Ten years after my first birthday I could recall memories from nine years prior. My parents moved us from Florida to a secluded tribal village in Guyana to protect us from the constant threat of fish hawks. They were a beautiful animal, as I recall them, but had, within their three-toed feet, a vicious set of talons much accustomed to penetrating fish and mammals. Guyana was merely the name of the country we retreated to; we resided high in the mountains where the designation of countries and their boundaries were meaningless to the tribal population we joined. We roamed the mountainside catching sparrow monkeys and picking mountain pineapple, a bromeliad species I fear I ate the last of. Sparrow monkey and pineapple are quite a breakfast on a cold morning in Guyana. Our tribe leader 'Kinchusa' was fatally wounded by a chimp in a territorial dispute leading to a splintering of factions among our group. Thirty of us set off for the coast where we fashioned a quasi-democracy and sustained ourselves by netting fish and hunting small game. We had been told our father's fate was the vast prison labor system in Guyana but we later learned he had escaped and returned to Florida where he took up a law practice. We raised plane fare and joined him there where we have been happy citizens since. USA!
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- See Fernando Teson, "Humanitarian Rights and Cultural Relativism" 25 Virginia Journal of International Law (1985), 869)
- The only philosophically coherent (although counterintuitive) argument against humanitarian intervention is the pacifist position, one that opposes all violence. For a spirited defense of that position, see Robert Holmes On War and Morality (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1989)
- See, for example, Bhiku Parekh, "Rethinking humanitarian Intervention," 18 International Political Science Review (1997), 49, 54-55.
- For the view that there is considerable overlap on humanitarian intervention among different religious traditions see Oliver Ramsbotham, "Islam Christianity, and Forcible Humanitarian Intervention," 12 Ethics and International Affairs (1998), 81.
"In this chapter I argue that intervention is morally justified in appropriate cases. The argument centrally rests on a standard assumption of liberal political philosophy: a major purpose of states and governments is to protect and secure human rights, that is, rights that all persons have by virtue of personhood alone. Governments and others in power who seriously violate those rights undermine the one reason that justifies their political power, and thus should not be protected by international law. A corollary of that argument is that, to the extent that state sovereignty is a value, it is an instrumental and not intrinsic value. Sovereignty serves valuable human ends, and those who grossly assault them should not be allowed to shield themselves behind the sovereignty principle. Tyranny and anarchy cause the moral collapse of sovereignty.
I supplement this argument with further moral assumptions. The fact that persons are right-holders has normative consequences for others. We all have (1) the obligation to respect those rights; (2) the obligation to promote such respect for all persons (3) depending on the circumstances, the right to rescue such victims - the right of humanitarian intervention. Because human rights are rights held by individuals through virtue of their personhood, they are independent of history, culture, or national borders.
I define permissible humanitarian intervention as the proportionate international use or threat of military force, undertaken in principle by a liberal government or alliance, aimed at ending tyranny or anarchy, welcomed by the victims, and consistent with the doctrine of double effect.
The argument for intervention has two components. The first is the quite obvious judgement that the exercise of governmental tyranny and the behavior that typically takes place in situations of extreme anarchy are serious forms of injustice towards persons. The second is the judgement that, subject to important constraints, external intervention is (at least) morally permissible to end that injustice. I suggest below that the first part of the argument is uncontroversial. For the most part, critics of humanitarian intervention do not disagree with the judgement that the situations that (according to interventionists) call for intervention are morally abhorrent. The situations that trigger intervention are acts such as crimes against humanity, serious war crimes, mass murder, genocide, widespread torture, and the Hobbesian state of nature (war of all against all) caused by the collapse of social order. Rather, the disagreement between supporters and opponents of humanitarian intervention concerns the second part of the argument: interventionists claim that foreigners may help to stop the injustice, non-interventionists claim they may not. The related claims from political and moral philosophy that I make (that sovereignty is dependent on justice, and that we have a right to assist victims of injustice) concern this second part of the argument. If a situation is morally abhorrent (as non-interventionists I suspect will concede) then neither the sanctity of national borders nor a general prohibition against war should by themselves preclude an intervention.
This discussion concerns forcible intervention to protect human rights. I address here the use and the threat of military force (what I have elsewhere called hard intervention) for humanitarian purposes. However, the justification for the international protection of human rights is best analyzed as part of a continuum of international behavior. Most of the reasons that justify humanitarian intervention are extensions of the general reason that justify interference with agents in order to help victims of their unjust behavior. Interference and intervention in other societies to protect human rights are special cases of our duty to assist victims of injustice. However, many people disagree that humanitarian intervention is part of a continuum; they treat war as a special case of violence, as a unique case, and not simply as a more violent and destructive form of human behavior that can nonetheless be sometimes justified. They do not agree with Clausewitz that war is the continuum of politics (politik) by other means. Intuitively, there is something particularly terrible, or awesome about war. It is the ultimate form of human violence. This is why many people who are committed to human rights nonetheless oppose intervention. To them, war is a crime, the most hideous form of destruction of human life, and so it cannot be right to support war, even for the benign purpose of saving people’s lives. Good liberals should not support war in any of its forms.
I am, of course, in sympathy with that view. Who would not be? If there is an obvious proposition in international ethics, it has to be that war is a terrible thing. Yet the deeply ingrained view that war is always immoral regardless of cause is mistaken. Sometimes it is morally permissible to fight; occasionally, fighting is even mandatory. The uncritical opposition to all wars begs the question about the justification of violence generally. Proponents of humanitarian intervention simply argue that humanitarian intervention in some instances (rare ones, to be sure) is morally justified, while agreeing of course that war is generally a bad thing. But it is worth emphasizing here that critics of humanitarian intervention are not pacifists. They support the use of force in self defense and (generally) in performance of actions duly authorized by the Security Council. So their hostility to humanitarian intervention cannot be grounded on a general rejection of war. Part of the task of this chapter is to examine those reasons.
The case for intervention relies on principles of political and moral philosophy. Political philosophy addresses the justification of political power, and hence the justification of the state. Most accounts of the state rely on social contract theory of some kind to explain and justify the existence of the state. Here I follow a Kantian account of the state. Governments are justified as institutions created by ethical agents, that is, by autonomous persons. The state centrally includes a constitution that defines the powers of governments in a manner consistent with respect for individual autonomy. This Kantian conception of the state is the liberal solution to the dilemmas of anarchy and tyranny. Anarchy and tyranny are the two extremes in a continuum of political coercion. Anarchy is the complete absence of social order which inevitably leads to a Hobbesian war of all against all. The exigencies of survival compel persons in the state of nature to lead a brutal existence marked by massive assaults on human dignity. The is a case of too little government, as it were. At the other extreme, the perpetration of tyranny is not simply an obvious assault on the dignity of persons: it is a betrayal of the very purpose for which government exists. It is a case of abuse of government - of too much government, as it were. Humanitarian intervention is one tool to help move the quantum of political freedom in the continuum of political coercion to the Kantian center of that continuum, away, on one hand, from the extreme lack of order (anarchy), and, on the other hand, from governmental suppression of individual freedom (tyranny). Anarchical conditions prevent persons, by reason of the total collapse of social order, from conducting meaningful life in common or from pursuing individual plans of life. Tyrannical conditions (the misuse of social coercion) prevents the victims, by the overuse of state coercion from pursuing their autonomous projects. If human beings are denied basic human rights and are, for that reason, deprived of their capacity to pursue their autonomous projects, then others have a prima facie duty to help them. The serious violation of fundamental civil and political rights generates obligations on others. Outsiders (foreign persons, governments, international organizations) have a duty not only to respect those rights themselves but also to help insure that governments respect them. Like justified revolutions, interventions are sometimes needed to secure a modicum of individual autonomy and dignity. Persons trapped in such situations deserved to be rescued, and sometimes the rescue can only be accomplished by force. We have a general duty to assist persons in grave danger if we can do it at reasonable cost to ourselves. If this is true, we have, by definition a right to do so. The right to intervene thus stems from a general duty to assist victims of grievous injustice. I do not think that critics of intervention necessarily disagrees with this in a general sense. Rather, their opposition to intervention relies on supposed moral significance of state sovereignty and/or national borders.
The issue of the justification of humanitarian intervention is narrower than the general issue of how liberal governments should treat abusive regimes. It is perfectly possible to say that a non-liberal government should not be treated as a member in good-standing with the international community while acknowledging that it would be wrong to intervene in those states to force liberal reforms. The situations that qualify for forcible intervention are best described as “beyond the pale” situations. Only outlaw regimes are morally vulnerable to acts of forcible and non-forcible humanitarian intervention. All regimes that are morally vulnerable to intervention are of course illegitimate, but the reverse is not rue. For many reasons it may be wrong to intervene in regimes which are nonetheless intolerable by general liberal tenets. Humanitarian intervention is reserved for the more serious cases - those that I have defined as tyranny and anarchy. Again, the illegitimacy of the regime is a necessary and not a sufficient condition for permissibility.
I indicated that most critics of intervention are not pacifists. They object to this kind of war. They do not object to wars, say, in defense of territory. This position is somewhat anomalous because it requires separate justifications for different kinds of wars. In contrast, the liberal argument offers a unified justification for war. War is justified if, and only if, it is in defense of persons and complies with the requirements of proportionality and the doctrine of double effect. Take the use of force in self defense. What is the moral justification? That the aggressor is assaulting the rights of persons in the state attacked. The government of the attacked state then has the right to fight for its citizens’ lives and property. The defense of the state is justified qua defense of persons. There is no defense of the state as such that is not parasitic on the rights and interests of individuals. If this is correct, any moral distinction between self-defense and intervention, that is, any judgement that self-defense is justified while humanitarian intervention is not, has to rely on something above and beyond the general rationale of defense of persons." Tesòn, F.
