Intervention and virtue

Barrie Paskins

pp. 113-121

in: Ian Forbes, Mark Hoffman (eds), Political theory, international relations, and the ethics of intervention, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1993

Abstract

Many modern approaches to the discussion of normative questions are guided and misguided by an over-emphasis on rules. It is often assumed that the range of possibilities can be derived from a basic contrast between absolutist ethics and consequentialism. The absolutist holds certain things to be completely forbidden, be it killing, torture, direct attacks on noncombatants or intervention. The consequentialist denies that there are any such absolutes, for the rightness of an action is determined by the totality of its consequences and there is no a priori guarantee that the consequences will never be such as to require killing, torture, intervention. Between the extremes of absolutism and consequentialism many rights-based theorists would like to find a middle position that somehow avoids both the absolutist's confidence that some things can be completely ruled out and the consequentialist's tendency to make every kind of iniquity a possibility for everyday calculation.