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Introduction
This paper examines the ethical dilemma posed by inter-societal giving practices in an anarchical
international order: on the one hand, aid practices tend to help prevent foreigners and foreign
states from being represented as enemies; on the other hand, these aid practices tend to become
the basis for the social construction of the moral agency of non-human donor states and
organizations in the process.
the anarchical world is that it encourages cooperation and peace between foreign states. The
problem with anthropomorphizing non-human agents, however, is that they are not humans. The
problem with moralizing non-humans is that the human being, then becomes merely one among
many moral agents, i.e., those agents deemed capable of judging right from wrong and good
from bad, based on the truth or best available knowledge about the problems or issues in
question. Non-human agents do not always use truth-based judgmental rationality; instead, they
generally tend to rely on instrumental rationality (for profit in the case of corporations and for
security in the case of states, according to political realists), making their judgmental rationality a
less reliable source of ethical evaluations.
Thus, the problem of moralizing non-human agents
derives at least partially from the possible misrecognition of instrumental rationality as one of the
ethically valid judgmental rationalities. This paper offers a social scientific reason for caution in
moralizing non-humans in the context of giving practices in general and grant aid practices in
particular.
According to Marcel Mauss (1950/1967/1990), an early anthropological theorist of
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There may be a reason to refer to agent- or action-oriented contexts of evaluative judgment as “moral,” while
referring to institutional and structural or theoretical contexts as “ethical.” In the following, however, “moral” and
“ethical” will be used interchangeably to refer to rational evaluative judgment based on truth or best available
knowledge about issues at hand. Though scientific knowledge is the primary form of knowledge to be relied upon,
but other forms are not precluded. See Collier (1994: 169-200; 1999; 2003).
Convention