Grotius on duties in the international state of nature

This chapter examines Hugo Grotius’s contribution to the development of a notion of what we might term an international state of nature, and especially his insistence that the duties that actors owed each other in this international realm were very different from those that obtained within civil society. In the sixteenth century, theorists writing within a range of traditions had posited solemn and demanding duties to assist and rescue vulnerable subjects of other rulers from tyranny and persecution. In the early seventeenth century, Grotius explicitly subordinated such duties to the duty to seek the preservation and advantage of one’s own state. No state was bound to accept trouble or inconvenience for the sake of vulnerable outsiders. Positive duties to care for the needs and welfare of others were explicitly confined to the realm of civil society. An examination of Grotius’s argument helps us to appreciate the contingent roots of an understanding of international duties that remains widely accepted today.