Ethical discourses can have great influence in national and international affairs. Neta Crawford’s Argument and Change in World Politics (2002) reviews five centuries of debates over imperial conquest, slavery and the slave trade, forced labour, colonization, trusteeship and decolonization. Crawford shows how ethical discourses can gradually structure and restructure pre-analytical feelings and analytical attention and how they can interact with and influence other factors—by the range of comparisons that they make, by the categories and default cases that they introduce and defend, by the ways they reconstitute conceptions of ‘interests’ and perceptions of constraints. ...