Anti-Climacus

LINK: Norm posts on a subject near and dear to my heart, humanitarian intervention, and offers the following suggestion, on a proposal to have Britain incorporate conventions against genocide into their national law:

"But it doesn't go far enough. By making genocide the threshold for intervention, it would not in fact give protection to peoples against all mass killing, because not all mass killing is genocide; moreover much killing and related atrocity can be done without any of it taking on mass forms, without large-scale massacre - if there is a regular 'flow' of killing and atrocity on a smaller scale. As I have argued before, the threshold for the kind of intervention Brian is talking about needs to lowered."

Norm points out at least one potential problem with this:

"Of course, there must be such a threshold, practically, politically, morally. Intervention, especially military intervention, cannot be justified for every human rights violation, however small."

I see at least three other substantial problems with this proposal:
1. The genocide conventions, and consequently the laws they lead to, are still ungrounded in a critical sense (which is to say, we can imagine it as not beyond the realm of possibility that this set of genocide conventions or another one which was successfully negotiated on an international level might require morally unjust compromises--internalizing this set of norms does not make them the right (or the best) set to internalize). It might be the case that they are, but more work in grounding is needed.

2. What's essentially being argued is that the ability to intervene militarily and otherwise for humanitarian purposes should be the sort of decision that's open to all the normal forces of partisan politics within a nation--and the politicians in any given nation would probably be happy to ignore humanitarian problems when it's inconvenient for them politically--as they do now--but with the addedd difference that you've somewhat sullied the pull of the humanitarian impulse in the meantime.

3. I have some reservations about this being the correct level to situate this internalization of international standards--what you're essentially giving to a state is carte blanche to do what it wants when it thinks a humanitarian situation has been triggered (one can imagine Saddam Hussein invading Iran under a 'humanitarian' pretext)--and this is all the more a problem when you do with it as Norm does, and suggest (rightly, to my mind), that the threshhold has to be at least somewhat lower than it is now.

What does this suggest? Well, obviously, I'm not all the way to an answer yet (hello, potential dissertation!), but it does seem to suggest that perhaps some other locus is the appropriate site to try and internalize humanitarian ethics.