All critical theories raise epistemological questions; what is the basis of the claims that we make about the world? This chapter examines what three critical approaches (Critical Theory, Post-Structuralism and Complexity Thinking) have contributed to epistemological debates and how these perspectives have been construed in International Relations. For the ‘first generation’ Frankfurt School writers theory and practices of knowledge production could be considered to be historically and geographically specific. This is not to deny the possibility of making truth claims, but rather to say that these are context dependent. In their most famous work, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno analysed the considerable constraints that are implied by living in a totally reified world. The pessimistic implications of that work led subsequent Frankfurt School writers to investigate alternative ways that an operationalization form of truth may be achieved, and the chapter assesses Habermas’ communicative action theory, which has been particularly influential in International Relations theory. For poststructuralist writers the question is not so much about knowledge, but more about how certain ‘truths’ come to be established as such. For complexity thinkers access to knowledge is made difficult by the multiple elements that can have an impact on an event, and the non-linear relationships between them. While we might be able to analyse how events came about, if the gold standard for knowledge production is the ability to predict the future then complexity thinking raises significant issues.

This chapter focuses on the Christian tradition of practical ethics in Europe of the High Middle Ages, here in relation to lay practice. Its particular focus is vows, voluntary commitments to God to undertake a good action, which were a popular feature of popular piety in this period. This was an ethical domain rich in complex rules. Typically, pious laypeople took vows of pilgrimage, prayer, fasting and chastity, either for a fixed period or in perpetuity, as a penitential act or as a spontaneous act of piety. Especially from the thirteenth century, the church established detailed rules intended to moderate such vows, given the ways in which they could conflict with other, ordinary obligations. The chapter takes as an example the pastoral rules relating to vows in four texts from thirteenth-century France and England, Thomas of Chobham, Peter the Chanter, Raymond of Penafort and John of Freiburg. These books of penitential advice shows that detailed rules about vows were devised by the clergy with the concerns of ordinary people in mind. In this light, casuistry – which would later become notorious as the archetype of ethical legalism – is revealed not so much as an invasion of private conscience, but an attempt to facilitate personal devotional projects.

Chapter 9 poses the following question: might anatality-enhancing biopolitics somehow exist; alife-affirming biopolitics that doesn’t use childrenas raw material to prefigure contingent andcontestable visions of the future? Using HannahArendt’s thoughts on ‘natality’, and bringing thisinto conversation with Deleuze and Guattari’s ideaof ‘becoming-child’, and also Miguel Vatter’s workon ‘positive’ biopolitics, this concluding chapterreflects on what it might look like to refigurechildhood as a way of reconfiguring biosocialpower.

This chapter describes the challenges of a distinct aspect of ethical formalism, that of quantification, and the tension in many ethical traditions between calculation and the incalculable. Certain facets of ethical conduct can be weighed or counted, while others – such as matters of faith, mercy and trust – disrupt or evade calculation. The chapter explores this tension in the context of Sunni Islam, where adhering to religious rules in one’s personal conduct is often assumed to gain one points in a divine system of bookkeeping. Through ethnographic research in the Palestinian city of Nablus, it is argued that such divine bookkeeping can be understood as a technology of the self. Other aspects of being a good Muslim, however, break calculation apart. Ethical qualities that bear on one’s relation to God or other human beings are particularly difficult to think of in such formalistic terms. Regarding contemporary Islam, some scholars have argued that an interest in calculation stems from the rise of neo-liberal forms of capitalism. Yet attention to comparable ideas in the Christian tradition shows otherwise. St Anselm, for instance, phrased similar notions in the terms of the feudalism of his time. The chapter points instead to the repressive politics of the occupied Palestinian territories, which combine capitalist political economies with extensive security surveillance. There is an elective affinity between the microscopic scrutiny of such state surveillance and the calculated tallying of good and bad deeds.

This introductory chapter makes the case for studying systems of ethical rules as an important historical phenomenon in their own right. It shows that both history and anthropology have tended to overlook the importance of rules in many ethical systems. It argues that this is due to a number of impulses within contemporary ethical and legal thought, including the move towards virtue ethics and an enduring distinction between the purviews of law and morality. Having established that the boundaries between law and morality are not as clear-cut as many assume, the Introduction sets out the case for thinking instead in terms of ‘ruly’ or legalistic ethics. It argues that rules can enable ethical life and coexist with virtue ethics. Finally, it argues for the retention for comparative purposes of the concepts of conscience and casuistry. Both have become too strongly identified with particular instances of the Christian tradition. When defined in broader terms as awareness of the moral dimensions of one’s actions, conscience can be reclaimed as a helpful concept, which allows us to interrogate complex problems such as dilemma and doubt. In the case of general rules, such problems arise precisely through the consideration of particular cases – or casuistry. These points made, the Introduction summarises the chapters that follow and sets out the arguments of the book as a whole: that rules can underpin and enable ethical life; that rules interact in important ways with virtue ethics; and that ‘ruly’ ethical systems engender moral rules about rules.

This chapter presents a case study rooted in the Jewish tradition of legalistic ethics, halakhah, discussing in particular its role in processes of conversion to Judaism. Jews-by-choice have become a prominent feature of the synagogues and Jewish organisations of contemporary Poland, the focus of the chapter. In the understanding of halakhah, conversion (giyur) means becoming an observant Jew. Converts willingly submit themselves to rules and constraints in order to effect a desired self-transformation. The institution of giyur creates the legal matrix that enables these individual, rule-oriented projects of the self and their recognition by the communities that the converts wish to join. However, the halakhah is characterised by pluralism. This form of self-making must thus be mediated through a multiplicity of rabbinical legal expectations – ‘progressive’, ‘orthodox’, ‘ultra-orthodox’ – and the varying degree of their recognition by a handful of especially important institutions, including, crucially for some, the Israeli state. In hierarchical terms, the strictest version of religious practice often becomes the most readily acknowledged. In practice, then, these transformative projects are realised not just through the rules of religious observance, but by navigating the meta-rules of conversion – which themselves vary – and the relationships, formal and informal, between these different legal matrices. Successful conversion thus often requires elaborate tactics of shifting between authorities, institutions and spheres of influence. An appreciation of its legalism thus becomes an indispensable technology of the self.

Chapter 5 moves beyond the genealogical questioning ofhow we have come to be what we are. The questionthat follows is: ‘what are we in the process ofbecoming?’ In opening out this question, the chapterexamines how biosocial power operates in the guiseof empowerment, specifically in the form ofchildren’s citizenship. Approaching citizenship(from Nikolas Rose) as a moral technology ofdiscipline, the chapter focuses on how children’scitizenship has been configured in Ireland, wherechildren have recently been incorporated into thepolicy process, initially as ‘active participants’,and subsequently as ‘active citizens in their ownright’. The chapter uses the case study as acritical vantage point on the idea of the ‘WholeChild’ and the figure of the ‘resilient’ child, andconcludes by presenting children’s citizenship as aform of biosocial empowerment that, on closerinspection, proves to be a mode ofsubjectivation.

This chapter tackles common stereotypes of the Islamic sharia through a comparative approach, arguing that the history of Christian casuistry provides a rich source for an alternative conceptual vocabulary for describing such rule-dense ethics. In contrast to stereotypes of sharia as ‘strict’, Christian casuistry fell into disrepute as being too lax. This was especially in the form of the doctrine of ‘probabilism’, which allowed the following of any learned opinion, even if not the most widely attested. This was to ameliorate the effects of ‘tutiorism’ – always taking the safest path to salvation. These concepts for discussing the uses of rules are put to work to help understand how contemporary Shi’i Muslims cope with the dilemmas of life in the UK. In questions such as when to break one’s Ramadan fast when a British summer day might last more than twenty hours, or whether one can shake hands with someone of the opposite sex, the rules developed by scholars in the Middle East may not sit well with the realities of life in Britain. Ethnographic fieldwork shows how people take up a variety of tactics in response, whether it be playing it ‘safe’, following a more liberal opinion or using one’s ‘common sense’. Most importantly, rules are neither necessarily rigid nor strict. Rather, legalistic forms of ethics offer a variety of ways to facilitate good conscience, even when faced with the seemingly irreconcilable demands of religious ideals and life in a non-Muslim society.