CHAPTER THREE
Is Just Intervention Morally Obligatory?
THE IDEA THAT HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION is not only permissible but obligatory is a central tenet of the “responsibility to protect” that has rapidly emerged in international discourse over the last decade. This concept was first developed by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2001.1 As numerous scholars had done in the 1990s,2 the ICISS laid out principles for humanitarian intervention according to widely accepted Just War criteria. These included just cause, right intention, last resort, proportionality, reasonable prospects for success, and right authority.3 However, whereas earlier scholars had suggested that the satisfaction of Just War criteria could generate a right of intervention, the ICISS claimed that it actually generated a responsibility to intervene. The commission asserted that in those instances where intervention was permissible, it was also obligatory. Nevertheless, the ICISS provided little justification for this claim, simply implying that such intervention was demanded by our “common humanity” and by the need to deliver “practical protection for ordinary people, at risk of their lives, because their states are unwilling or unable to protect them.”4
In this chapter, I outline a defense of the claim that humanitarian intervention, where just, is morally obligatory. I consider some arguments in favor of this proposition and suggest that to the extent that intervention can ever be justified, it is obligatory by virtue of the duties-generating character of human rights. Although some have argued that such a duty is “imperfect” since it does not fall on any potential intervener in particular, I claim not only that the duty can in theory be “perfected” by appropriate and equitable distribution of obligations but that states, regional organizations, and international institutions already behave as if they recognize the duty to protect to be largely distributed in this way. The chapter, therefore, goes some way toward responding to claims long heard that we have only a minimal duty to assist and protect strangers and foreigners and that the duty ought to instead be understood as a discretionary right lest it impose an excessive burden upon particular actors.
MORAL OBLIGATION IN JUST WAR THINKING
Cicero, one of the earliest Just War theorists, wrote of duties of assistance and protection owed to foreigners. In a work that profoundly influenced the subsequent development of Western political thought, On Duties, the Roman philosopher developed an account of the obligations that we owe to each other by virtue of our common humanity. Cicero argued that a man is not to harm another, and he is also not to stand by when harm is being perpetrated against another: “the man who does not defend someone, or obstruct the injustice when he can, is at fault just as if he had abandoned his parents or his friends or his country.”5 He insisted that duties are owed universally, declaring it absurd to say that justice and fellowship obtain between family members but not between fellow citizens, and equally absurd that account should be taken of fellow citizens but not of foreigners. Those who suggest otherwise “tear apart the common fellowship of the human race.”6
However, Cicero believed that duties owed to family and fellow citizens take priority over those owed to strangers and foreigners. “It seems clear to me,” he observed, “that we were so created that between us all there exists a certain tie which strengthens with our proximity to each other. Therefore, fellow countrymen are preferred to foreigners and relatives to strangers.”7 He accepted that the performance of a duty to defend others would at times require some degree of self-sacrifice, and he reprimanded those who neglect their duties out of a desire to avoid “enmities, or toil, or expense.”8 Yet he indicated that duties that were owed to strangers were limited to those instances where “assistance can be provided without detriment to oneself.” After all, “the resources of individuals are small, but the mass of those who are in need is infinitely great.” We need to be measured in our generosity, therefore, so that “we shall still be capable of being liberal to those close to us.”9
Cicero’s account of duties contributed in no small measure to the subsequent development of Just War theorizing. His universal duties of assistance and protection were commonly combined with arguments about the legitimacy of punishing tyrants for breaches of natural law in order to justify extensive intervention by states in each other’s affairs, and particularly by European states in the New World. Sometimes intervention was framed merely as a right, but often it was articulated in terms of a duty. Gentili asserted a universal duty “to protect men’s interests and safety” and, defending war on behalf of others, maintained that “the subjects of others do not seem to me to be outside of that kinship of nature and the society formed by the whole world.”10 Some appealed to the limits that Cicero placed on the duties owed to foreigners in order to emphasize the discretion that states could rightfully exercise. Grotius, for example, emphasized the natural right of self-preservation and, citing Cicero for support, suggested that rescue of peoples from injury and oppression was obligatory for a state only insofar as it could be carried out with “convenience” to itself.11 Vattel similarly allowed intervention in support of peoples resisting tyranny while cautioning, “The duties of a nation towards itself, and chiefly the care of its own safety, require much more circumspection and reserve, than need be observed by an individual in giving assistance to others.”12
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the sovereign right of non-intervention became firmly entrenched in international law, the focus of debate about “humanitarian intervention” was whether it was permissible at all, not whether it was mandatory. Since the end of the Cold War, however, as notions of conditional sovereignty and the permissibility of humanitarian intervention have come to be widely accepted within the society of states, attention has again turned to whether and in what circumstances such intervention is morally obligatory.
THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO INTERVENE
Clearly, intervention can be morally obligatory only insofar as it is morally permissible, and there are several powerful arguments against intervention that ought to make us pause. Some theorists, such as Las Casas in the sixteenth century, observed that wars in defense of people risk creating more harm than good and costing more lives than are saved.13 Others, such as Pufendorf in the seventeenth century, have warned that a right of intervention could be subject to self-interested abuse and lead to increased instances of unjust war.14 Others still, such as J. S. Mill in the nineteenth century, have criticized the notion of intervention as a violation of the right of communities to self-government.15 Nevertheless, I wish to cautiously proceed on the assumption that there are occasionally extraordinary situations, such as the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which military intervention in defense of humanity satisfies Just War criteria and should be permitted. It does not automatically follow, however, that permissible interventions are obligatory.
Some have argued, particularly since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that realist logic produces a moral obligation to intervene to protect populations from mass atrocities since the occurrence of atrocities so frequently spawns flows of refugees and conditions that facilitate arms and drug smuggling, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the spread of international terrorism, each of which threatens international order and stability and therefore national security.16 This realist argument, however, suffers from a serious limitation in that while it may be persuasive in certain cases like Kosovo, it will be less persuasive in cases like Rwanda in which the material self-interests of powerful states are not clearly affected. We need, therefore, an argument for the morally obligatory nature of intervention that does not rely on a coincidence of national interests with the interests of strangers.
One such argument suggests that standing by while some members of human society are harmed in fact harms us all in some moral sense. In the sixteenth century, Gentili justified war in response to violations of the “common law of humanity” and the “law of nations” on the grounds that “in the violation of that law we are all injured.”17 More recently, in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, Barack Obama asserted that “when genocide is happening, when ethnic cleansing is happening somewhere around the world and we stand idly by, that diminishes us.”18 This kind of argument is certainly appealing, but, to be honest, I do not know what it means.
A less abstract and more persuasive argument rests on the simple observation that human rights generate duties. To the extent that there are universal human rights, there are duties that fall upon us all to protect them, and insofar as it is permissible to intervene beyond borders to protect human rights in exceptional and tragic circumstances, we are morally obliged to do so. We may not agree on where human rights come from.19 Nevertheless it is agreed that all individuals have rights by virtue of their humanity. The first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to cite one example, declares, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Moreover, we hold human rights to be so important, so fundamental, that we are sometimes permitted to set aside the sovereign right of non-intervention to defend them when they are threatened on a massive scale. This is the argument upon which theorists justify the permissibility of humanitarian intervention and upon which actual instances of such intervention have been justified by states. It would seem to me that if in a particular situation human rights are threatened to the extent that a state can be said to no longer rightfully enjoy freedom from outside intervention, then the duty-generating character of human rights imposes a duty upon other states to act to protect the population.20
Human rights such as the right to life and freedom from violence and injury are properly understood as claim rights, and claim rights generate duties. Cicero suggested that justice requires both that we refrain from harming others and also that we act to defend others who are being harmed. Human rights generate duties in both of these senses: negative duties to refrain from harm and positive duties to assist and to protect from harm. If we are to take the idea of universal human rights seriously—and it would seem that we believe we should given how many conventions and declarations are adopted in their name—then we are required not only to refrain from violating them but also to act to protect them. Henry Shue has persuasively defended such a claim in his classic work, Basic Rights, in which he develops a typology of duties: to avoid depriving, to protect from deprivation, and to assist the deprived.21 Moreover, Shue makes clear that such duties do not fall on only the sovereign state. Using precisely the language that the ICISS would later adopt, he acknowledges that the “primary duty” to protect human rights lies with the state, but he insists that external actors possess “default duties” to act to protect populations when states prove unwilling or unable to do so.22 James Nickel concurs, suggesting that “a morally justified right does not just disappear, or cease to direct behaviour, when it is systematically violated. In such a case, the right’s capacity to generate obligations may shift so as to increase the responsibilities of the secondary addressees.”23 There are a range of actions that external actors may undertake to discharge their default duty. They might condemn the violations of human rights, apply diplomatic pressure, or impose economic or military sanctions. However, in those extraordinary situations in which the seriousness of the human rights violations and the context of the crisis are such that military intervention is understood to be permitted as a just response of last resort, it would seem reasonable to suggest that such intervention is morally obligatory since it is the only means of effectively discharging the duty to protect.
Cicero suggested that duties owed to those close to us take priority over duties owed to distant strangers. Such arguments are often heard today in discussions of global justice. A response to the claim that intervention is morally obligatory might be that while there are universal human rights, the duty of the state to provide for and to protect the rights of the national population takes priority over the duty to protect those outside of the state. I would tend to endorse the “strong cosmopolitan argument” advanced by Martha Nussbaum among others that insists that nationality is a “morally irrelevant characteristic” and that national boundaries are “morally arbitrary.”24 While there may be good reasons for individuals to prioritize the duties owed to family and friends, it is not at all clear to me why we should prefer the rights of co-nationals to the rights of those beyond our borders.25 Nevertheless, we do not need to accept this strong version of cosmopolitanism to accept that we possess duties beyond borders. David Miller defends the moral relevance of nationality and the idea that a nation-state has a particular duty to promote the well-being of its own population, yet he also recognizes that all humans have basic rights that generate duties not only to refrain from harm but, in extraordinary situations, to assist and protect. Miller concludes that nations are bound to limit their pursuit of domestic objectives, at least to some degree, in order to carry out their global obligations.26 It would seem clear that extraordinary human rights violations are precisely the kinds of situations in which we are obliged to restrain our pursuit of national well-being and act to rescue strangers.
ASSIGNING THE OBLIGATION TO INTERVENE
Numerous scholars have charged that while there may indeed be a moral duty to intervene to protect populations from mass atrocities, it is an “imperfect duty,” meaning that it is not one that can be morally demanded of any particular actor. Michael Walzer puts it well: “The general problem is that intervention, even when it is justified, even when it is necessary to prevent terrible crimes, even when it poses no threat to regional or global stability, is an imperfect duty—a duty that doesn’t belong to any particular agent. Somebody ought to intervene, but no specific state in the society of states is morally bound to do so.”27 This would seem to render the notion of a universal right to protection meaningless. As Onora O’Neill observes, “When obligations are unallocated it is indeed right that they be met, but nobody can have an effective right—an enforceable, claimable or waiveable right—to their being met. Such abstract rights are not effective entitlements.… [They] are empty ‘manifesto’ rights.”28
What is required is that the duty to intervene be allocated to particular actors in particular circumstances. The duty to protect human rights is not a universal duty in the sense that the duty to refrain from injuring others is. We are all expected to refrain from doing harm, but we cannot all be expected to individually contribute to everyone else’s protection. Nor do we need to be. To paraphrase O’Neill, the universal right to be protected from injury can be fully met so long as somebody provides such protection.29 As Shue suggests, “Universal rights, then, entail not universal duties but full coverage. Full coverage can be provided by a division of labor among duty-bearers.”30 What is required to make the notion of universal rights meaningful is that the duty to protect must be distributed and assigned to particular actors and thereby “perfected.” Moreover, it would seem that such distribution is itself a perfect duty. While international actors may not all have a perfect duty to intervene in every instance to ensure every individual’s protection, they arguably do have a perfect and universal duty to work together to ensure that the duty of intervention is distributed efficiently and equitably.31
How might the duty to intervene be appropriately and fruitfully assigned? Moral theorists suggest two key ways to assign such a positive duty. The first, and least satisfactory, way involves identifying an actor that stands in a special relationship with those in need of protection or that has a special capability for protecting them. This idea is based on the concept of “backward-looking” and “forward-looking” responsibility allocation developed by Robert Goodin,32 and it has been applied to the subject of military intervention by a number of philosophers including Kok-Chor Tan.33 An actor who has one of these special qualities may be understood to bear a particular duty to intervene. Looking backward, a state might be understood to stand in a special relationship with people in need of protection in another state by virtue of shared historical ties, including perhaps past injustices. Tan observes that former colonial powers are often understood to bear a particular responsibility to ensure the ongoing peace and stability of a former colony. Alternatively, looking forward, responsibility might arise due to the state’s military strength or its geographical proximity to the people in need. The argument, then, is simply that we may be able to identify actors that “stand out” and bear a particular duty to intervene on behalf of the society of states.34
I suggest that this means of responsibility distribution is already accepted in practice in certain instances. States often recognize that they bear a particular burden of responsibility to intervene in response to mass atrocities either by virtue of their special relationship with the victims or their special capacity to rescue. In 2003, for example, President George W. Bush acknowledged that the United States’ “unique history with Liberia” had “created a certain sense of expectations” that the United States would act to end the violence in the country.35 And in 1994, the Clinton administration tacitly acknowledged that it bore a particular obligation to act to end the violence in Rwanda, presumably because of the military capability of the United States and its role as a leading power, when it actively sought to frame the violence as an intractable civil war rather than as a genocide in order to avoid the sociopolitical costs of failing to act. However, this means of distributing responsibility has important limitations. The existence of special relationships can be patchy and contested, and the burdens imposed upon those with special capacity can at times be unreasonable.36
The second and more satisfactory means of allocating responsibility is institutionalization. This idea was outlined by Shue in a well-known article, “Mediating Duties.”37 Shue suggests that we need institutions to mediate the duties that all actors have to protect the rights of others, both for reasons of efficiency and also in order to provide respite for actors who might otherwise be unfairly burdened. Institutions assign duties to particular actors and specify their content. Thus, they transform “imperfect” duties into “perfect” duties that can strictly bind actors. He claims that the development of institutions to mediate duties for the protection of the rights of others is itself a duty that we all bear: “If institutions are players of as much importance as I have maintained throughout and can implement positive duties effectively, among the most important duties of individual persons will be indirect duties for the design and creation of positive-duty performing institutions that do not yet exist and for the modification or transformation of existing institutions that now ignore rights and the positive duties that rights involve.”38 As noted earlier, Shue acknowledges that the institution that bears the “primary duty” for the protection of populations is the sovereign state. However, since it is clear that states are often unwilling or unable to discharge their responsibilities, Shue argues, it is necessary to develop institutions beyond the state that can carry out “default duties” to protect populations when required. A number of scholars have applied this concept of institutionalization to the subject of intervention in recent years.39 They argue that if we accept that intervention is at times a moral duty, then all actors within the society of states have an obligation to “perfect” the duty by developing institutions that can effectively undertake or facilitate such interventions. After all, as O’Neill suggests, universal rights are “easy to proclaim, but until there are effective institutions their proclamation may seem a bitter mockery to those who most need them.”40
I again suggest that this argument for the allocation of duties is not merely plausible in the abstract, but international actors already behave as if duties of intervention are allocated in this way. Particular states, regional organizations, and international institutions bear particular duties to either undertake or facilitate intervention in particular instances due to the institutionalization of the duty. Such distribution of duties may not yet be optimal in terms of efficiency or equitability, but it does mean that particular actors can at times be identified who bear a particular obligation to act and who can be appropriately subject to blame when they fail to do so. In Article 4(h) of its Constitutive Act, for example, the African Union (AU) has declared for itself “the right … to intervene in a Member State pursuant to a decision of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.” In claiming the right to develop “African solutions to African problems,” the AU has arguably taken upon itself the obligation to do so on behalf of the society of states. The role of the AU with respect to the crisis in Darfur was repeatedly framed in this way by both African and non-African states until it became clear in 2006–7 that the organization was not able to effectively discharge its obligations and that the UN Security Council would need to authorize the deployment of a hybrid UN-AU force.41
The Security Council, in turn, is an international institution that is understood to bear the particular obligation to authorize coercive measures in response to mass atrocities, where appropriate, by virtue of its right to decide on such matters under the UN Charter.42 Certainly, the Security Council should exercise discretion in determining the most appropriate way of responding to individual crises. However, in claiming the exclusive right to authorize the use of military force, it also takes on the obligation to do so when necessary.43 Moreover, it would seem to follow that council members have a moral obligation to table and facilitate the passage of appropriate resolutions, and the five veto-wielding permanent members of the council have a duty to refrain from impeding the council by vetoing or threatening to veto draft resolutions that would authorize the effective protection of populations.
While the obligation to intervene and facilitate intervention is already assigned to particular actors in particular circumstances, such distribution is not yet optimal. Cicero and several theorists who followed him suggested that intervention for the protection of others from injury could be morally obligatory only so long as it could be performed without excessive cost to oneself. Consideration of what is excessively costly to a state is beyond the scope of this chapter. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to suggest that there are limits to the costs that we can expect states to bear in protecting those beyond their borders. After all, a state cannot be expected to intervene to rescue strangers if such intervention seriously undermines its capacity to protect the rights of its own populations. However, all international actors do have a duty to cooperate and coordinate to institutionalize the duty of intervention so that it may be most efficiently and fairly distributed such that it can be effectively discharged without any particular actor bearing excessive cost. As Shue suggests, “one wants institutions that function effectively to honor rights while imposing only duties that make fair demands of those who bear them…. We simply must find out whether both [of these principles] can be satisfied together in practice, being as imaginative as we can.”44 The demand that intervention not be excessively costly does not allow us to ignore the duty to intervene. Rather, it obliges us to distribute the duty more fairly and effectively. Of course, it is conceivable that there could be instances in which, even with equitable distribution of responsibility among capable actors, justifiable intervention will be excessively costly.45 Our duty is to distribute the obligation to intervene effectively and fairly so that such instances arise as infrequently as possible; so that the moral obligation to intervene may be discharged and so that universal rights may be vindicated.46
In this chapter I argue that to the extent that intervention to protect populations is ever permissible, it is morally obligatory. I justify this by appealing to the duties-generating character of human rights. If we are to take the idea of universal human rights seriously, then we need to accept that their protection is not merely a discretionary right but a moral duty. I suggest that regardless of whether we think that duties owed to those close to us should take priority over those owed to strangers, the obligation to protect those beyond our borders is surely generated in those instances where violations of human rights are so severe that external intervention is permitted. I observe that the obligation to intervene does not fall on every actor, but rather that it falls on particular actors in particular ways, and that every actor has a duty to cooperate and to institutionalize the duty so that the burden is distributed appropriately and fairly and so that it can be discharged effectively. And I suggest that states, regional organizations, and international institutions already appear to recognize the obligation to intervene to be distributed in fairly clear ways, if not always in the most efficient or equitable ways. This is not to say that relevant actors always faithfully discharge their obligation, but merely that it is at least widely recognized upon whom the obligation falls. We have a universal duty to continue to work together to further ensure that the obligation to intervene is best distributed so it can be performed as far as possible without excessive costs to particular actors.
Of course, it is to be lamented that there ever arise instances in which military intervention is required. Even when it saves the lives of many, intervention typically costs the lives of some. Moreover, the obligation to intervene always follows a tragic failure to prevent a crisis in the first place. There is an overwhelming case, therefore, for imploring international actors to carry out their prior moral obligation of assisting states to protect their populations from grave violations of human rights so that mass atrocities are prevented and intervention does not need to occur. In recent years, advocates of the “responsibility to protect” have endeavored to reorient discussion about the protection of populations away from the controversial issue of intervention and toward a focus on the prevention of mass atrocities through assistance, capacity building, and institutional reform. Such a move holds the promise not only of avoiding contentious debates about the rights and duties of intervention but also of saving more lives.
Notes
1. International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre [IDRC], 2001).
2. See, for example, Mona Fixdal and Dan Smith, “Humanitarian Intervention and Just War,” Mershon International Studies Review 42, no. 2 (1998); Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
3. ICISS, Responsibility to Protect, xii.
4. Ibid., 2, 11.
5. Cicero, On Duties, ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), I.23.
6. Ibid., III.28.
7. Cicero, De Amicitia, qtd. in Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 36.
8. Cicero, On Duties, I.28.
9. Ibid., I.51–52.
10. Alberico Gentili, De Iure Belli Libri Tres, trans. John C. Rolfe, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), I.XV, I.XVI.
11. Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, ed. Richard Tuck (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), II.XXV.7(1).
12. Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations, ed. Bela Kapossy and Richard Whatmore (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008), II.I.3.
13. Bartolome de Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, trans. Stafford Poole (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), ch. 31.
14. Samuel Pufendorf, The Law of Nature and Nations, trans. Basil Kennett (London, 1729), VIII.VI.14.
15. See J. S. Mill, “A Few Words on Non-intervention,” in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 21, Essays on Equality, Law and Education (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).
16. See, for example, Michael Wesley, “Toward a Realist Ethics of Intervention,” Ethics and International Affairs 19, no. 2 (2005).
17. Gentili, De Iure Belli Libri Tres, I.XXV.
18. Qtd. in James Pattison, Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect: Who Should Intervene? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 177.
19. Referring to agreement reached on human rights by “proponents of violently opposed ideologies” within UNESCO soon after the Second World War, Jacques Maritain famously observed that “we agree on these rights, providing we are not asked why.” Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 77. I would contend that the only plausible grounds for holding that we all possess rights is that we are all conferred with moral worth by a loving God. See Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). I recognize, however, that many believe that universal rights can be justified on alternative grounds.
20. This argument is derived from Kok-Chor Tan, who suggests: “If rights violations are severe enough to override the sovereignty of the offending state, which is a cornerstone ideal in international affairs, the severity of the situation should also impose an obligation on other states to end the violation.” Kok-Chor Tan, “The Duty to Protect,” in Humanitarian Intervention, ed. Terry Nardin and Melissa S. Williams (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 90.
21. Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistance, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
22. Henry Shue, “Afterword: Rights-Grounded Duties and the Institutional Turn,” in Basic Rights.
23. James Nickel, “How Human Rights Generate Duties to Protect and Provide,” Human Rights Quarterly 15, no. 1 (1993): 85.
24. Martha C. Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 5, 14.
25. For an argument endorsing this view, see Simon Caney, Justice beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
26. David Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Miller, however, emphasizes that this is a “humanitarian duty” whose performance is unenforceable rather than a “duty of justice” (248, 73). For Kantian arguments that intervention is in fact a duty of justice, see Carla Bagnoli, “Humanitarian Intervention as a Perfect Duty,” in Humanitarian Intervention, ed. Terry Nardin and Melissa S. Williams (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Heather M. Roff, “A Provisional Duty of Humanitarian Intervention,” Global Responsibility to Protect 3, no. 2 (2011).
27. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 3rd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2000), xiii.
28. Onora O’Neill, Bounds of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 126.
29. Ibid., 103.
30. Henry Shue, “Mediating Duties,” Ethics 98, no. 4 (1988): 690.
31. O’Neill, Bounds of Justice, 103.
32. Robert E. Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 117–35.
33. See Pattison, Humanitarian Intervention; Roff, “Provisional Duty”; Tan, “Duty to Protect.”
34. Tan, “Duty to Protect,” 98, 101.
35. Elizabeth Bumiller and Eric Schmitt, “Bush Insists Liberian President Go before Troops Come,” New York Times, July 4, 2003. Tan also offers this example in Tan, “Duty to Protect,” 114n23.
36. Tan, ” Duty to Protect,” 101–2.
37. Shue, “Mediating Duties.”
38. Ibid., 703.
39. See Bagnoli, “Humanitarian Intervention”; Pattison, Humanitarian Intervention; Roff, “Provisional Duty”; Tan, “Duty to Protect.”
40. O’Neill, Bounds of Justice, 105.
41. See UNSC Resolution 1769 (July 31, 2007).
42. How this exclusive right of the Security Council can be reconciled with the right of intervention claimed by the AU is not altogether clear under international law.
43. Indeed this function of the Security Council is framed as a “responsibility” in Article 24(1) of the Charter.
44. Shue, “Afterword,” 166.
45. I would suggest, however, that it would usually be the case that excessively costly interventions are actually unjustifiable on grounds of proportionality and likelihood of success in the first place.
46. It is sometimes suggested that while states may in certain circumstances bear a moral obligation to intervene, the same cannot be said of individual soldiers who are asked to risk their lives to protect the lives of strangers. For a compelling discussion, see Daniel Baer, “The Ultimate Sacrifice and the Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention,” Review of International Studies 37, no. 1 (2011): 301–26. I would suggest that this is no truer of humanitarian intervention than it is of any other kind of war. If we accept that soldiers can ever be asked to risk their lives in war on behalf of their state, there is no reason, it seems to me, to suggest that asking them to do so as part of a humanitarian intervention is any more problematic than any other justly waged war.