Tragedy, ‘Tragic Choices’ and Contemporary International Political Theory

The essence of the tragic vision of the world is that human action sometimes, perhaps often, involves a choice between two radically incompatible but equally undesirable outcomes: that whatever we do in a given situation we will be, from one perspective, acting wrongly. This account of the human condition may be particularly germane to realist thought, but the absence of a sense of the tragic can be employed to critique many other areas of international political theory. Analytical political theory in general rejects the tragic vision, and a great deal of modern writing on humanitarian intervention and global distributive justice similarly refuses to accept that sometimes there are no unambiguously right answers; that to act is, necessarily, to do wrong. The unwillingness to admit the tragic dimension of human existence is not simply intellectually harmful but also politically debilitating.