Bridging the contending theories of natural law and international relations, this book proposes a 'relational ontology' as the basis for rethinking our approach to international politics. Amanda Beattie challenges both the conventional interpretation of natural law as necessarily and intractably theological, and the dominant conception of international relations as structurally distinct from the ends of human good, in order to recover the centrality of other-directed agency to the promotion of human development. Offering an important contribution to the study of international political thought, the book contains a number of challenging and controversial ideas which should provoke constructive debate within international relations theory, political theory, and philosophical ethics.

Amanda Russell Beattie

Introduction Realizing the Human Experience: Vulnerability and Human Suffering; Chapter 1 International Relations and Modern Institutional Design: Locating the Isolated Individual; Chapter 2 The Morality of Natural Law and International Relations: Establishing a Tradition of Influence; Chapter 3 Thomas Aquinas and the Morality of Natural Law; Chapter 4 A Relational Account of 'the Political' Agency, Community and Loving Reasonableness; Chapter 5 The Morality of Natural Law and International Politics: Unbounded Moral Communities and Collective Moral Agency; epilogue Epilogue;