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CONTEMPORARY HUMAN rights dilemmas have deep roots in the literature of European conquest. Consider the Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria's treatise De Indis (1532), which raised central questions for the conquerors of America. Did bringing Christianity to the American Indians include the responsibility to save them from the brutality of their own leaders? Which European values should inform the rule of Europe over America? How human were the barbarians? Vitoria decided that the universality of morality and justice included the obligation to defend "the Innocent" among the barbarians "against tyranny." This required imposing European law on barbarian peoples
either on account of the personal tyranny of the barbarians' masters toward their subjects, or because of their tyrannical and oppressive laws against the innocent, such as human sacrifice practiced on innocent men or the killing of condemned criminals for cannibalism. I assert that in lawful defense of the innocent from unjust death, even without the Pope's authority, the Spaniards may prohibit the barbarians from practicing any nefarious custom or rite.
The barbarians were human enough, Vitoria concluded, to deserve humanitarian intervention.
For Vitoria, saving the innocent was not a last-minute rescue mission, but a sustained obligation to change the barbarians' culture and to impose an alternative culture and system of justice. Although Vitoria justified intervention against unjust tyranny, he was not concerned that the norm in Europe was absolute rule. He did not view the fight against tyranny in Europe as analogous to his prescriptions against tyranny in the Americas. Vitoria held double standards. Yet by his own lights, his concern with universalism and humanitarian action was not hypocritical.
Still, Vitorias humanitarianism did not support unlimited intervention. We are all too familiar with governments abusing the rhetoric of universal rights to justify global expansionism. In that context Vitoria's claim that defending the innocent was part of the Spanish expansion may appear cynical and self-serving. That may well be true, but what makes Vitoria interesting is that although he believed defense of the innocent was a reason for intervention, he rejected imposing codes of behavior on the unbelievers for purely cultural reasons. Vitoria believed unequivocally that mores were no ground for humanitarian intervention.
This position contradicted the conventional wisdom of his day, but, as Vitoria pointed out,...