be achieved. In something of a prescriptive conclusion, Gaddis writes, “in
practice we tend to fall back upon the only simulative technique that success-
fully illustrates the general and the specific, the regular and the irregular, the
predictable and the unpredictable. We construct
narratives.”5
The narratives examined here—consisting primarily of the biographies and
specific experiences of statesmen—are an integral part of how we might
improve our understanding of ethics and international affairs. These narra-
tives reveal the timeless philosophical quandaries all humans face, yet they
account for history and context: they consider ethics in terms of both princi-
ple and practice. As William Kilpatrick, a professor of education at Boston
University, writes: “the connection between narrative and morality is an
essential one, not merely a useful one. The Ph.D. needs the story ‘part’ just
as much as [anyone]. In other words, story and moral may be less separable
than we have come to think. The question is not whether the moral principle
needs to be sweetened with the sugar of the story; but whether moral princi-
ples make any sense outside the human context of
stories.”6
There is a natural
instinct for those of us interested in ethics and international affairs to get
down to cases, to merge theory and practice through example.
This focus on narratives, as well as ethics and decision making, enables us
to get to the root of ethics, which is human agency—or real people acting in
history. Despite their focus on the international system, the conditions of
anarchy and the primacy of power and interests, realists such as Hans J.
Morgenthau and Kenneth W. Thompson conclude: “Ethical rules have
their seat in the conscience of individual men. Government by clearly identi-
fiable men who can be held personally responsible for their actions is therefore
the precondition for the existence of an effective system of international
ethics.”7
This assertion leads to a second theme in discussing statecraft, and that is
the issue of perfectionism versus nonperfectionism. Max Weber calls this the
distinction between the “ethics of ultimate ends” and the “ethics of respon-
sibility.”8
Without delving too deeply into this distinction here, most people
are willing to cede some ground to Weber and the realists on this point, and
most understand statecraft to be concerned with moral choice that frequently
if not regularly requires the balancing of competing moral claims and the
choosing of the lesser of two evils. Decision making always involves reconcil-
ing the desirable with the possible: the political arena is not the realm for the
blind pursuit of moral imperatives without regard for consequences. For this
reason, saints, by their very nature, do not make good politicians, and politi-
cians are generally not suited for sainthood. One will find very few pure
Kantians among statesmen anywhere—that is, statesmen who strictly adhere
to principles over consequences, and the virtues of reason over the lessons of
experience.
xii Foreword: Biography, Ethics, and Statecraft
