A central theme in the study of international relations is that anarchy requires states to set aside moral concerns to attain security, rendering IR an autonomous sphere devoid of ethical considerations. Evolutionary and moral psychology, however, suggest that morality emerged to promote human success under such conditions. It is not despite anarchy but because of anarchy that humans have an ethical sense. Our argument has three empirical implications. First, it is almost impossible to talk about threat and harm without invoking morality. Second, state leaders and the public will use moral judgments as a basis, indeed the most important factor, for assessing international threat, just as research shows they do at the interpersonal level. Third, foreign policy driven by a conception of international relations as an amoral sphere will be quite rare. Word embeddings applied to large political and nonpolitical corpora, a survey experiment in Russia, and an in-depth analysis of Hitler's foreign policy thought suggest that individuals both condemn aggressive behavior by others and screen for threats on the basis of morality. The findings erode notions of IR as an autonomous sphere and upset traditional materialist–ideational dichotomies.

国际关系研究的一个中心主题是，无政府状态要求国家搁置道德问题以实现安全，从而使国际关系成为一个没有道德考虑的自治领域。然而，进化和道德心理学表明，在这种情况下，道德的出现是为了促进人类的成功。不是无政府状态，而是因为无政府状态，人类才具有伦理意识。我们的论点具有三个经验意义。首先，几乎不可能在不援引道德的情况下谈论威胁和伤害。其次，国家领导人和公众将道德判断作为评估国际威胁的基础，实际上是最重要的因素，正如研究表明他们在人际层面所做的那样。第三，将国际关系视为非道德领域的概念驱动的外交政策将非常罕见。应用于大型政治和非政治语料库的词嵌入、俄罗斯的一项调查实验以及对希特勒外交政策思想的深入分析表明，个人既谴责他人的攻击性行为，又根据道德筛选威胁。这些发现削弱了国际关系作为一个自治领域的概念，并打破了传统的唯物主义-观念主义二分法。