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Wars and interventions bring to the fore certain ethical issues. For instance, NATO's intervention in Kosovo in 1999 raised questions about the moral import of UN Security Council authorization (given that the Council did not authorize the action), and the means employed by interveners (given NATO's use of cluster bombs and its targeting of dual-use facilities). In what follows, I consider the moral permissibility of the NATO-led intervention in Libya and suggest that this particular intervention highlights three issues for the ethics of humanitarian intervention in general. The first issue is whether standard accounts of the ethics of humanitarian intervention, which draw heavily on just war theory, can capture the prospect of mission creep. The second issue is whether epistemic difficulties in assessing the intervention's likely long-term success mean that we should reject consequentialist approaches to humanitarian intervention. The third issue concerns selectivity. I outline an often overlooked way that selectivity can be problematic for humanitarian intervention.
THE CASE FOR INTERVENTION
The moral permissibility of the intervention in Libya largely turns on two fairly tricky assessments. These are, first, whether the situation was sufficiently serious at the time the intervention was launched (the just cause question), and, second, what the predominant purposes of the intervention were (the right intention question).
First, in regard to just cause, was the situation in Libya sufficiently serious to warrant humanitarian intervention? Michael Walzer, writing in the New Republic shortly after the launch of the intervention, doubts it. He argues that "a military attack of the sort now in progress is defensible only in the most extreme cases," which is reminiscent of his claim in Just and Unjust Wars that intervention is permissible only in response to acts that "shock the moral conscience of mankind."1 However, as has often been noted, Walzer's account of just cause seems unconvincing since, first, it arbitrarily sets the bar extremely high for intervention, and, second, it is unclear precisely what constitutes acts that "shock the moral conscience of mankind."2 A more morally defensible test (which I defend elsewhere) is the one proposed by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. This test requires that there be circumstances of actual or apprehended (a) "large-scale loss of life," with or without genocidal intent, which is...