Introduction In the nineteenth century, scholars, practitioners, students and interested citizens construed the subject of international relations as paradigmatically bound up with morality and ethics. But with the rise of logical positivism and logical empiricism in the philosophy of science and some associated doctrines, many people apparently became convinced that the intimate connection between morality and the study of international politics constituted an obstacle to a scientifically valid understanding of the subject. Support for their rigid separation was to be found in the dominant epistemology of the time which contrasted the kind of knowledge said to be available in scientific inquiries with that to be found in ethics in such a way as to depreciate ethics, or to make it, at best, a ‘special’ study outside the purview of mainstream ‘empirical’ international relations. The implications of this view may be gleaned from a passage in a well-known text in international relations written in the 1960s:

If ‘science’ is the domain of ‘what has been, is, or will be’ and morality consists of ‘what one ought to do’ where the sort of knowledge involved is ‘alleged’, prima facie that would seem to leave morality with hardly anything to do.