Don't Let It Put You Off Your Dinner: First Steps Towards Ethical Policies Shaped by Cultural Considerations

The Duke of Wellington's foreign policy was based on a simple ethical principle: essentially the assessment of options in terms of whether they would lessen or increase the likelihood of civil strife. This principle, being rooted in the “culture of decency,” is not compatible with the prevailing (but, it is argued, increasingly unattractive) realist approach. A major obstacle to the operationalization of Wellingtonian policy (which, incidentally, need not be foreign policy) is the lack of understanding of the causes of civil strife. This obstacle can, however, be side-stepped: first, by the increasingly well-established observation that civil strife, and related gross abuses of human rights, do not happen in stable democracies, and, second, by the more discriminating understanding of both democracy and nondemocracy that is provided by Cultural Theory. Together, these two developments offer a basis for option assessment that simply was not available to the Duke of Wellington. The article concludes with three tentative applications.