A Quick Defense of U.S. Military Intervention
I don’t want to defend any specific U.S. military interventions, since I don’t really know the exact motives behind any of them. Instead, I want to focus on the philosophical argument that the U.S. should or should not intervene in other countries to protect human rights.
For those who know my philosophy, I base my ethical system on the rights of individuals. Basically, each individual has certain rights (life, body, freedom, etc.) that must be evaluated in each moral decision. This is the system I use for judging moral decisions on both an individual and societal scale.
As for the topic, the standard argument for U.S. intervention goes like this:
1. There is a foreign government that is imposing ____ human rights violations on its citizens.
2. The U.S. has the power to invade and overthrow the government, and therefore stop the violation of human rights.
Therefore, the U.S. should intervene and overthrow the foreign government.
The opposition generally claims that it is not the job of the U.S. to play world police, or intervene in the affairs of other countries. To refute this argument, I want to point out the arbitrary distinction between nations. Consider this:
Imagine that a revolutionary army takes over Arizona and establishes its own government. This happened quickly enough that the national army is about to move in and overthrow the uprising. During the time in between, the revolutionary government imposes laws that restrict freedom of travel (like North Korea), freedom of speech, and has started to hunt down people who oppose the new government.
Should the national army overthrow the new government? The people of Arizona are having their rights violated, and the only way to prevent it would be a military intervention. Most people would argue that yes, it is clearly obvious that the national army should overthrow the new government.
The main distinction between the above case and global policy is that the people of Arizona are U.S. citizens, and that it is the job of the U.S. government to protect its citizens. However, it’s hard to argue that a person born in Arizona deserves a greater right to protection than a person born in Libya simply because of their place of birth.
What I want to argue for (though will do so mainly in future posts) is the need for universal ethics, that see human beings as a universal entity rather than divided into nations.
