International Legal Evangelism: Intelligence, Reconnaissance & Missions

10. The duty to order the world
I have said that a Christian should understand the importance of international law
in terms of our duty to order the world, bringing to the chaos of action and impulse
coherence and clear-headed orientation to important human goods. 47 I believe that
the ordered framework that international law provides is indispensable, by
promulgating, as it does, as points of public global orientation, norms about how
prisoners of war are to be treated, what the rules about neutrality require, and what
is to happen at national borders, what labor standards are to be upheld, and how
environmental catastrophe is to be averted. We are not necessarily good at doing
these things, but they have to be done and, unless it can be shown that international
law and international institutions will make things much much worse than they are
rather than somewhat better, then we have an obligation to try. We mustn’t let
disappointment that they don’t make things a thousand times better motivate a
refusal to look for any amelioration at all.
There used to be a tradition in political philosophy that presented the tasks of
government as optional. People if they liked could form a social contract and set
up a government. This, as John Locke put it, “any number of men may do,
because it injures not the freedom of the rest; they are left as they were in the
liberty of the state of nature.” 48 Governance was based on consent, a social
contract, and like any contract it was a matter of choice: you could take it or leave
it. Well, like Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals, I believe this fantasy has been
done away with. 49
Governance—the ordering of a community, a land, or a people—is not an
option. It is a moral necessity. And it is not an enterprise from which we are
entitled to stand aloof because it is not convenient to us to enter into a social
contract. As Rawls insisted in A Theory of Justice, we have a natural duty to play
our part in the setting up, the maintenance, and the operation of just institutions;
we have an unconditional duty to play our part in making it possible for the
47 Ordering the world is partly a matter of ordering ourselves, ordering our communities, and ordering the effects we
have on each other—if you like, the externalities we impose on each other. It is a matter of bringing order to anger
and conflict as well as an order of humility to our spiritual vanity and our moral self-righteousness. Not all of this is
a task for law. Some of the order in our lives is brought there by prayer, worship, friendship and love and the sober
self-scrutiny and reconciliation at a personal level. Some of it is the upshot of forms of community among us—often
world-wide community—that have little or nothing to do with law. The international community of scholars, the
international community of scientists, the literary world, the world of entertainment, and of course the churches,
most of which now have a global dimension. Law does little of this work, except provide a framework within which
other forms of human community are enabled to act across time and across continents.
48 Locke, Second Treatise, §95.
49 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, ii, §17: I believe that fantasy has been done away with which sees the
beginning of the state in a “contract.”
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