Walzer Just and Unjust Wars Quoting John Westlake The duties and rights of states are nothing more than the duties and rights of the men who compose them 53 Sovereignty is merely an expression of the values of individual life and communal liberty 108 ID: 681424
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Slide1
Protecting Individual Rights
Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars
Quoting John Westlake: “The duties and rights of states are nothing more than the duties and rights of the men who compose them” (53).
Sovereignty is “merely an expression” of the values of “individual life and communal liberty” (108).
Autonomous political communities are the arenas in which rights and liberties are won, or not.Slide2
Protecting Individual Rights
Altman & Wellman, A Liberal Theory of International Justice
Human rights: “individual
moral rights to the protections generally needed against the standard and direct threats to leading a minimally decent human life in modern
society” (3).
“
…
a
state has earned legitimacy if it is willing and able (a) to protect its own members against
‘substantial
and recurrent
threats’
to a decent human life – threats such as the arbitrary deprivation of life or liberty, and the infliction of torture – and (b) to refrain from imposing such threats on
outsiders” (4). Slide3
Protecting Individual Rights
Walzer’s answers
(1) No one is safe (from anything!) in a world with intervention:
Within existing state boundaries “men and women (let us assume) are safe from attack; once the lines are crossed, safety is gone” (57).
(2) Outsiders are just bad at effectively promoting the protection of human rights
Intervention might not be effective, and interveners usually have mixed motives at best.Slide4
Protecting Individual Rights
Responses to Walzer
On (1):
(a)
A & W’s proposal is that military intervention
might
be justified when (and only when) people’s basic human rights (arts. 3-20, 25-6 of the UDHR, a
subset
of those
already recognized in international law
) are violated.
(b)
Military intervention isn’t always destructive (the no-fly zone and safe haven in Iraq after the Gulf War, Haiti)Slide5
Protecting Individual Rights
Responses to Walzer
On (2):
(a)
A & W say we should take effectiveness into account (Haiti)
.
(b)
Morally imperfect actors don’t necessitate inaction
(
domestic
politics
, Bangladesh)
.
(c)
States have a tendency to oppress their own citizens, too.Slide6
Collective Self-Determination
Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars
“The moral standing of any particular state depends upon the reality of the common life it protects and
the extent to which the sacrifices required by that protection are willingly accepted and thought worthwhile
” (54, emphasis added)
“When states are attacked, it is is their
members
who are challenged, not only in their lives, but also in
the sum of things they value most, including the political association they have made
” (53, emphasis added).Slide7
Collective Self-Determination
Altman & Wellman, A Liberal Theory of International Justice
Walzer’s
claim that it’s better to suffer at the hands of compatriots is misguided:
“The suffocation of self‐determination by a local tyrant rather than by an external state is still an affront to a people's right of self‐determination. Their right to become free by their own efforts is a claim–right against anyone coercively interfering in their efforts to create a legitimate state.
…
if political self‐determination is as valuable as Walzer insists, then it is difficult to see the moral logic in his view” (A & W, 24). Slide8
Collective Self-Determination
Walzer’s answers
(1)
Millian
argument: self-determination can only be achieved through local political struggle with no outside help.
(2)
Again, outsiders will likely be ineffective due to complicating factors, like bad motives.Slide9
Collective Self-Determination
Responding to Walzer
On (1):
Mill and Walzer oversimplify the determinants of political change. That one’s activism is rendered ineffective by a “bloody repression” is no signal that she is insufficiently committed to justice.
On (2):
Again, that they might be misused is no argument against the veracity of A & W’s principles.Slide10
Final Points
• Non-military intervention (sanctions, aid and loan conditionality, prerequisites for membership in international organizations, diplomatic
pressure,
public
criticism,
supporting one or another political faction in another state
, NGO work, transnational activism,
etc.)
•
Non-intervention as position-taking