Politicising Ethics in International Relations by Baker Gideon;

Author:Baker, Gideon; [Baker, Gideon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2022-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

Postscript: hospitality beyond the natural law tradition

For Cavallar (2002: 391) there is ‘surprising continuity’ of agreement on hospitality between the natural lawyers. These men ‘assumed a natural right to attempt interaction or commerce with other communities, provided the natives did not object’. (We can remove Vitoria from this list, since he doesn’t provide sufficient grounds for native objection, and we can add Diderot to it, about whom Cavallar says little.) Short-hand for the right of communal self-determination in hospitality, as we have seen, was oft-mentioned support for the isolationism of China and Japan.7 On the other hand, the claimed natural right of interaction weakened this stated commitment to the consent of non-European peoples, and tended to delegate judgement on whether consent could reasonably be denied to Europeans themselves.

Cavallar (2002: 275) sums up his review of hospitality rights in the natural law tradition by contrasting them with hospitality as it appears in the work of Montesquieu, Smith and Hume. Cavallar points to how much hospitality rights have changed from those articulated by Vitoria. First, hospitality rights are no longer seen as a given, but rather as subject to an evolutionary history. In the Spirit of the Laws (1748), Montesquieu recalls Tacitus’ account of German hospitality, of how it was considered sacrilege for a German to shut his door to a stranger. ‘But’, writes Montesquieu, ‘when the Germans had founded kingdoms, hospitality was become burthensome’ as exemplified by two laws of the code of Burgundians which penalised any barbarian who showed a stranger the house of a Roman and decreed that anyone who received a stranger should be indemnified against any possible harm to the community caused by his guest. Montesquieu is clear that the rise of commercial society is to blame for this demise in hospitable behaviour:

But if the spirit of commerce unites nations, it does not in the same manner unite individuals. We see that in countries where the people move only by the spirit of commerce, they make a traffic of all the humane, all the moral virtues: the most trifling things, those which humanity demand, are there done, or there given, only for money.

The spirit of trade produces in the mind of man a certain sense of exact justice, opposite on the one hand to robbery, and on the other to those moral virtues which forbid our always adhering rigidly to the rules of private interest, and suffer us to neglect this for the advantage of others.

The total privation of trade, on the contrary, produces robbery, which Aristotle ranks in the number of means of acquiring: yet it is not at all inconsistent with certain moral virtues. Hospitality, for instance, is most rare in trading countries, while it is found in the most admirable perfection among nations of vagabonds.

(Montesquieu 1777: 14)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.