GLOBAL DIALOGUE Volume 7 ● Number 1–2 ● Winter/Spring 2005—Humanitarian Intervention

Intervention and the Dangers of Moralism

C. A. J. (TONY) COADY

C. A. J. (Tony) Coady is professorial fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, University of Melbourne. This article is adapted from his chapter, “Intervention, Realism and the Ideal of Peace”, in Righteous Violence: The Ethics and Politics of Military Intervention, ed. C. A. J. Coady and Michael O’Keefe (Melbourne University Publishing, forthcoming 2005).

ince faith is now back in fashion in politics, courtesy of the influence of both Christian and Islamic fundamentalism, let me begin with a declaration of faith or rather lack of it. I lack faith in the declared virtues of the renewed vogue for military intervention that has been such a feature of international affairs in the past dozen years or so. Much of this fashion is motivated by the desire to rescue people from persecution or to impose the wonders of modern democracy, but some of it is driven by the desire to prevent dangers that may arise some time in the pretty distant future. I shall discuss mainly interventions premised on the rescue motivation, what is often called “humanitarian intervention”, but my scepticism is not restricted to that. Indeed, I am even more sceptical about interventions on behalf of democracy and prevention, and will say a little about them in passing.

Although there were plenty of armed interventions in the post–Second World War period, there was a strong moral presumption against them. This moral presumption was embodied in most versions of modern just war theory, and was echoed in international law as it developed after the Second World War. It is this presumption, or its strength, that is now under challenge.

The prohibition on intervention was variously defended, and allowed of certain exceptions. In Michael Walzer’s version of just war theory, for instance, an exemption was allowed for a small number of exigencies, most notably, and most plausibly, for interventions to prevent genocide.¹ Yet the bias against intervention was still very strong. In practical terms, this was no doubt influenced by the persistence of the Cold War and the fear that interventions could escalate to global disaster, though, in one of the many paradoxes of that frigid conflict, the nuclear might of the superpowers allowed for many interventions within their own secure spheres of influence, since conspicuous counter-interventions by the other side ran more risks than either was prepared usually to take. Indirect support to “balance” intervention was, of course, another matter, and the consequences of much of this are still with us, as the dismal case of Afghanistan continues to show.

In theoretical terms, the bias against or (virtual) ban on intervention was often defended on grounds of the importance of the integrity of nation-states within the world order. In Walzer’s writings, there was appeal to a domestic analogy whereby nation-states were entitled to autonomy in getting on with the job of governing their populations without interference from other nations no matter (within limits) how bad a job they were doing. For Walzer, this policy of restraint was supported by recourse to the value of the self-determination of peoples; others treated the value of the existence of sovereign states and their independence more pragmatically. They respected them as the bedrock upon which international stability should rest, unless it could be shown that the stability itself required relaxing the policy of restraint. Walzer’s position is important and merits a separate discussion. It raises difficult questions about the sort of “self” and the sort of “determination” involved, but we cannot explore such questions here. Instead, I shall be concerned with a second response to the question of intervention.

The term “military intervention” is often used to refer to any military operation within the boundaries of another state. For the purposes of moral analysis it is better to use it more narrowly. By “military intervention” I shall mean one power singly, or several powers jointly, acting without the express consent or invitation of the state invaded. Hence, the 1999 Australian military response in East Timor does not count as intervention, for me, because Indonesia agreed to the Australian presence. This agreement may have been unpopular in many Indonesian circles, but it meant that the “intervention” was in a quite different moral and political category from an Australian invasion that had no consent from the Indonesian government. An adequate definition along these lines should probably include armed support for subversion as well as direct intervention.

The term “humanitarian” has its own definitional problems but I shall have principally in mind substantial armed military activity to protect people against severe violation of basic human rights. This motive has to be primary for an intervention to count as humanitarian, though it may co-exist with other motives. It is tempting to hold that an intervention is not humanitarian if the humane motive would not have sufficed to produce intervention. Some would consider this condition too strong, but the motive must be at least necessary and prominent. The various attempts by the invading powers to present the 2003 United States–led invasion of Iraq as humanitarian, when other motivations were shown to have been ill-based, fails badly since the leaders of the invading powers had made it clear before the invasion that the removal of the tyrant Saddam Hussein would not have provided sufficient reason for military intervention. An intervention cannot be humanitarian by afterthought.

The Vice of Moralism

One of the main problems with humanitarian intervention is that its advocates and practitioners are prone to the vice of moralism. I do not mean that they are prone to morality. Here, I differ from the school of “realism”, which often claims that morality has no place in international affairs. On the contrary, I think that morality and ideals have an important role in international relations, but I think of moralism as a distortion of that role. I also think that realism has lessons to teach us if it is understood as complaining of moralism in international policy. But we need to get clearer about the nature of moralism.

Moralism is a kind of vice involved in certain ways of practising morality or exercising moral judgement, or thinking that you are doing so. The vice often involves an inappropriate set of emotions or attitudes in acting upon moral judgements, or in judging others in the light of moral considerations. The moraliser is typically thought to lack a certain self-awareness, a breadth of understanding of others, and is deemed to be subject to an often delusional sense of moral superiority over those coming under judgement. Nonetheless, it seems unlikely that moralism will take one simple form.

One variety of moralism involves seeing as moral issues things that are not, and thereby over-moralising the universe. There are moral dimensions to all human activities, but these dimensions will often be rightly muted because they are obvious or marginally important or already correctly agreed. Some issues, then, are best treated as simply questions of efficiency, but the moraliser is likely to insist on dragging in moral concerns where they have little or no place. To take a simple illustration: it usually won’t matter whether a pie has been exactly divided among the six people at the picnic as long as everyone gets enough to eat and the portions are roughly equal. Appealing to justice here as an objection to a somewhat smaller share would usually be moralistic.

Another way in which moralism can distort practical thinking is by treating complex matters of moral opinion as though they were matters of moral certainty. The moraliser tends to be overconfident in his or her moral judgements, and this can be particularly dangerous when it involves the imposition of those judgements on others. There are such things as the palpably good and the evidently evil, but a great deal of adult moral life consists in recognising that good, reasonable people can legitimately disagree about many other things that raise moral questions. A nation whose leaders are armed both with powerful weaponry and too many moral certainties is likely to do a great deal of harm in addition to displaying moral arrogance.

A third form of moralism, particularly pertinent to the intervention debate, is blindness to the practical difficulties involved in implementing moral imperatives or ideals. Moral intensity can be the enemy of clear vision, and prudence is often a victim of the moralising attitude. This seems to me to be particularly well illustrated by recent interventions that may have been motivated in part by lofty moral concerns. In Iraq, the moral awfulness of Saddam Hussein and the appeal of the moral ideal of democracy helped blind the “coalition of the willing” to the high probability of anarchy, disruption and continuing violence that the intervention would bring about. Those, like President George W. Bush and his advisers, who live in the lofty realm of Good and Evil are often incapable of implementing the earthly, moral virtue of prudence.

Although prudence and a wise appreciation of likely consequences are an important part of morality, they should not be thought to militate against a significant role for ideals in the conduct of foreign affairs. The nature of ideals is too big a topic to embark upon here, but there is one ideal that is particularly relevant to the intervention debate, and too often neglected. This is the ideal of peace. Reliance upon ideals can turn into moralism, but this is no necessary transition. Although ideals will invariably be in some tension with the demands of current reality, they also condition the way we can view our present world and its potentiality. Idealists have often altered what people previously thought was possible and have thereby helped bring about deep changes in the world. Where the ideals have been worthy ones, this has been a great benefit to humanity and gives a richer sense to what is realistic. Democracy itself is inspired by ideals of equality that were derided by tough-minded realists in the past.

The Ideal of Peace

We must now see how this relates to the question of armed intervention, particularly in the context of humanitarian intervention. My reinterpretation of what is significant in realism allows a place for genuine morality, including both ideals and prudence. This might be thought to open the way to a more sympathetic attitude to intervention, especially if we also give a place to ideals of justice and freedom. In some respects, this is so, but in other respects the argument will go against intervention since a good deal turns upon whether interventionist arguments are moralistic and also upon the ideals that are in play. What follows should make this clearer.

It is an important, if somewhat neglected, fact that opposition to various forms of intervention stems at least as much from a commitment to the ideal of peace as from an attachment to the inherent value of national sovereignty. Despite the euphemisms so often associated with it (“taking out”, “neutralising”, “restoring freedom”), armed intervention produces a great deal of killing, maiming and extreme suffering, and the victims are often non-combatants in their thousands. The innocent suffer along with the guilty, either as direct targets, or more commonly these days, as “collateral damage” from the savage bombardments characteristic of high-technology warfare. And this is not to mention the long-term effects on economies and ecologies. Armed rescue certainly has its appeal, especially when the rescue is of victims of ethnic cleansing or deliberate starvation, but we need to be clear-headed about what such rescue usually involves. Those who are attracted to the ideal of peace and revolted by the realities of war, even of that rarity “just war”, will be cautious of the enthusiasm for armed intervention.

You do not have to be a pacifist in the ordinary understanding of that term to be moved by the ideal of peace. Absolute pacifists are of course in favour of peace, but the ideal of peace also plays an important role in traditional just war theory, though this role has too often receded into the shadows of the theory. It was prominent in the thought of St Augustine, one of the founding figures in the just war tradition, and has been promoted by numerous Christian leaders, including a succession of modern popes. These leaders often allow that some wars or armed interventions may be justified in extremis, but their commitment to the ideal of a peaceful world breeds a degree of scepticism about too ready a recourse to the sword (or bomb), even in a humanitarian cause.

The ideal of peace is more than a picture of a state of non-fighting, though that is an essential ingredient in it. The state of non-fighting has to have something robust about it; it has to be more like calm weather than a mere lull between storms. Hence, the ideal requires institutional support within states and in the international order, though this need not mean that a peaceful world is identified with a fully just or even democratic world. It may be that only advances towards the sort of societies that genuine democracies can involve will be required to sustain peace, but that needs further argument.

Dangers to Peace

There are, of course, many objections to any such vision of a peaceful world, and they come again from a sense of the supposed “necessity” of war. But there used to be similar objections to other ideals that have now been realised or at least closely approximated. The abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women, and the elimination of duelling could be cited as just three examples. I will not argue further here for the ideal of peace, but enough has been said, I hope, to make the point that there are serious dangers to this ideal in the enlarged resort to armed intervention.

Short-Term Reactions

The first such danger is a certain short-sightedness caused by the entirely understandable “gut reaction” to carnage. This carnage is broadcast to the living rooms of advanced industrial nations in a way never before possible and it evokes a natural desire to “rescue”. But the idiom of “rescue” is often inappropriate to what can actually be achieved militarily. In many of the cases of tribal slaughter, ethnic cleansing and the rest, armed intervention is an inappropriate instrument of rescue. The atrocities and tragedies are enmeshed in structures, histories and institutions that mean a temporary separation of warring factions with some accompanying loss of life all round is not guaranteed to stop the slaughter and may merely accelerate later reprisals.

Consider the parallel with domestic violence such as child abuse. An individual who simply went into a home where a baby is being beaten and forcibly separated the violent parent from the child has done little to “rescue” the child. Such an individual will usually have produced a respite rather than a rescue. Sooner or later after the intervener departs, it will all start up again. This is why, in extreme cases, children have to be removed from parents and cared for elsewhere—but no one seriously proposes that some foreign nation or alliance will do anything analogous to that.

Of course, an alternative in the domestic situation would be for the intervener to move in and restructure the family relationship (if possible) or remove the abuser and substitute someone else. Something like this is meant by the term “nation-building”, and Walzer has (very tentatively) proposed in this spirit a reconsideration of the old ideas of trusteeship and protectorates.² In a dramatically changed world, with a strengthened United Nations and other international humanitarian agencies, such options might have some plausibility and value, but in the present world, it is hard to see how they could be either plausible or desirable. They would inevitably be seen by the proposed trustees as both costly and risky, and by the proposed beneficiaries and underdeveloped nations as a return to a colonial mindset. So intervention that is “nation-building” seems mostly unfeasible and dangerous, while intervention that just stops a slaughter and departs seems to make no contribution to real peace. This point applies more widely, of course, than to humanitarian interventions alone, since the disruptive effects of any military intervention will commonly require an aftermath of reconstruction that is fraught with political and often military difficulties, as the intervention in Iraq is demonstrating daily in dramatic fashion.

Cultural Incomprehension

Armed humanitarian intervention faces a series of barriers concerning local knowledge and cultural appreciation that are, no doubt, in principle possible to overcome, but are in practice often insurmountable. Cultural relativism about values is a fallacious philosophical position, but this does not mean that it is going to be easy for foreigners to understand the local forms that even universal values will assume. To take a simple example: different forms of greeting may express the same values of courtesy, friendliness and respect, but uninformed foreigners may have difficulty comprehending local styles of salutation. In addition, differences of language, religion, and political tradition can make for treacherous misunderstandings, while ignorance of subtle hostilities, loyalties and sensitivities peculiar to a distant region compound the problems. Even where government leaders have some grasp of these problems, and that is rare enough, it is straining credulity to suggest that front-line troops will have the same understanding. This is why it is sadly common for humanitarian interveners initially to be welcomed by the victims, but soon after to be reviled by them. Incidentally, it is hard enough for close neighbours to achieve the understanding in question; they are sometimes worse than distant foreigners for an intervention role because their motives and understanding of their neighbours may be distorted by historic hatreds.

The problems that arise here for enthusiasts of intervention are often problems of moralism. There is the same lofty distance from the facts to which moral judgement needs to be applied, and there is sometimes the tendency to unacceptable imposition of contentious moral and political values.

The Proliferation of Violence

There is also the potential damage to strivings for a peaceful world. As argued earlier, a typical distortion of moralism is heedlessness about the long-term consequences of taking a moral stance now. The case of intervention on behalf of protecting very basic human rights, such as the right of the innocent not to be killed, is so very difficult partly because sensible advocates of intervention will argue that the long-term consequences of intervention support the ideal of peace. After all, peace is already violated and the interventionist violence is aimed at restoring peace.

There is undoubtedly something in this response, though it has the disadvantage of paralleling the claims about the First World War being “the war to end all war”. Violence may sometimes be a “necessary evil”, but we can never neglect the potential of violence to generate more violence and to instil attitudes that are inimical to a peaceful order. Of course, the closer one can make the international order approximate the domestic order of states, so that intervention is done by an authorised and representative agent, the closer even violent intervention comes to a police action. Police actions can violate moral constraints, but the existence of a valid legal order within which policing can occur and make sense provides checks upon such violations and makes policing a legitimate activity overall. The international may not be the “anarchy” that many realist thinkers have claimed it to be, but it still has some way to go before most military interventions can come close to the policing model. The United Nations is the only institution that even remotely approaches providing that sort of legality—which is one reason why the contemptuous bypassing of it by the political and military leaderships of powerful states is so dangerous. Were the United Nations to have a permanent, autonomous intervention force, as some influential figures have advocated, the situation might be very different, and it is a shame that the major powers have resolutely opposed any such development. Such a UN force would be the most likely means of delivering the sort of world required by an ideal of peace, but there are formidable intellectual and practical obstacles to its feasibility.

Moral Rhetoric

The fourth danger is that of empty moral rhetoric. Talk, they say, is cheap, and moral talk is sometimes cheap and dangerous. Though this is closely related to hypocrisy, we might think of it as a form of moralism different from those outlined above: it is the moralism of words over deeds. What I mean is that grand moral talk is easily evoked by tragic moral events, but not only is it much harder to translate into significant action, it can also stimulate false hopes, encourage victims to rash acts in the (vain) hope of attracting outside support, and subsequently create bitter reactions of cynicism and disillusion. Sometimes the rhetoric is sincere enough, and the problem lies in its disconnection from mechanisms that might transform words into appropriate deeds. Too often the rhetorical words produce rhetorical gestures—actions that speak more softly than the words and are ill-adapted to the realities. Some of the United Nations’ clumsier efforts in Bosnia illustrate this. Thomas Weiss poses sharply the sort of choice that may often be required: “The moral of international actions in the former Yugoslavia is that hollow gestures are not necessarily better than no action at all. Earlier and more robust military intervention should have been pursued, or the situation left to the warring parties to settle themselves.”³ In this choice, for most situations, the first option is fraught with difficulty, whereas the second is agonising. In retrospect, prompter interventions will commonly look a better option, but this is sometimes because events have taken a dire course that would earlier have been difficult to foresee and presumptuous to act upon.

Intervention: A Priority?

All these strictures against moralism are likely to be met by the cry that something has to be done in the face of slaughter. Maybe intervention is dangerous, moralistic, faulty, but these lives must be saved. I am not unmoved by this appeal, but it needs to be set in context, particularly the political context, and it needs to be balanced by the consideration that what one does here for these people has human costs for other people elsewhere. Responses that are dictated by media visibility (the “CNN factor”) are bound to be selective and can distort priorities. Massacres, plagues and disasters that are equally deserving of our compassion occur frequently around the planet, but we do nothing or very little about them. Apart from arming Saddam Hussein, the compassionate advanced states did nothing about the slaughter of the Iran–Iraq War. No “rescue” programmes were mooted for the appalling devastation—including rape, pillage, starvation, murder and enslavement—that was regularly visited upon the southern Sudanese by the northern Sudanese for decades, and that continues today. Until recently, this “forgotten war” in Sudan received almost no media coverage, but it was estimated in 1999 that more than two million people had died in it by then, which is more than in any other conflict since the Second World War.⁴ Now there are diplomatic pressures and threats of other action, but apparently no serious plans for military intervention, partly because of the mess in Iraq.

When we widen the perspective to encompass disease, the ravages of AIDS in Africa can be seen as a monumental and continuing disaster that surely deserves to trigger our “rescue” responses as much as, if not more than, the usual candidates. It has been estimated that thirty-five thousand children worldwide perish daily from poverty and preventable disease, and it has been plausibly argued that the funds devoted to the humanitarian relief of the “loud” crises created by wars could be ten to twenty times more effective against the “silent” emergencies created by poverty.⁵ None of this is even to mention the deaths, pain and suffering cheerfully tolerated in our own back yards—a prime example being the effects of the absence of a serious health system in the United States.

One difference, of course, between some of these situations and the paradigms proposed for intervention is that between killings and more diffusely caused deaths. Brutal killings seem to evoke more in the way of a need to respond, partly through the desire to punish, and partly because there are specifiable agents whose acts of harm seem open to prevention. The means for delivering that punishment and prevention seem, moreover, decisive and peremptory, especially such military measures as bombing. But not only can this appearance be delusive, since much more protracted military measures than bombing may be required for success, but it may also be that there are underlying structural causes of the conflict that bombing will not address—causes which may be just as costly and difficult to confront as those of the AIDS epidemic.

We are a long way from the peaceful world that so many yearn for. I have argued that the realist tradition, with all its faults, can provide a useful caution against the high-minded resort to violence. Suitably reinterpreted, realism offers a prudential reminder that a distorted appeal to morality produces a moralism that threatens the striving for a peaceful world.

Endnotes

1. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 3rd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 101–8.

2. Michael Walzer, “The Politics of Rescue”, Dissent 42 (winter 1995), pp. 35–41.

3. Thomas G. Weiss, “UN Responses in the Former Yugoslavia: Moral and Operational Choices”, in Ethics and International Affairs: A Reader, ed. Joel H. Rosenthal (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1995), p. 231.

4. See William Finnegan, “The Invisible War”, New Yorker, 25 January 1999, pp. 50–73.

5. See James P. Grant, The State of the World’s Children 1993 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).