One of the key themes to emerge from this forum is the dangers of an overly stark contrast between empirical and normative scholarship, a distinction that is presupposed of course in raising the question of their relationship. While Moral Limit invoked that and other related distinctions as analytical devices rather than incompatible ontological and epistemological positions, I concur that such a dichotomy (along with other contrasts) can easily become problematic, not the least if (1) it is taken to imply an epistemological distinction that ‘empirical’ research does not always involve interpretivism; and/or (2) it entails insufficient recognition of the ways that various kinds of normative theory engage a range of what ought to be recognized under a broad banner of ‘empirical’ considerations as Erskine truly most usefully underscores in her response. The caution that so many forms of what we may understand as international political theory (IPT) are better seen as lying on something of a continuum of different forms and degrees of self-conscious engagement with the empirical ‘real world’ is thus an appreciated corrective to be well heeded, particularly the way various interpretive approaches offer windows into such concerns. Yet, Erskine's invocation of ‘interpretive’ strategies as a critical resource in normative approaches is left underdeveloped. This is a tall order beyond this limited forum, about which of course so much has been written elsewhere, yet it just is not clear what is analytically special about ‘interpreting’ moral norms and criteria along the lines she suggests for the rather focused present purposes of navigating the question of moral limits and possibilities. In any case, I hope that such qualifiers are kept in mind when such terms are deployed for the analytical uses that they can serve; later I point to other limitations presented by various dichotomies invoked in the course of this dialogue.

In the introductory chapter to the book, I sought to avoid the charge of unfair or narrow characterizations of IPT that Erskine nevertheless detects in the book; I was reticent to pronounce upon ‘IPT’ at a broad level, instead preferring the more modest device of taking on some of the most prominent scholars and works I was aware of in IPT on the question of ethics and analyzing what they offered for the particular questions that animated Moral Limit. Erskine points out numerous authors whose contributions, she suggests, do more than I was aware of regarding attention to the empirical for the normative, and reviewers of Moral Limit and of this forum have also done the same. These informed engagements will serve valuably to broaden the community of scholars whose work will help me and others working on such issues to weed out intellectual dead ends and identify useful synergies – they are duly appreciated and also mark a simple if important function of dialogues like this that is perhaps easy to overlook. In Moral Limit though, I sought to work through what the approaches of various prominent scholars offered to those questions of how one knows moral limits and possibilities in world politics when one sees them, how to resolve international dilemmas in a socially constructed world, and how to respond to the hypocrisy that seems to frequent foreign policy and global affairs. I will not speak for other contributors to the volume and will let them defend themselves insofar as they are more the precise targets of objection (such as in Erskine's charges about Reus-Smit's characterizations of normative theory, and Snyder and Vinjamuri's critiques of Sikkink), which in turn might spur yet further useful conversation and debate.Footnote ³⁷ For my part, I offered critiques (hopefully friendly, as noted by Nicholas Rengger in his contribution) of prominent normative international relations (IR) scholars like Walzer, Linklater, and Frost regarding the shortcomings of their work for my particular purposes – none of which Erskine substantively challenges even as she invokes (1) Frost as one among several such scholars that I should have profitably engaged for attempting to reconcile global ethics with communitarian sensibilities, and (2) Walzer for his communitarian interpretation. Thus, while I heartily acknowledge the reminders of the richness of normative IR theory including its many varied purposes, and look forward to following up on further recommendations, an even more useful point would have been to elucidate how some of those approaches more specifically help us directly answer not just tasks of moral evaluation broadly speaking that she defends as a key contribution of IPT, but the more pointed questions of disentangling moral limit and possibility, of navigating different kinds of dilemmas in a socially constructed world politics, and dealing with hypocrisy in world politics. Perhaps this could be put on the IPT table as a future research agenda that would be exciting to see carried out in a focused way. Indeed, prodded by the reviewers to this forum to identify the value-added of these exchanges – beyond my own individual learning that has been considerable – a chief contribution of this dialogue it seems to me has been the way it has stimulated the identification of agendas for further work, more of which I'll mention along the way.

At the same time, just as those making the move from more self-consciously empirically oriented work to engaging with various kinds of normative international theory can benefit from both the more nuanced and broader engagements pointed to by Erskine, I would underscore the value of the obverse. I cannot do justice in this limited space to the extent to which each of the scholars suggested by Erskine successfully do this as she suggests, so again, this is most useful terrain for yet further engagement. I would say of Molly Cochran's pragmatism (referred to by Erskine to substantiate her position) that there seems to be very much in common in spirit between such an approach and appreciation of the practical judgments that might flow from understandings of how moral norms work. Indeed, I come away from this forum convinced that fruitful engagement is to be had with the concerns that animated Moral Limit and the burgeoning contemporary interest in IR in various forms of pragmatism – analytical, epistemological, and ethical (see Reus-Smit Reference Reus-Smit2012) as another agenda for further focused work. I came a bit late to the contemporary pragmatist party only after Moral Limit (all part of the chagrined learning process), and look forward to a more systematic exploration of the ethical implications of pragmatism in IR. Of Cochran's work I would confine myself to saying in this impossibly short space that it is disappointing that she defines the possibility of the ethical use of violence as beyond the bounds of pragmatic ethics (Cochran Reference Cochran2000, 252); that is most unfortunate in my view as it renders her international normative theory silent on some of the most vexing moral dilemmas in world politics, and thus does not provide guidance to the very kinds of most challenging ethical questions Moral Limit sought to distill from IPT – such as whether and how the use of violence such as humanitarian intervention might be justified in some circumstances, say even from a cosmopolitan perspective.

Another key theme of Moral Limit that is engaged in this forum is the question of the ethics of constructivism as such. Snyder and Vinjamuri provide a useful avenue for exploring this issue in working through the extent to which constructivism as such is consequentialist or principled. It is quite startling that Snyder and Vinjamuri also turn to pragmatism in an attempt to contrast what they see as the pitfalls of constructivist-informed ethics. But I must confess that it is unclear how their ‘call for a principled pragmatism, one that is based on the creation of social conditions that permit desirable norms to flourish’ differs from the constructivist contributions to ethics suggested in Moral Limit. That project's authors would have no quarrel whatsoever with an approach of creating social conditions for ethics – what else could one do in a socially constructed world? That Snyder and Vinjamuri's approach does not differ nearly as much from the suggested contours of constructivist-informed ethics as they seem to think is apparent right from the start as they invoke the imprimatur of a prominent contemporary practitioner for their pragmatism, yet it is none other than a leading constructivist scholar (John Ruggie)! The analytical core of the difference as Snyder and Vinjamuri see it is to avoid “the pitfalls of the approaches that some principled constructivists take to consequentialism” (p.11, this Forum) and “build a stronger firewall between the use of norms in an explanatory mode and the use of norms to define the ethical aspirations and evaluative criteria” (p. 12). But this formulation is too underdeveloped to be helpful and indeed seems contradictory, since it involves calling for a firewall between the explanatory and normative elements of norms even as the authors themselves violate it by calling for a principled pragmatism in which the prescriptive status of norms is to depend in no small part upon their empirical viability: ‘Ethical reasoning, together with social context, establishes the goals…’ as they put it. I agree, but this is no firewall. Nor am I persuaded at all that constructivists ‘fail to differentiate analytically between the causal role of norms in their empirical theory and the aspirational role of those norms in their ethical commitments’, as charged; indeed the whole premise of Moral Limit was that constructivists had focused primarily on the explanatory and had not attended thoroughly to the latter with but a few exceptions.

Nicholas Rengger's essay raises a similar point from a different angle: ‘What’, he asks, ‘does “Constructivism” in any or all forms bring specifically to the table in terms of a bridge between theoretical reflection and the concrete realities of the world that is not there in (say) classical Realism? Price does not really tell us and that, surely is a problem. My own view would be that there is nothing specific that Constructivism brings to the table’. Together, these provocations flag the interesting issue of the extent to which there is a meaningful difference between various conceptualizations of pragmatism, the ethic of ‘prudence’ long counseled in the realist tradition, and practical insights for moral entrepreneurship generated from constructivist and other scholarship tracking moral change.Footnote ³⁸ In the conclusion to Moral Limit I did spell out what I thought was one difference between a realist ethic and insights derived from constructivism; namely, that the latter seems ontologically disposed against:

The difficulty in Snyder and Vinjamuri's analysis seems to lie in a truncated and reductive understanding of constructivism. They argue that the problem is that when means like coercion are needed, it creates ‘…a tension for principled constructivism when it implies that discourse about norms and attempts to enforce them offer the best way to explain the world and the best way to improve it’. But no one in Moral Limit is shown to be doing either let alone both of these things, and for good reason, as the book's authors do not do so, certainly not in such crude formulations of claiming norms offer ‘the best’ way to explain or prescribe (which are unhelpfully conflated here as if the authors are not at pains to be careful in these distinctions, which is the core premise of the whole book). The problem here is twofold: one concerns the ontological understanding of norms and power; the second concerns logics of action to which I will return a bit later below (for now I will just note that association of the term ‘enforcement’ above with the constructivist account of norms only confuses the issue).

The relationship between norms and discourse and Snyder and Vinjamuri's preferred variables – power and interest – is a decidedly more subtle one in the constructivist view than lends itself to such ready recourse to the dichotomy deployed by Snyder and Vinjamuri. I confess that it is a bit exasperating after all these years of explication about what constructivism is and is not to encounter (1) the lack of appreciation of the core constructivist insight that norms and discourse can be usefully understood as forms of power, and that norms and discourse can shape power and interest; and (2) the attempt to retain power and interest as ‘non-constructivist’ variables. Here surely is one point where analytical dichotomies seem to have run their course of usefulness and become instead a barrier to harnessing the descriptive and explanatory as aids for the prescriptive. But let me try to forward the debate by trying out the proposition here that absent a more nuanced appreciation of the influence of norms on power and interests, and their associated logics of action (below), formulations like Snyder and Vinjamuri's would in fact be inherently conservative, and far less amenable to ‘principled, desirable social change’ than they seem to want to suggest. Why would any change in power or interests underpin ethical change if the former are somehow prior to and independent of ethics? Such changes would simply mean different formations of domination in the name of relative balances of power – regimes of sheer survival and self-help stripped of any other political, social, or ethical content. That such a fundamental ontological point could be lost at this point in the scholarly debate, and the constructivist position reduced to championing discourse as the cure for world peace as if it remained naïvely neglectful of the role of power, is not, alas, a sign of as much intellectual progress on this dimension as one might have hoped;Footnote ⁴⁰ this empirical evidence of ontological gaps that remain is to be frankly acknowledged lest the forum itself plead guilty to all Whigish charges intimated by Nicholas Rengger. On the other hand, there is evidence too of nuanced bridging attempts between realism and constructivism (Jackson 2004).

Still, what do these avowedly different approaches counsel to do in the face of dilemmas? Snyder and Vinjamuri usefully attempt to sketch out what they see as three analytical possibilities. First, pretend there is no conflict (which I need not say anything more about). Second, simply say some norms can never be violated, or agree normatively with the empirically most prevalently ranked norms. These are two quite different things they confusingly lump together – the latter simply conflates the ought with the is in far too simple-minded a manner (which the authors in Moral Limit do not do), and in any case would presuppose a prior identification and ranking of what counts as the relevant norms constituting the dilemma such that ethical ranking is not entirely escaped. Third, one could shift the focus from behavioral outcomes (e.g. the extent of actual human rights abuse) to the consequences for the strengthening of a norm. They argue constructivists exhibit all three, but I would object that I just do not see the first two in Moral Limit, and not surprisingly nor are any of its authors cited except those like Finnemore who are approvingly cited as not doing what they allege.Footnote ⁴¹

The second salient difference between Snyder and Vinjamuri's pragmatism and sensitivity to a practical ethical sensibility intimated in Moral Limit – itself a most interesting convergence – is Snyder and Vinjamuri's move to try to claim the logics of action that lay behind power and interest as primary, and exclusive of the logics associated with norms and discourse: ‘Whereas principled constructivists typically assume that persuasive normative discourse and norms-conforming action take the lead in creating desirable social change, principled pragmatism takes the view that principled, desirable social change can only be successfully advanced when it is first anchored in a supportive configuration of power and interest’. But the scholars in Moral Limit do not simple mindedly assume that discourse ought to lead in changing the world absent power and interest, quite the contrary as the discussion of ontology above suggests. Constructivists are typically happy to grant a prominent place for logics of coercion and bargaining in explaining compliance with ethical norms; they simply claim that other social logics that they have explored – like deliberation, arguing, persuasion and also more coercive logics of discourse like shaming – can play an important role in social change. Here I do not see need for improvement upon the kind of basic position articulated by Risse over a decade ago:

Similarly, Müller and Deitelhoff's attempt to systematically disentangle different logics of action in real-world negotiations resulted in the conclusion that mixed modes of action were the norm, often even for a given actor. Demonstrating the prevalence of pure types empirically proves elusive: for influencing the course of the negotiations, ‘even strategically motivated actors engage in the exchange of arguments’ (Deitelhoff and Müller Reference Deitelhoff and Müller2005, 171), and constructivists have long explored how moral entrepreneurs constantly engage in strategic social construction (Finnemore and Sikkink Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998). I confess it is not clear what more can be said if one is not to accept the apparent reasonableness of such propositions in the face of abundant empirical evidence – realist, rationalist, constructivist, etc. – showing the prominence of each perspective's privileged logics of action in various contexts. No one single logic dominates successfully all the time. Accepting the messiness of world politics and the constant mix of logics like coercion, bargaining, and persuasion implies moving to more mid-level theoretical claims of the problem-solving type that seem an ill-match for the next order trumping kinds of claims of primacy forwarded by Snyder and Vinjamuri. Such claims are increasingly a rarity in the academy – not as much fun as the old days perhaps for those who like a good intellectual dust-up, if one finds a bit boring the truth that results from the intellectual progress of showing the flaws of overly grand claims.

What might the insights of constructivism distinctively counsel on the question of how to act? This is a key challenge laid with great nuance by Nicholas Rengger's in his response, and he is surely right that a more satisfactorily developed constructivist contribution to ethics would have to detail how particular varieties of constructivism contribute to particular ethical positions rather than reifying constructivism as an undifferentiated whole. Here it might be useful to begin by unpacking global ethics as containing several dimensions. A constituent part of an ethical response to an international issue is answering the question of whom (or what) ought to be our moral concern. Skeptics, communitarians, international society proponents, cosmopolitans, and ecoholists among others all have different responses. The authors in Moral Limit explore the links of their constructivism with a broadly cosmopolitan ethic, worked through in particular issue areas. Thus, the answers to the ethical question of how to act are not at as general a theoretical level as Rengger's challenge (and that of one most helpful reviewer) might demand, but are of the more situational type where, for example, a commitment to human rights faces a dilemma of conflicting imperatives – more on that will be said below. A second dimension of any ethical account concerns how to make a properly moral decision. Here virtue ethicists differ from utilitarians who differ from Kantian deontologists who differ from Habermasians, again but to name but a few. So what ethics if any on these fronts might constructivism entail? To begin with the second dimension, does constructivism imply an ethics of principles or consequences? Rengger takes issue with the constructivist account of ethics he reads in my work, intimating that I hold that consequentialist forms are not ethical, though I certainly do not mean to imply any such thing. I concur that it is the end to which instrumental action is devoted that gives it critical moral content, and if anything I would suggest that constructivists (given their view that interests and even ‘rational action’ tend to have meaningfully social elements) would tend to be reticent to grant that there is anything constituting truly non-moral action, since even the strategic maximization of profit and power are usefully seen as ethical choices to substantive moral goods except perhaps bared down to the most desperate of circumstances of sheer survival.

Snyder and Vinjamuri make an observation that might prove salutary for forwarding the debate here: ‘Constructivists and activists writing about human rights, international justice, and humanitarianism typically claim that acting in strict accord with these values in any context strengthens norms, but this is debatable’. It is indeed debatable; what we argued in Moral Limit was that we ought to pay attention to the consequences of the legitimacy of the principle that the consequence itself is premised upon. To clarify, with an example, stability and/or rule of law presumably matter not just for their own sake, but because they will produce less killing, yet that very goal may well be frustrated if in the particular process of allegedly protecting it the intersubjective structures of legitimation that underpin norms against violence are in fact undermined. This could occur if masterminds of widespread atrocity are treated as morally different agents in the sense of being granted moral exception. Marc Lynch explores to great effect this logic of the dynamics of legitimacy and hypocrisy in his chapter on Iraq sanctions episode in Moral Limit, as do in their own ways Bahar Rumelili with the logic of security communities and Ann Towns and Amy Gurowitz in their explorations of the constitutive effects – and attendant moral costs – in immigration policies. So here is another useful vein for much more systematic empirical work – the dynamics of whether and how much tactical consequentialism as an ethic in fact undermines the very ethics it is designed to achieve over the long run. This is an agenda that ought to bring together IPT with IR theory and empirical researchers not to mention philosophers given their long-standing interest in act and rule utilitarianism among so many other formulations directed toward similar ends. This could provide a better understanding of the effects of Snyder and Vinjamuri's suggested ‘strategy for minimizing the damaging effects of hypocrisy’, namely, ‘to adopt rules that govern exceptions’. This emerges from their analysis as a key common ground for anyone concerned about the tensions between the desirable and the practical. Perhaps it is no coincidence that there has been so much attention in recent years to the politics and ethics of the exception, but in any case the timing of this collusion seems most fortuitous to hopefully propel a fourth possible research agenda to precipitate out of this dialogue – tracking the longer-term ethical implications of the politics of exception. Constructivism as I see it is not principled or consequentialist (or some other) in its ethics as such as it is not a full-blown moral theory, but rather points to the importance of understanding the relationship between different pursuits of consequences and principles for getting ethics right. Nicholas Rengger's contribution (along with Erskine's) raises the interesting issue of the implications of constructivism and its emphasis on the importance of identity for other ethical approaches, particularly virtue ethics, that were unexplored in Moral Limit – yet more interesting work to be done. A provocation to perhaps add some fuel: one could wonder whether we are not all principled pragmatists now (at least insofar we are engaged in questions of how to act)?

So who or what ought we care about, and does constructivism have anything distinctive to add on this second dimension of ethics? To return to Erskine, her own recent work is very much at the forefront of such concerns from the perspective of IPT, as she explores the possibility of a cosmopolitanism ‘that would sustain an account of moral agency, judgment and value as radically situated in particularist associations (Erskine Reference Erskine2008, 2)’. Her method is to pursue an understanding of moral reasoning through engagement with the cosmopolitan and communitarian elements in the thinking of normative theorists from Rawls to Frost, Walzer and MacIntyre, to name but a few in her utterly thorough, fair, and fruitful treatment. And yet, what are we to make of the fact that this impressive engagement with IPT ends up at a point that other IR scholars have arrived at for a generation now and thus would not exactly find a surprise – namely, the documenting of overlapping communities and transnational cosmopolitan networks in establishing non-territorial sources of cosmopolitan identity and value? If not every international political theorist made their way into Moral Limit's consideration, extremely conspicuous by their absence in Erskine's analysis are the insights and findings of the likes of Kathryn Sikkink, Neta Crawford, or Thomas Risse to single out but a small few of a whole generation of IR scholars who have empirically documented such overlapping transnational and cosmopolitan communities, not to mention IR scholars like Wendt and Adler and Barnett theorizing such communities in ways different from those in the traditions of IPT.

That said, engagement with Erskine's treatment leads us to greater clarity on a key theme of the forum regarding appropriate divisions of labour between more normatively and positively oriented scholarship by answering another key theme regarding the ethics of constructivism. As she usefully characterizes, ‘…normative IR theory has set itself the task not only of identifying and describing moral norms in world politics, but also of identifying and defending criteria against which these principles and practices can be evaluated’. She then lucidly argues that ‘…a moral yardstick for evaluating particular moral norms as just or unjust, progressive or regressive, moral or immoral, is not somehow inherent in constructivism’. I concur as far as this goes (which also concurs with a similar observation by Rengger though with its own distinctive angle as discussed below), yet what struck me as missing in Erskine's discussion here is whether there is a salient difference between a division of labour in arriving at the grounding of moral commitments – say a commitment to human rights generally – and distinct moral questions such as what to do when confronted with dilemmas that present severe challenges to simultaneous commitments that one might otherwise hold such as between justice and peace, self-determination and human rights, or conflicting humanitarian imperatives.

Thus, perhaps the division of labour question needs to be broken down to underscore that in the first instance the most direct potential value-added from constructivism (and other research explicating the role of moral norms) will tend to lie less in extended normative arguments as such grounding general moral commitments – norms prohibiting slavery, torture, or discrimination, or the pursuit of justice or self-determination – or grounding of higher-level general theories such as cosmopolitanism, and more in offering perspective concerning possibilities for their realization and structural costs, and leverage when brutal trade-offs are confronted between moral commitments that cannot simultaneously be realized. This unpacking of the normative enterprise into more clearly defined constituent projects brings us full circle to the discussion above that emerges from Snyder and Vinjamuri, and the common ground that has emerged here of the need for a more robust empirical sense of the relative success of different moral strategies. One can easily imagine a research program from large N to case studies attempting to do just that, and indeed Sikkink's latest rejoinder to Snyder and Vinjamuri's other research has done exactly this on the subject of criminal tribunals and other transitional justice mechanisms (Sikkink Reference Sikkink2011).

But might constructivism not do more? To probe further the division of labour theme, while Erskine denies a particular ethic to constructivism, at the same time she easily concedes that normative IR scholars ‘are less concerned to defend the empirical assumptions that form an important part of our work with reference to strict social scientific scholarly standards’. Here she usefully if controversially raises the question of ‘whether engaging in evaluative and prescriptive analyses is actually precluded by the theoretical underpinnings of the constructivist project (in its different manifestations), or, conversely, simply constrained by self-imposed limitations brought on by disciplinary expectations and the internalized methodological biases of many of those working in this area’. I would argue the latter, though frame it not so much as a limitation but strategic opportunity; indeed, the form that constructivist scholarship has often taken has in many cases explicitly been in order to engage mainstream American debates that had and too often continue to largely ignore ‘British’-style (among other non-US forms) IR including IPT, and thereby have an impact upon the mainstream of the discipline to pay more attention to ethics than it had for decades. The reaction of some non-US scholars has been that constructivism is just saying things like ‘society matters in international relations’ that the English school among others have always said (often heard by this author). This neglects the fact that through the way it has documented such phenomena, and established its plausibility through careful empirical research and systematic consideration of alternative explanations, constructivism by most accounts has been very successful in establishing itself as one of the major contemporary perspectives in the English-speaking part of the scholarly discipline at least. This can be contrasted to the fact that references to other styles of non-US mainstream scholarship such as the English school continue to be largely absent from that mainstream US IR scholarship – just have a look at most American IR graduate syllabi at highly-ranked institutions. Thus, Erskine is only partially right when she suggests that engaging in explicitly ethical enquiry requires scholars to question the way that mainstream American constructivism has come to define itself; the point of Moral Limit is that it requires IR scholars on both sides of the empirical/positive divide and indeed continental divide to question how they have come to define themselves.

Here, Erskine's analysis can most usefully contextualize the position of some constructivist scholars even as I would argue that it does not apply to all. She argues that ‘the way that liberal cosmopolitan positions tend to appeal to impartialist starting points does seem radically at odds with constructivism's own assumption that the identities of actors are defined by the institutionalized norms and values of their social contexts, making political agency (and arguably moral agency) radically situated and socially determined’. Yet a contributor like Sikkink in Moral Limit is explicit that she derives her cosmopolitan human rights ethic precisely from what Erskine might called its situatedness, so there appears to be a salutary convergence here of empirical and normative IR scholars on appropriate standards and their grounds. Perhaps this forms a bridge to Nicholas Rengger's invocation of the role for ‘world-disclosing’ ethics as opposed to action oriented ethics. Emanuel Adler's work has proceeded from just this kind of presumption as well – that it is precisely constructivism's communitarian ontology that provides the promising pathway to the intersubjectivity of global ethics (Adler Reference Adler2005). This would be the pathway to a broader contribution of constructivism – namely, girding an embedded cosmopolitanism insofar as evidence of the possibility of transcending moral parochialism underpins the very acceptance of that moral position itself. Rengger suggests just this as a basis for undercutting skepticism drawing on Kant: ‘As long as we can say that human progress is possible in principle (i.e. is not obviously impossible) Kant argues we have a moral duty to work for it’, a point I explicitly concurred with in Moral Limit (7, fn 8). Thus, my only quarrel here is that Erskine might move a step too quickly to the claim that in a division of labour model ‘…constructivists must surrender the territory of defending the evaluative criteria required to say whether certain norms are better than others, when change constitutes moral progress, and, by extension, what we ought to do’. For one, well-rounded scholars could be profitably enjoined to engage a fuller range of implications of their work rather than encouraging staying in their silos, and indeed IR scholars such as those contributing to this forum and others such as Robert Keohane have been doing just that. In any case, ‘defending evaluative criteria’ might imply different things, and constructivism (and other empirical approaches to moral norms) strikes me as potentially very useful in providing (1) a powerful sociological defence of the possibility of desired morals against skeptical charges of idealism; and (2) insights regarding the possibilities and limits of success of the application of those criteria in particular instances where context might indeed be everything. Erskine herself later seems to recognize this in arguing that the evaluative criterion of consequentialism is not contingent upon empirical findings – only the resulting prescriptions are. So there does seems to be a very instructive narrowing down of the differences here, which in turn can make more clear the avenues for complementary work and indeed for collaborative work where a common ground of concern converges at their respective edges as each of the normative and empirical projects push out to their boundaries of expertize.

Erskine's contention is that the only standards for evaluation that I argue are open to constructivists besides implausible externally derived metaphysics are those ‘…dependent upon existing moral norms’, similar to Snyder and Vinjamuri's third possibility of dealing with a moral dilemma. But this selective citation to support this contention strains the meaning of the original passage – the second half of that quote qualifies it by stating that such standards do not determine our moral evaluations, but constructivists nonetheless do take them ‘seriously as structuring the very ethical standards that are available to us to invoke for judgment’. I do not suspect Erskine, nor any other contemporary normative theorist would actually disagree with that contention, so the insinuation that any ethic of constructivism is inherently conservative is overwrought at least on this account, or at least no more susceptible to such charges as the method of interpretivism she proffers if I understand it correctly. Further development of just how interpretive analytics of the type she seems to champion within normative theory would deal with this would seem to offer one avenue for further conversation.

Rengger's essay points in exactly this kind of direction in his formulation of the varieties of ‘world-disclosing’ thought as opposed to ‘action-coordinating’ ethics, though in doing so I worry that he suggests a further step away from the latter, which does not get us closer to responses to the very specific questions that animate Moral Limit, which I take typically to simply be different from those of the ethical approaches pointed to by Rengger. And while I do not make any imperial claims of the primacy of practical ethics as suggested by Rengger (rather just the utility of constructivism for helping answer them for those interested in taking them on), Rengger's analysis most helpfully breaks down the issue from being about an ethic of constructivism in general as such, into the need to articulate the ethics of specific constructivisms and their relation to specific moral theories. While more certainly remains to be done on this front, this is indeed what the contributors to Moral Limit attempted to do as a first cut – the volume does not develop a particular grand constructivist ethic, but rather in specific cases authors attempt to work through how a constructivist-informed analysis of the dynamics of morality can help one arrive at a nuanced moral assessment given a particular moral stance that the authors embrace. Thus, to cite but one example from the book, Marc Lynch's analysis of the Iraq sanctions episode pivots around the moral dilemmas presented from the point of view of a cosmopolitan sensibility that takes as the key moral reference point the suffering of innocent civilians. In his astute analysis of the dynamics of hypocrisy, he concludes that real moral progress is evident as defined in his humanitarian terms, but that critical lessons need to be drawn for future episodes to avert the structural moral costs that accompanied the more tactical gains:

To conclude far too quickly, fora such as these suggest there is something worthwhile to be had from seeing just how far scholars can go before they might concede irreconcilable differences, rather than starting their work from a committed assumption of such essential differences (of their own and/or others). What comes to my mind here is my recollection of Richard Rorty's own pragmatic self-description as a ‘bourgeous Nietzschean liberal’ (and all the contradictions that entails). That is to say, even acknowledging that at some level ‘everything is politics’ ultimately does not have to preclude earnest attempts to learn from rather than simply reposition ourselves at every instance, and move beyond at least some sources of error and mutual misunderstanding. In my mind at least, this forum has occasioned more nuanced mutual understandings of the phenomena we study from different perspectives, though as well has underscored basic differences such as ontology that do produce divergence. Thinking aloud, I wonder if one could argue the scholarly ethic broached above is inherent in a constructivist ontology insofar as the scholar so inclined is self-conscious how knowledge constitutes power and interests. As slim as it is, I will hang a lingering if dogged shred of hope for progress on this last bit of empirical evidence (the discovery of a novel thought for me) that has arisen in the course of attempting to meet the rigorous challenges of the contributors and also reviewers of this forum.