7.3.11

I have been asked, quite reasonably, re: humanitarian intervention:

But, how do you recognize when you're facing one of those exceptional situations? I tend to agree with your point, but that's the question that always sticks with me. How do you know? If not by using some kind of rule, then using what?

The short answer to this question is that one doesn't have a rule because, though the various phenomena of humanitarian intervention are linked by the same moral principle, it is hard (perhaps impossible) to specify a consistent empirical rule that corresponds to the moral one.

The more complicated answer has two steps. First, we should think of sovereignty and non-intervention in rule utilitarian terms. (I don't mean to say we need to be rule utilitarians; I think there's a perfectly adequate deontological argument for the same rule) Rule utilitarianism, as we all remember, produces rules which are intended to be utility-maximizing in most cases. There will always be instances where more utility would be gained by breaking the rule but, for various reasons, it works out more easily to hold to the rule anyway.

Non-intervention is a clear example of this kind of rule. It's not hard to imagine--or remember--cases where a small amount of infringement on sovereignty would produce a better overall result. We want to respect cultural and governmental difference, as well as the freedom of people to choose their own options even within a liberal-democratic framework. The world would be better if everyone were on the same page regarding (say) free trade or environmental protections, but the world in which everyone were forced to be on the same page would be notably worse. This does mean that there are various small-scale morally unacceptable behaviors--killing people who demonstrate against you, for example--which remain beyond the reach of international law.

Now, the sort of behaviors that might lead to humanitarian intervention pose an obvious problem to the rule. In these cases, the utility that following a rule of non-intervention would create is so incredibly negative as to negate the rule itself. This is a variation on the thought that 'the constitution is not a suicide pact.' Non-intervention is a serious moral good, serious enough to deserve to be our presumptive and default position. (Among other things, it makes colonialist behavior harder to justify) But it is not the only good; nor does it make sense to follow a rule at the cost of what that rule is there to ensure. Thus far I gather there is agreement. Why can't all those cases themselves become a rule? After all, they share the common feature of being severe violations of a general rule. I think a rule cannot be formed for at least three reasons.

First, an anecdote: before I had definitively settled on political theory as my niche in political science, I gave serious consideration to writing a dissertation on humanitarian intervention from an international relations perspective. There was, so far as I could tell, no serious study of the phenomenon across a sufficiently large period of time. The reason became obvious: it's very difficult to specify a theory in which one can include all the cases one wants to include. To get a sense of this, think about just three cases: Rwanda, Kosovo, and Bangladesh (in 1970-1971). What links them together? They are not all instances of war: Rwanda was not an interstate conflict. They were not all motivated by the same reasons: Kosovo was driven by religious conflict, Rwanda by ethnic. They did not all provoke the same response: Bangladesh is one of the classic justified cases of intervention; Kosovo remains controversial; no one acted in Rwanda. It's not clear to me how one builds a rule out of those differences.

Second, one might lean on the moral intuition that links the cases and say, 'they are all instances of systematic and widespread murder of human beings.' Leave aside, for the moment, the question of whether that's true for Kosovo (it remains controversial). There in fact already is a law to make this illegal, and one with a well-developed mechanism for enforcement (unlike much of international law): the Convention on Genocide. The Convention fails not because the rule it articulates is unclear, but because the political interest in enforcing that rule is minimal. So the problem may not be the absence of rules at all.

Third, I worry that the moral calculus of intervention only makes sense when intervention itself fails. That is, there's a problem of prospective-v-retrospective evaluation. A successful intervention should stop the problem before it reaches a critical stage; but a successful intervention is also going to look wildly disproportionate to the original harm. Given that we know 500,000 Rwandans died in absence of intervention, it is easy to say that even a very high cost would be justified to prevent the genocide from being carried out. Kosovo may in fact be such a case: there are disputed claims of a program of genocide having begun. Those who would condemn it argue that the plan of NATO airstrikes looks excessive given the reality on the ground. So any attempt to build a rule permitting intervention is going to have to deal with this reality: a successful intervention will appear like a disproportionate use of force.

Much better, it seems to me, to accept that instances where intervention would be justified share common moral features (of being an exceptional case), but are not instances of a general rule.

1 comment:

rosebriar said...

That makes a tremendout amount of sense. Thanks! :-)