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Instead of focusing on the elusive essence of decision, this paper looks at the ethics of decision. It looks at the two dominant representation of the ethics of Britain's decision to invade Iraq: the pro- and anti-war lobby. Rather than seeking to synthesise the two, or produce a better representation, this paper argues that both conspire to efface the profoundly political nature of the ethics of decision. Both representations are shown to deconstruct, due to the paradoxes and contradictions of 'ethics' and decision', undermining themselves as they make their case. The aim of emphasising the political nature of ethical decision is to show that while the danger in the US may be the silencing of anti-war opinion, the opposite is the case in Britain. It is argued that this could have potentially dangerous implications, while the silencing of debate and ethico-political discussion can never be anything but bad for critical thinking. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an exercise in intellectual history which aims to advance our understanding of the development of English School thinking on the topic ofinternational ethics by outlining three phases of ethical inquiry within the British Committee. It is ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past ten years, humanitarian intervention has been justified in British foreign policy discourse as a matter of saving people and preventing suffering. The archetypal example of this was the Kosovo intervention of 1999. Equally, in most international relations literature on the topic, both from cosmopolitans and the English School (e.g. Richard Falk and Nicholas Wheeler) the human is at the heart of ethical justifications for war. Yet, in both cases, it is a specific and limited conception of the 'human' that is treated with such care: a human that must be protected on their own soil, but not transferred to a different territory. Perhaps the most obvious ethical solution (cheaper, easier and less violent) to the Kosovo conflict, if protecting the human was key, would have been to airlift refugees into NATO countries. However, such a policy of hospitality was explicitly rejected in British foreign policy - in fact the British government was generally hostile to more refugees. Similarly, humanitarian intervention literature barely touched upon it, despite the importance of cosmopolitan 'hospitality'. Given this, it cannot be a concept of the human stripped of all its political content (what Agamben would call 'bare life') that is key to the ethics of war. Rather, it is a 'human' that must be kept distant, tied to a territorial identity, and separated from the subject that does the saving. It is argued that interveners and cosmopolitans alike need to differentiate their conception of the human, especially in its relation to a territorial 'home'. A more complex conception of the 'human' would be much more difficult to place simplistically at the centre of an ethics of war. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]