The most notable feature of standard understandings of the meaning of ethics in relation to international affairs, asWalker points out,² has been that such understandings are invariably characterised in terms of ethics and or of international affairs, with `ethics' on the one hand and `international affairs' on the other being defined in mutually exclusive terms. The task of international ethics has been seen as the task of bringing an alien (better) ethical vocabulary to tame the recalcitrant actual political (worse) world. This characterisation owes much to the Hobbesian positivist position which identifies right and justice with the remit of the sovereign state, and therefore takes it as axiomatic that inter-state relations are essentially amoral.