Global Ethics in Theory and in Practice: The Case of The Responsibility to Protect (R2P)

The UN endorsed the principle of the Responsibility to Protect in 2005. This has proved controversial partly because it includes, where all else fails, military intervention to try to stop certain classes of human rights violation. I welcome the move to R2P as representing a ‘cosmopolitan turn’ in understanding the UN, but doubt whether military intervention is the right way to discharge our cosmopolitan responsibilities to protect. My three reasons – that it is counterproductive, that it unjustifiably privileges the preventing of the deliberate violation of human rights by other agents over the promotion of human rights and protecting human rights in the face of suffering caused by natural causes or the impacts of human institutions, and that it goes against the principle ‘the means are ends in the making’ – all reflect particular a ways in which ethics, particularly in its global dimension, should be understood. This paper explores via the example of R2P some of these ‘higher order’ or ‘meta’ issues in ethics about the nature of consequences, the implications of rights and the relationship between means and ends.