The objective of this paper is to develop a novel account of how the duty to undertake humanitarian intervention should be assigned to states. It takes as its point of departure two worries about the best existing answer to this question, namely: that it is insensitive to historical considerations, and that its distribution is unfair. Against this background I propose that the duty to intervene should be assigned to states based on the strength of their claim to reject the burden (...) of intervention. Specifically, I argue that the strength of such claims should be determined by ability to intervene effectively, adjusted for historical responsibility for the rights-violations taking place, and the extent to which their capacity for intervention derives from resources tainted by historical rights-violations. This approach, I will argue, can better accommodate the centrality of protecting the victims while also taking into account both historical and distributive concerns. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the international implications of liberal theories which extend justice to sentient animals. In particular, it asks whether they imply that coercive military intervention in a state by external agents to prevent, halt or minimise violations of basic animal rights can be justified. In so doing, it employs Simon Caney's theory of humanitarian intervention and applies it to non-human animals. It argues that while humane intervention can be justified in principle using Caney's assumptions, justifying any particular intervention on (...) behalf of animals is much more difficult – and in present circumstances impossible. If these claims are correct, a number of important conclusions follow. First, all states lack legitimacy because of the horrors that they inflict upon animals. As a result of this, all states are prima facie liable to intervention by external agents. To remedy this situation, all states have the responsibility to massively transform their relationsh... (shrink)

Since its earliest incarnations, just war theory has included the requirement that war must be initiated and waged by a legitimate authority. However, while recent years have witnessed a remarkable resurgence in interest in just war theory, the authority criterion is largely absent from contemporary discussions. In this paper I aim to show that this is an oversight worth rectifying, by arguing that the authority criterion plays a much more important role within just war theorising than is commonly supposed. As (...) standardly understood, the authority criterion provides a necessary condition for the justification of the resort to war, but has no bearing on the question of permissible conduct in war. In opposition, I argue for an alternative interpretation of the criterion, which attributes to it a fundamental role in assessing this latter question. With this revised interpretation in place, I then demonstrate its advantages by applying it to the practical issue of armed conflicts that are initiated and fought by non-traditional belligerents. While several theorists have recognised that this common feature of modern armed conflict poses a challenge to mainstream just war theory in general—and to the authority criterion in particular—I argue that existing discussions frequently misconstrue the nature of the challenge, since they assume the standard interpretation of the authority requirement and its role within the theory. I then show that the revised interpretation provides a clearer account of both the challenge posed by non-traditional belligerency and the kind of response that it requires. (shrink)

This article considers the duty to undertake humanitarian intervention. It first examines the arguments for the duty to intervene and questions the possibility of supererogatory humanitarian intervention. It then considers the leading objections to this duty which, it is argued, are largely unpersuasive. In the final section, the article considers the duty to intervene in the context of the responsibility to protect doctrine, which provides the framework within which debates about humanitarian intervention now in large part occur.

Cosmopolitan justice calls for extensive institutional transformations at the international level. But in the absence of a global enforcing authority, such transformations are bound to be hampered by a range of obstacles, including non-compliance and coordination problems. What solutions can a cosmopolitan thinker offer to address these challenges? In answering this question, the paper focuses on the role that international cooperation between the world?s democracies can play in promoting cosmopolitan aspirations. It argues that such cooperation has a crucial role to (...) play in executing global justice reforms; and furthermore, that the world?s democracies have a moral duty to lead the way in implementing cosmopolitan justice. The paper then suggests that a ?League of Democracies? ? an intergovernmental organization which is open exclusively to the world?s democracies ? could potentially facilitate the type of democratic cooperation that is necessary for cosmopolitan justice. (shrink)

Allen Buchanan has argued that a widely defended view of the nature of the state – the view that the state is a discretionary association for the mutual advantage of its members – must be rejected because it cannot adequately account for moral requirements of humanitarian intervention. This paper argues that Buchanan’s objection is unsuccessful,and moreover, that discretionary association theories can preserve an important distinction that Buchanan’s alternative approach to political legitimacy cannot: the distinction between “internal” legitimacy (a state’s ability (...) to morally justify itself to its own members) and “external” legitimacy (a state’s ability to morally justify itself to humanity more broadly). (shrink)

Abstract The article addresses three aspects of the humanitarian intervention doctrine. It argues, first, that the value of sovereignty rests on the justified social processes of the target state ? the horizontal contract. Foreign interventions, even when otherwise justified, must respect the horizontal contract. In contrast, morally objectionable social processes (such as the subjection of women) are not protected by sovereignty (intervention, of course, may be banned for other reasons). In addition, tyrants have no moral protection against interventions directed at (...) them. Second, the article addresses the internal legitimacy of humanitarian intervention. It concludes that the liberal state may only use voluntary soldiers (either the voluntary army or mercenaries) to conduct humanitarian intervention. Conscription for that purpose is not permissible. The article shows that the long-standing criticism of mercenaries stems from a romantic prejudice and is thus unfair. Third, the article makes a distinction between intention (the determination to perform an action) and motive (a further goal that the agent seeks with that action) and shows that only intention is relevant for humanitarian intervention. A justified humanitarian intervention requires the intention to liberate the victims, but not necessarily a good further motive. It shows how mainstream doctrine has impermissibly confused the two concepts. (shrink)

The principle of absolute sovereignty may have been consigned to history, but a strong presumption against foreign intervention seems to have been left in its stead. On the dominant view, only massacre and ethnic cleansing justify armed intervention, these harms must be already occurring or imminent, and the prudential constraints on war must be satisfied. Each of these conditions has recently come under pressure. Those looking to defend the dominant view have typically done so by invoking international peace and stability, (...) or the value of communal self-determination. But the internal aspect of legitimacy has been overlooked in all of this. If a government insists on defending the human rights of foreigners, it must also be sure not to violate the rights of its own citizens in the process. I argue that the current presumption against humanitarian intervention cannot be substantially relaxed for internal reasons, or given the obligations that states owe to their own constituents. (shrink)

Both radical rebellion and humanitarian intervention aim to defend citizens against tyranny and human rights abuses at the hands of their government. The only difference is that rebellion is waged by the oppressed subjects themselves, while humanitarian intervention is carried out by foreigners on their behalf. In this paper, it is argued that the prudential constraints on war (last resort, probability of success, and proportionality) impose tighter restrictions on, or demand more of, humanitarian interveners than they do of rebels. Specifically, (...) I argue that rebels enjoy exemptions from the success principle that do not apply to humanitarians, and that rebels are not constrained by the foreseen mediated consequences of their actions ? consequences that are interceded by the agency of other parties. The same cannot be said for intervening states. If this is right, then it is possible for a humanitarian intervention to fall short of the prudential conditions of legitimate war despite being expected to accomplish no less, and to cost no more, than a rebellion which is rightly judged to satisfy these conditions. (shrink)

The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty's report, The Responsibility to Protect, argues that when a state is unable or unwilling to uphold its citizens? basic human rights, such as in cases of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, the international community has a responsibility to protect these citizens by undertaking humanitarian intervention. An essential issue, however, remains unresolved: which particular agent in the international community has the duty to intervene? In this article, I critically examine four ways (...) of assigning this duty. Although I highlight the benefits of institutionalising the responsibility to protect, I argue that we should adopt, in the short term at least, a consequentialist solution: humanitarian intervention should be the responsibility of the intervener that will be the most effective. (shrink)

Concern regarding overly demanding duties has been a prominent feature of moral debate ever since the possibility was famously sounded out by Bernard Williams nearly fifty years ago. More recently, some theorists have attempted to resolve the issue by reconsidering its underlying structure, drawing attention to the possibility that the duties to respond to large-scale moral issues like global poverty, systemic racism, and climate change may be fundamentally collective duties rather than indi- vidual ones. On this view, the relationship between (...) potentially overly demanding individual duties and large-scale moral issues is mediated by the fact that the duties are, first and foremost, ours together rather than each of ours on our own. We believe this theoretical shift constitutes an important development for moral theory regarding large-scale moral problems, but in this paper we focus on two dis- tinct reasons to think that the interplay between collective duties and demanding- ness is more complicated than has typically been appreciated. First, we argue that in cases in which risks or burdens are indivisible, the move to collectivize duties fails to fulfill its promise to alleviate demandingness concerns, and moreover that those kinds of cases are far more widespread than they may initially appear to be. Sec- ond, we argue that if concerns over individual demandingness could block a putative obligation from becoming an actual moral duty, then, in some cases at least, con- cerns over collective demandingness could do so as well. These complications help elucidate the fact that while the move to collectivize duties can address demanding- ness concerns in a particular subset of cases, in others doing so may merely relo- cate—or even exacerbate—the problem. (shrink)

This paper examines four interpretations of the observation that humanitarian intervention might be used ‘selectively’ or ‘inconsistently’ in order to elucidate the normative commitments of the deliberative process in international relations. The paper argues that there are several types of concerns that are implicit in the accusation of inconsistency, and only some of them amount to objections to humanitarian intervention as a whole. The paradox of humanitarian intervention is that intervention is prohibited except where the intervention is humanitarian, yet humanitarian (...) reasons never exist in isolation, and it is nearly impossible to determine the real reason for intervention (or any other collective action) in the international arena. The problems revealed by an examination of inconsistency in the example of humanitarian intervention turn out to be general problems with applying the norms of practical reasoning to moral questions dealing with collective agents. (shrink)

While some suggestions have been made as to how the duty to undertake humanitarian intervention should be assigned to specific states, the question of how to assign the duty to carry the economic a...

Fair resource allocation in humanitarian medicine is gaining in importance and complexity, but remains insufficiently explored. It raises specific issues regarding non-ideal fairness, global solidarity, legitimacy in non-governmental institutions and conflicts of interest. All would benefit from further exploration. We propose that some headway could be made by adapting existing frameworks of procedural fairness for use in humanitarian organizations. Despite the difficulties in applying it to humanitarian medicine, it is possible to partly adapt Daniels and Sabin's ‘Accountability for reasonableness’ to (...) this context. This would require: (1) inclusion of internally explicit decisions and rationales; (2) publicity to donors, local staff, community leaders and governments, as well as frank answers to any beneficiary—or potential beneficiary—who asked for clarification of decisions and their rationale; (3) a consistent reasoning strategy to weigh conflicting views of equity in specific situations; (4) advocacy within the organization as a mechanism for revision and appeals; and (5) internal regulation according to publicly accessible mechanisms. Organizations could generate a common corpus of allocation decisions from which to draw in future similar cases. Importantly, the complexity of these challenges should encourage, rather than hinder, broader discussion on ethical aspects of resource allocation in humanitarian medicine. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Why should members of societies engaging in humanitarian intervention support the costs of that project? It is sometimes argued that only a theory of natural duty can require their support and that contractualist theories fail because they are exclusionary. This article argues that, on the contrary, natural duty is inadequate as a basis and that contractualism provides a basis for placing support for (justified) interventions among the duties of citizenship. The duty to support intervention is not, therefore, a competitor (of (...) indeterminate weight) to our duties to compatriots, since it rests on the same basis. That is because exclusive citizenship can be justified only if social contracts can be iterated elsewhere and successful societies therefore owe assistance to societies that are immobilized by state abuse or state failure. (shrink)

This article presents a new understanding of the problem of cosmopolitan motivation in war, comparing it to the motivational critique of social justice cosmopolitanism. The problem of cosmopolitanism’s “motivational gap” is best interpreted as a political one, not a meta-ethical or ethical one. That is, the salient issue is not whether an individual soldier is able to be motivated by cosmopolitan concerns, nor is it whether being motivated by cosmopolitanism would be too demanding. Rather, given considerations of legitimacy in the (...) use of political power, a democratic army has to be able to motivate its soldiers to take on the necessary risks without relying on coercion alone. Patriotic identification offers a way to achieve this in wars of national defense, but less so in armed humanitarian interventions (AHIs). Two potential implications are that either AHIs should be privatized or that national armies should be transformed to become more cosmopolitan. (shrink)

Recent debates in just war theory have been concerned with the status of combatants during war. Unfortunately, however, the debate has, up to now, focused on self-defensive wars. The present article changes the focus slightly by exploring the status of combatants during military humanitarian intervention (MHI). It begins by arguing that MHI poses a number of challenges to our thinking about the status of combatants. To solve these it draws on Jeff McMahan's theory of combatant liability. On this basis, the (...) article contends that, first, combatants engaged in atrocities lack the same set of rights and liberties held by intervening combatants. Second, and more controversially, drawing on McMahan's theory as well as the notion of complicity, it suggests that the same applies to those combatants who do not perpetrate atrocities but are merely ordered to defend the target state against the intervening state. (shrink)