question of ethics and in the realm of social morality constructed by each society for itself. Ethics is not about good and evil.

Nevertheless, a poignant ethical problem does arise when the Dienst-sense changes into deference. The international legal discipline has been identified as one always insecure even about its own existence, humble to politics, silent when faced with critical challenges, and deferential when it is demanded to stand its ground.⁵¹ Unlike the deinos, who although evil maintains an authentic, unmediated and full relationship between his self and his acts, the lawyer who defers to extant social structures which he refuses to examine, whether they be a code, an authority, or strategy, because he is afraid of other people's opinions, of what 'the system' will do to him, or of not living up to standards which he has done nothing to verify, falls into the stream of the impersonal and inauthentic. His deferral is unethical.

The question in the lawyer's mind should always be: if law is the servant, who is the master? And if this is the particular inside the general principle, how is the general created and sustained? As a consequence, the history of international law includes many instances where apparent injustices are not responded to in law and the issues are being deferred elsewhere; colonialism, slave practices, human rights violations, totalitarianisms, different aspects of war, women's inequality, inadequate protection of children and slum-dwellers, or large-scale environmental criminality. The legal profession in different contexts has understood its Dienst as deference more than often. An example of such deference is the jurisprudence of the early 19th century US courts regarding the issue of slavery, and in particular the question of whether slaves were human.⁵³ Often with great dismay the judges bowed their heads and pronounced their legal decisions upholding the principle of slaves not being human in deference to an odd mix of formalism and politics, adding that 'the most stupid must feel and know [that these principles of slaves not being humans] can never be true'.⁵⁴ Judge Riffin went on to provide an insight into the internal conflict faced by such a judge:

The struggle . . . in the Judge's own breast between the feelings of a man and the duty of a magistrate is a severe one. . . . It is useless however to complain... I most freely confess my sense of the harshness of this proposition [the uncontrolled power of the master over the slave] . . . And as a principle of moral right, every person . . . must repudiate it.⁵⁵

Judge Riffin may have been a good man in that he did not share this morality of slavery but, to the extent that he abdicated responsibility through the formalist strategy or easy exit of 'the law made me do it', he was also unethical. The unethical element lay in the bracketing away of the strong 'feelings of a man' out of deference to the societal conception of magistrate as an abstract applier of dehumanized codes. Nevertheless, the law survived, State v. Mann was overruled a few years later, and the law was perfectly able to perform its Dienst, to the better, when lawyers stopped deferring the 'important' issues.

5 Illustrations: The International Court of Justice

In the last part of this paper, we will illustrate briefly the gravest ethical problems of the above presented styles by linking them to the ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons (8 July 1996), and attempt to allude at a practical example of life-ethics using the much older Guardianship of Infants case (1958). In one guise or another, whether under the that of formalism, idealism or strategy, much of the simplifying away of fundamental ethical choices, what we have called inauthenticity, takes the form either of deferring these 'important' choices elsewhere, as in the Nuclear Weapons opinion, or of covering them up under the socio-legal scaffolding, as in the Infants case.

If we imagine, for instance, a feminist strategic essentialist response to the nuclear arms opinion, again we can see that the formal/ideal paradoxes recreate themselves in these recent trends as well. A strategist-feminist may argue that the Court's problem was that it refused to reform the norms to incorporate or to read in them a human value of 'nurturing' because international adjudication is male-gendered and it excludes such important values which it regards as 'domestic/private', 'feminine', or 'marginal' as opposed to the 'hard core' of sovereignty and self-defence. But a feminist might claim that, if interpreted in the light of the general principle of nurture, the law would have clearly and overwhelmingly prohibited the use and threat of nuclear arms. Paradoxically, however, while making heard the principle of nurture, the feminist here defers to the structure of legal argument, its gendered principles and criticisms, and generally defers to gender as a basis of difference.⁵⁷

The ethical problem of the post-realist styles can similarly be seen to degenerate from Dienst to deference as any of the more conventional styles. All the strategists want to serve the world in some way which they think is 'important' or meaningful, but they often end up in deferring to a paradoxical means frustrating the very meaningfulness in the present.

An older case which serves well to demonstrate the ethical manifestations of these different styles is the Guardianship of Infants case (ICJ Reports (1958) 55). The case was one of Sweden against Holland and related to the infant Marie Elizabeth Boll, a Dutch national born in Sweden to a Dutch father and Swedish mother but who had lived all her life in Sweden, spoke only Swedish and was affected by a Swedish law on protective upbringing of children. The Netherlands argued that under a 1902 Convention regarding the guardianship of infants, Sweden did not have the right to do so, but rather had to send the child to Holland.

The reasoning of the Court was formalist. The Court's reasoning was as follows:

The Court is not concerned with the incidental effects of the Law on Protective Upbringing but with its nature and purpose. Guardianship and protective upbringing are wholly different institutions. The former is concerned with the interests of the minor, the latter with the interests of society. Guardianship is in the sphere of private law. Protective upbringing is in the sphere of public law.⁵⁹

Therefore the protective upbringing law did not violate the Convention, even as applied to Dutch citizens. The Court, in a move familiar to all who have read legal cases, hung its hat on a wholly artificial distinction between public law and private law, as well as between the nature of a law and its 'incidental' effects and came to a conclusion which was good for Marie Boll.

Yet the Court could not merely see through the formality. Instead, it fought formality with formality, clove law into finer categories and tailored a fit, albeit awkward, which would allow Marie Boll to stay protected in Sweden. The cost of this manipulation, however, was that it permitted a semantic difference of classification to cover up a substantive conflict between international treaty and domestic legislation — precisely the scenario which the treaty was trying to avoid. As Lauterpacht points out in his concurrence:

[A]n identical provision which in the law of one country forms part of a law for the protection of children may, in another State, be included within the provisions relating to guardianship.⁶⁰

Lauterpacht, in his dissent, was unwilling to hide beneath the artificial distinctions between private and public law or between nature and effect of the laws. In his concurrence, he uncovers honestly and analyses meticulously the unstable artificial construction that the Court uses to leave the child to its grandfather.

Assuming that there is a technical difference [between the Swedish law and the treaty], it may still be considered undesirable that a dispute between two Governments shall be decided by reference to a controversial technicality in a case relating to significant issues of substance — a technicality which, if acted upon generally, would introduce confusion, or worse, in the law of the operation of treaties. Once we begin to base the interpretation of treaties on conceptual distinctions between actually conflicting legal rules lying on different planes and for that reason not being, somehow, inconsistent, it may be difficult to set a limit to the effects of these operations in the sphere of logic and classification. . . . [A]n essentially doctrinal classification and distinction provides a doubtful basis for judging the question of the proper observance of treaties . . . . The rights of the parties, especially in an international dispute, ought not to be determined by reference to the controversial mysteries of the distinction between private and public law.

By excavating the unstable foundations of the Court's construction, however, Lauterpacht finds himself in a difficult position. For basic moral and ethical reasons he feels that the child's interests are best protected by Sweden. He must concur, but he is still functioning within the social scaffolding of the law and the ICJ. What Lauterpacht does is base his decision on ethics and morality, but by rephrasing these concerns in legal language under the concept of ordre public.

Lauterpacht qualified his use of the ordre public conception because he recognized the tension between the surface of legality and its ethical underpinnings. He recognizes that in a world of positive law, such an undelineated, uncompartmentalized and gelatinous protoplasm of law presents a danger through its lack of constraint. But he also goes on to say that it is an essential ingredient of law without which law would not be law:

Admittedly, the notion of ordre public — like that of public policy — is variable, indefinite and occasionally productive of arbitrariness and abuse. It has been compared in this respect, not without some justification, with the vagueness of the law of nature. Admittedly also, it has often been the instrument or the expression of national exclusiveness and prejudice impatient of the application of foreign law. . . . [Nevertheless], it is, on its own merits, part and parcel of the entire doctrine and practice of private international law almost from its very inception; the two are inseparable, not only as a matter of history but also of necessity.⁶⁴

The Court's, and especially Lauterpacht's, difficulties illustrate well the occasional awkwardness of attempting to fit into legal constructions what is, with ethical clarity, the morally right thing to do. Ethically, neither the judges in the plurality nor Lauterpacht feel that they would be true to themselves as human beings if they allowed legal technicalities to convince their judge-selves to take this child away from what is 'obviously' her home and consign her to a life as a stranger in a country which is foreign to her in every sense except the legal. Yet they are nevertheless judges, and the legal is the arena in which they are 'supposed' to be functioning.

As we have tried to argue from the outset, the question of what a life-ethical decision would have been, in either of these cases, is nearly nonsensical. Although being with Others, and being within a society and a world, is an inalienable part of who we are, we are all, our personhoods, our lives, and our situations, ultimately deeply our own; so too with life-ethics. Nevertheless, to us, the general language of Lauterpacht's opinion as opposed to that of the Court, seems to illustrate the general feel of life-ethical application in law, if as nothing more, then at least as a direction.

A less neighbourly definition of authenticity and ethics, but one which rings most on point with us, is simply to say ethics is care.

6 Conclusion

If ethics is deeply personal care, intransitive responsibility, and openness, what role is left for law, one might ask. This question is one which, when asked from an ethical standpoint, also has no absolute or even adequate answer. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that law is real, that it influences and impacts lives. It determined where Marie Boll ended up. Lauterpacht, after all, does not step outside the nomological circle when rendering his decision, but rather digs deeper into its foundations. As he himself has written, the very nature of law lies in externally imposed obligations and codes. Law, as the medium through which society channels its ideals into the real, has a function of inserting the common interests of society into the particulars of individual lives. It carries the structures of society from the past into the future and thereby sets the limits for the future possibilities of society. In this manner, law itself has a choosing dimension which is shaped, but not completely controlled, by its human actors.

Law, by its nature, seems societal, intentionally and necessarily transitive. It may very well be that one function of law is that of a veiling device through which deeply incommensurate ethical problems are covered over so that society can move on and resolve its problems. Such an analysis, and an acceptance of such a role for law, does not, however, require the bracketing of the ethical and existential questions in order to 'move on'. Even the decision to assume a rule-utilitarian approach to law, following Bentham for example, is made not once in advance for all time, but rather is re-made every time the lawyer is faced with the need to balance the integrity of the rule against the justice of a particular case, a balancing which often takes the form of 'does this rule apply here?' This balancing is inevitably done on the fulcrum of the lawyer's personal ethics, of her Lebenswelt. The ethical task is to undertake and sustain responsibility for the full range of complexity which every such choice entails; such choices are grounded in their human actors, who themselves are grounded in their lives, their worlds and their ethics.

The ethical dimension is present, whether explicitly or implicitly, in every decision to follow, break, determine, interpret or re-interpret the law. The question of what is the function of law is not only part of every decision of how to apply it, but it is part of the individual's ethical task for which no general or abstract answers can be provided in a meaningful way. Our intention has been to elaborate on the complexity of the inquiry, not to confuse it or declare it futile. It is not our intention to dispute the importance of evidentiary and procedural rules or imply that they can be done away with any more than wigs, costumes and lighting should be done away with in a theatre. Both law and theatre have a veiling element, but both are media, structures, languages through which society exposes, reflects on and mediates problems. Both see an important function in inducing social change. Yet, in law as in good theatre, one cannot separate the inside and the outside. The best actors do not artificially 'play' their characters but bring their deepest Lebenswelt into the character to connect it with the social reality. That connection is the difference between good and bad performance, it 'is a willingness to be naked, whether you have your clothes on or not, to strip away those parts of you that stand in the way of the truth of any individual'.

The function of the theatre is that of a critic, an indicator of abuses, and a mediator between struggles among segments of society. To conceive of theatre as a masquerade is the same as constructing law as merely a veiling project. Of course, as the theatre uses masks and robes, the law uses its forms. Both, however, still try to influence the inadequacies of the social order by becoming part of life and by drawing from life. Both lawyers and actors, even while working within externally imposed systems and roles, simultaneously and constantly create structures of ideas into which society flows.

The ethical task of the lawyer is to maintain personal responsibility and care for every engagement with legal problems. This responsibility does not preclude or in any way denigrate the use of legal forms. On the contrary, the legal forms are the tools and language of the lawyer and the judge. But the lawyer and the judge are no more simply the instruments of the socio-legal structure than an actor is merely the instrument of an abstracted character. It is not simply the case that the conception of lawyer as instrument divorced from the underlying person is morally wrong or unadvised. Rather, it is philosophically nonsensical — the character cannot exist without the actor — and the analytic pretence that one can is an unethical abdication of responsibility and care.

Notes

1. Paraphrasing Majorie Garber's introductory speech at the 'Turn to Ethics' conference at the Centre for Literary and Cultural Studies at Harvard University, April 1998. ↩
2. Our minds are not so divided that they would manage to keep our different roles and different sets of consistencies (e.g. personal moral choices or professional ethical choices in their every small everyday variety) separate and independent. Neither are our minds merely computerized calculators which would manage a consistency in the whole of our behaviour. See e.g. D. Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984); M.-R. Ollila, Moraalin tuolla puolen (1997), at 154-159; D. Danielsen and K. Engle (eds), After Identity: A Reader in Law and Culture (1995). ↩
3. A more extensive discussion on the natura-cultura distinction and its impact in international legal work has been developed by Korhonen, in O. Korhonen, International Law Situated: The Lawyer's Stance towards Culture, History, and Community, Ch. II, dissertation, Harvard Law School, 1999. ↩
4. See Martti Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia, The Structure of International Legal Argument (1989), at 187-191. ↩
5. Kennedy, 'New Approaches to Comparative Law: Comparativism and International Governance', 2 Utah L. Rev. (1997) 545. ↩
6. The narrative possibilities and their meaning in the international legal world have been studied extensively by Nathaniel Berman and David Kennedy. ↩
7. For an example of 'grounding' in philosophy, see e.g., Heidegger's analysis of Dasein as an inquiry into what is generally meant by Being and 'the human condition'. ↩
8. Koskenniemi, 'Faith, Identity and the Killing of the Innocent: International Lawyers and Nuclear Weapons', 10 Leiden J. Int'l L. (1997) 140-141, 153, 155. ↩
9. For more on Lebensphilosophie and Lebenswelt see, e.g., Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Bergson, Kierkegaard. ↩
10. Following M. Heidegger, Being and Time (1926). ↩
11. George Steiner, Heidegger (1978). ↩
12. The example of the teddy bear, and much of this discussion, is borrowed from M. Buber, I and Thou (1937). ↩
13. Buber, supra note 12, at 80. ↩
14. See M.-R. Ollila, The Ethics of Rendezvouz (1993), and Ollila, supra note 2. ↩
15. Our argument concerns those cases which fall outside the 'routine' or 'core' of normative ascertainment, however large or small one conceives it to be. ↩
16. Koskenniemi, supra note 8, at 149, 152-153, 161. ↩
17. See, e.g., Williams, 'Whistle Blowing in the Public Service', B. Williams et al. (eds), Politics, Ethics and Public Service (1985), at 11, 14. ↩
18. See Ollila, supra note 2, at 87. ↩
19. See Jay, 'Pontius or Ponting: Public Duty and Public Interest in Secrecy and Disclosure', in Williams, supra note 17, at 69. ↩
20. For a discussion of virtue ethics, see Alistair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981). ↩
21. We shall not look into the moral philosophies or their application to law. Our inquiry shall focus on the situation of the international lawyer when she faces a question to which there seems to be no readily generalizable or rationally arguable answer. ↩
22. Based freely on Peter Jay's analysis of ethics and law in public service. Jay, see supra note 19, at 76. ↩
23. Taken from an ABA booklet introducing American lawyers to the requirements of their Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination (1997). ↩
24. Case concerning the Continental Shelf (Libya v. Malta), ICJ Reports (1985), at 39, para. 45. ↩
25. See, e.g., W. Simon, The Practice of Justice, A Theory of Lawyers' Ethics (1998), at 1-4, 195-196. ↩
26. S. Rosenne, The World Court. What It Is and How It Works (1989) 70. ↩
27. See Dworkin's idealist judge, who finds the one right legal answer. R. Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (1977). ↩
28. The inventor (G. C. Spivak) of the concept of 'strategic essentialism' now wants to draw it back. See G. Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993). ↩
29. H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (2nd ed., 1975), at 322. ↩
30. See R. Unger, False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987). ↩
31. See ibid. ↩
32. West, 'Jurisprudence and Gender', 55 Univ. Chicago L. Rev. (1988) 1, at 63. ↩
33. D. Cornell, Imaginary Domain (1995); Idem, Sexual Freedom and Justice (forthcoming). ↩
34. See, e.g., Thomas Franck, Fairness in International Law and Institutions (1995). ↩
35. Karen Knop, talk given on her new book (29 April 1997): The Making of Difference in International Law: Interpretation, Identity and Participation in the Discourse of Self-Determination (forthcoming). ↩
36. See O. Korhonen, Kansainvälisoikeudellinen tulkinta ja dialogisuus (1995); Idem, 'New International Law: Silence, Defence, or Deliverance', 7 EJIL (1996) 1. ↩
37. P. Allott, Eunomia. New Order for a New World (1990), at 56, 66, 79. ↩
38. See, e.g. A. Nussbaum, A Concise History of the Law of Nations; and Kennedy, 'Primitive Legal Scholarship', 27 Harv. Int'l L (1986), 1; see also The Antelope Case, 23 U.S. (10 Wheaton) 66 (1825). ↩
39. By the 'they' in 'they-values' we mean, following Heidegger, the impersonal neuter German 'Das Man'. ↩
40. See Francis Fukuyama, 'The End of History?', National Interest (Summer 1989) 16. ↩
41. See generally on the dynamics of legitimation Koskenniemi, supra note 4. ↩
42. Laurence Buell described one aspect of ethics as 'earnest noise' in a presentation at the 'Turn to Ethics' conference at Harvard University, April 1998. ↩
43. See Kennedy, 'A New World Order: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow', 4 Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems (1994) 329. ↩
44. See Spivak, 'Revolutions That As Yet Have No Model', in D. Landry and G. MacLean (eds), Spivak Reader (1995), at 75. ↩
45. This is the criticism commonly advanced against new approaches to international law writings. ↩
46. On the concept of a tragic situation and international legal thought, see Korhonen, 'New International Law', supra note 36. ↩
47. Gadamer, supra note 29, at 321-322. ↩
48. H.-G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzuge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (1965), at 293-295. ↩
49. Gadamer, supra note 29, at 320. ↩
50. Ibid, at 323-324. ↩
51. Korhonen has discussed these critiques in Liberalism and International Law: A Centre Projecting a Periphery (1996), at 482-484. ↩
52. E.g., during the Cold War it was always the East-West interests and the power balance which needed to be serviced. ↩
53. See Genovese, 'The Hegemonic Function of the Law', in R. Jordan (ed.), The World the Slaves Made (1974). ↩
54. State v. Mann, 2 Devereux 263, 264, 256-57 (N.Car.Supr.Ct. 1829). ↩
55. Ibid. ↩
56. Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, Advisory Opinion (8 July 1996), ICJ Reports (1996) 226. ↩
57. This problem has been generally discussed in subaltern studies inspired by thinkers such as Gramsci and Spivak. ↩
58. Koskenniemi, supra note 8. ↩
59. ICJ Reports (1958) 55, at 79. ↩
60. Ibid, at 81. ↩
61. Ibid, at 82-84. ↩
62. Lauterpacht compares ordre public to public policy: 'It may be stated in the present context that although in this Opinion the French term ordre public is mainly used, it is not used as implying a substantial difference between it and the notion of public policy in common law countries.' Ibid, at 90-91. ↩
63. See, e.g., Dupuy's notes in R.-J. Dupuy, La communauté internationale entre le mythe et l'histoire (1986) 153. ↩
64. ICJ Reports (1958) 55, at 94-95. ↩
65. See, e.g., Dupuy, supra note 63, at 153, 155. ↩
66. Talk by Philip Allott at Harvard Law School, 19 November 1998. ↩
67. H. Shaver, Photoplay, March 1987. ↩