Philosophia DOI 10.1007/s11406-016-9704-0

Idealism, Realism, and Success in Armed Humanitarian Intervention Ned Dobos 1

Received: 17 February 2015 / Revised: 9 March 2016 / Accepted: 14 March 2016 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Abstract An armed humanitarian intervention (AHI) must have a reasonable prospect of success to be justified. It must also be a proportional last resort. These are necessary conditions for legitimate AHI. It has been suggested that, in addition to these necessary conditions, there are also ideal conditions of AHI, namely disinterest and multilateralism. These conditions are said to enhance the moral credentials of an armed intervention without being strictly required. The paper concerns itself with the relationship between these two ideals and the requirement of a reasonable prospect of success. Specifically, I explore the suggestion that the former are in some way instrumental to the latter. On this view, we should aspire towards disinterest and multilateralism because these things contribute to a positive humanitarian outcome. If this is correct then the ideal conditions can be partly grounded in, or justified in reference to, the prospect of success principle. Keywords Humanitarian intervention . Responsibility to protect . Just war theory . Casualty aversion . Ulterior motives . Realism, prospect of success

Introduction The 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS)—The Responsibility to Protect—sets out a list of conditions that must be This paper was first presented at the 13th International Law and Ethics Conference, on BWhat it Means to Win a War^, at the University of Belgrade in June 2014. I thank the conference organisers and participants for all their thoughtful comments and suggestions.

* Ned Dobos [email protected]

1

School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia

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satisfied before armed humanitarian intervention (AHI) becomes a morally acceptable option.1 There must be Blarge scale loss of life^ or ethnic cleansing; the intervention must a proportional last resort; and of course there must be a reasonable prospect of success. In this context, Bsuccess^ is to be understood as a positive humanitarian outcome. Taylor Seybolt puts it this way: A humanitarian military intervention can be considered a success when it saves lives. To be more specific, if in a humanitarian crisis some people would have died without assistance, but did not die because of the actions of military personnel, the intervention succeeded (Seybolt 2007: p 30). Determining whether a humanitarian intervention satisfies the just war condition of reasonable prospect of success thus requires some counterfactual analysis. First we estimate, in light of the available information about the emergency, how many people will be killed in the event of non-intervention. We then estimate how many are likely to be killed if an intervention were to take place and compare the numbers. Admittedly these judgments will involve a considerable amount of speculation, but this is a practical difficulty that need not delay us here. Nevertheless a slight adjustment to Seybolt’s conception of success in AHI is called for. There is by now a consensus that forced expulsion (Bethnic cleansing^) and mass enslavement can also justify military intervention. While these atrocities typically do, they need not cause a spike in the mortality rate of the country in which they are occurring. If an intervention would prevent the expulsion of large numbers of people from their homes, without reducing the number of deaths that are likely to have occurred in the absence of intervention, on Seybolt’s standard the intervention would have to be deemed a failure. This is counter-intuitive. Thus I stipulate the following modified definition of success in AHI: If in a humanitarian crisis some people would have been killed or enslaved or expelled without assistance, but were not killed or enslaved or expelled because of the actions of intervening military personnel, the intervention succeeded. Admittedly even this revised definition may be too crude, reducing as it does to numerical comparison. We might think that the manner in which deaths and displacements arise should count for something. Eric Heinze (2004) draws a useful distinction between rights violations that are disrespectful (intentional ones) and those that are not (accidental and some incidental rights violations). The former, Heinze argues, bear greater weight in the proportionality calculus. If this is right, then waging a war that will predictably kill and maim more innocent people than it will save may still be proportional, if the rights abuses prevented are deliberate while the harms caused are accidental or concomitant. We might make a similar move in relation to the success principle, counting an intervention as successful as long as it prevents disrespectful killings and expulsions, even if it does not result in fewer people being killed or displaced overall than would have been the case in the absence of intervention. This is a complex proposal, however, and requires a separate paper devoted to it. For present purposes, the above working definition will suffice. 1

Responsibility to Protect, Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001, at http://responsibilitytoprotect.org/ICISS% 20Report.pdf, last accessed 29/09/2014. Some of the material in this paper is taken from work previously published. See especially Ned Dobos 2008, 2010a; Dobos 2012.

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The ICISS, in line with Just War theory, treats reasonable prospect of success as a necessary condition of legitimate AHI. If an intervention does not meet this requirement, it cannot be justified regardless of whether there is a just cause, a right intention, and so on. This stands to reason, for if an intervention is not expected to prevent (or reduce) human rights abuses, the human and material costs associated with the intervention are (predictably) sustained, and inflicted, to no end. In addition to the success principle and the other familiar Just War criteria, the ICISS report identifies two conditions which, though not strictly necessary, are said to enhance the moral credentials of an armed humanitarian intervention. These conditions are disinterest and multilateralism. The report states that, ideally, AHI should be motivated purely by altruistic concern; ulterior economic or geopolitical motives should be absent. In that sense AHI should be disinterested. Furthermore, intervention should ideally be multilateral, where the highest form of multilateralism is intervention carried out under the auspices of the UN Security Council. This paper concerns itself with the relationship between these two ideals and the requirement of a reasonable prospect of success. Specifically, I consider the suggestion that the former are in some way instrumental to the latter. On this view, we should aspire towards disinterest and multilateralism because these things contribute to a positive humanitarian outcome, as just defined. If this is right, then the ideal conditions put forward by the ICISS can be partly grounded in, or justified in reference to, the success principle. The present paper critically examines this line of argument and concludes that it is defective.

Ideals as Instruments The notion that humanitarian intervention ought to be disinterested has a long history. In 1880, over a century before the publication of The Responsibility to Protect, English jurist Sheldon Amos wrote that Bso far as [humanitarian] intervention is concerned, it is above all desirable that the purity of the motives should be conspicuous^ (See Kardas 2003: n51). In a more recent statement, Bhikhu Parekh asserts that humanitarian intervention should be Bwholly or primarily guided by the sentiment of humanity, compassion or fellow feeling^(Frowe 2014: p.96). Wil Verwey goes further, arguing that Brelative disinterest^ on the part of the intervener is necessary for the intervention to even qualify for the designation Bhumanitarian^. A state is Brelatively disinterested^, Verwey explains, when Bits overriding motive is the protection of fundamental human rights, without important secondary motives of a political, economic, ideological or other self-interested nature being involved^ (Verwey 1998: p. 201). Oliver Corten follows suit, asking rhetorically: BHow can one claim an action is humanitarian if it clearly arises from considerations of Realpolitik, which is the only possible explanation why some states that violate the most basic human rights are let off the hook?^ (Corten 1999: p. 59). On the face of it this is rather curious since motives, in their own right, do not seem to affect the moral status of actions. Consider a simple case: A billionaire donates large amounts of money to charity, and as a result many people that would have died of starvation or easily preventable disease, do not die. Surely the billionaire has done a good thing. Suppose we discover later that the billionaire had an ulterior motive all

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along. His donation was motivated not by sympathy or fellow feeling, but purely by a selfish desire to appear on the Forbes Magazine list of most generous philanthropists. This may lead us to think less of the philanthropist as a person, but would we think less of the charitable act itself? Surely it remains the case that the billionaire has done a very good thing. Selfish motives taint the agent, not the actions that stem from them (Dobos 2012: pp. 66-7). Why, then, should we concern ourselves with purity of motives in militarized charity—in armed humanitarian intervention? One suggestion is that if an intervention is contaminated by ulterior motives, it is likely that the means used to prosecute it will not be conducive to a positive humanitarian outcome. In other words, selfish motives impede success. NATO’s campaign in Kosovo has been cited as a case in point. The late Marxist historian Ellen Meiksins Wood admits that opponents of this intervention tended to oscillate between principled opposition on the one hand, and practical opposition on the other—opposition to the war only because it was Bbungled^ or poorly executed. According to Wood, however, Bthe ‘bungling’ [was] inevitable simply because the war [was] driven by overriding factors quite distinct from, and in opposition to, its stated objectives (emphasis added)^ (Wood 2000: p.196). The real purpose of the war, says Wood, was to put on display NATO’s military muscle, and to force the Milosevic government to surrender to NATO unconditionally. It is not surprising, then, that NATO forces adopted a mode of warfare that best served these ends: high-tech, high-altitude, and highly destructive bombing. This, however, proved disastrous for the very people that the war was ostensibly waged to protect.2 It was meant to put a stop to the ethnic cleansing of the province’s ethnic Albanian population. On March 23rd, the day prior to the commencement of the NATO campaign, the number of people that had been forced out of their homes was estimated at 230,000. By the end of the war 1.4 million were displaced, and of these 860,000 had fled Kosovo entirely. Prior to the intervention, 2500 people had been killed in the civil war between the Serbs and the Kosovo Liberation Army. During the intervention approximately 10,000 were killed, most of them Albanian civilians killed by the Serbs, but there was also some collateral damage caused directly by NATO (Mandelbaum 1999a: p.3). These statistics led Noam Chomsky (2001) to suggest that ethnic cleansing was in fact the consequence of NATO’s intervention, not its cause. Australian philosopher Peter Coghlan argues that American interests had a similar affect on the recent Iraq war. He identifies three distinct motives behind the decision to invade. The first was punitive: to take revenge against the terrorist cells that attacked New York and Washington on September 11. The second was to show off the military strength of the US, and with this to send a message to potential threats. The third was to liberate the Iraqi people; the humanitarian motive. The first and second motives, says Coghlan, undermined the achievement of the third. US forces wanted to help the Iraqi 2

Some commentators are at pains to stress that they are not advancing this consequence-based argument. Uwe-Jens Heuer and Gregor Schirmer (1998) write: BWe do not want to deny that military interventions like those of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, or Vietnam in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or of the United States in Somalia may well have saved human lives, and may well have worked to the benefit of those threatened by hunger and terror. But in all these cases, and in others as well, the altruism of the intervening parties was a mere secondary phenomenon to crude self-interested efforts towards the expansion of political and military power, spheres of economic influence, and the like.

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people, but largely failed in this objective because they were so determined Bto kick some ass^ along the way (Coghlan 2003). The implication here is that disinterest is instrumentally important: without it, an intervention cannot be expected to achieve a positive humanitarian outcome because motives effect conduct and conduct effects consequences. Let us turn now to the second ideal identified by the ICISS—that of multilateralism. Again, there is variety of instrumentalist arguments that justify this ideal by reference to the success principle. Here I will sketch the three most commonly recurring. The first argument goes via the instrumentalist argument for disinterest. Eric Heinze puts it this way: If an incident of humanitarian suffering is large scale and severe enough to permit military intervention, then arriving at operational decisions collectively is the best means of ensuring that a particular state does not exploit the situation for its own ends to the detriment of a humanitarian outcome (Heinze 2009: p.118). In other words multilateralism helps to weed out ulterior motives, which is important because ulterior motives can obstruct the achievement of humanitarian results. A second instrumentalist argument suggests that multilateralism helps to remove or mitigate one of the chief impediments to the success of any humanitarian intervention, namely nationalistic resistance from within the target society. As Michael Walzer observes, some measure of resistance from the local population is always to be expected. But it is likely to be all the more fierce, widespread and protracted when the local population is hostile to or suspicious of the intervening power (Walzer 1980). To borrow from Shibley Telhami (2004), Bwhen you don’t trust the messenger, you don’t trust the message, even if it’s a good one^. Now since there is a great deal of antagonism towards those states most inclined to go it alone—such as the US—this can be expected to aggravate the resistance to any unilateral action they might embark upon, which of course increases the risk of mission failure. On the other hand animosity towards interveners is arguably reduced when a genuinely diverse coalition is involved; a multilateral effort will not arouse the same level of suspicion or resentment. In this respect at least multilateralism might be thought to improve an intervention’s prospect of success, by mollifying the resistance somewhat. In this connection UN Security Council authorisation is held up as the fullest realisation of the ideal, and perhaps for good reason. The Security Council is comprised of 5 permanent members (the P5) and 10 non-permanent elected members (E10), always including representatives from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. All of the major races and religions, large and small countries, capitalist and non-capitalist economies, and democratic and non-democratic states are represented. Plausibly, local populations are likely to be more receptive to a humanitarian intervention that is carried out by an organisation that is in this way representative of humanity, rather than a state or coalition with its own parochial character and interests, and chequered history. Finally, multilateralism helps to distribute the costs and risks associated with humanitarian intervention, which makes it more politically and economically sustainable for those involved. This is important because intervention is unlikely to achieve anything lasting if the interveners are compelled by domestic pressures to withdraw in a hurry. If the underlying issues that triggered the rights abuses to begin with are not dealt

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with, there is a good chance that the abuses will resume as soon as the interveners move out (Luttwak 1999). The violations will not have been prevented or ended, as per the aim of armed humanitarian intervention. They will merely have been suspended or postponed, and this is not Bsuccess^ in any meaningful sense. A lasting humanitarian outcome will typically demand some form of ongoing presence, and multilateralism helps make this possible. These are the bare bones of the instrumentalist arguments for disinterest and multilateralism. Each suggests that the ideals are important because they are conducive to a positive humanitarian outcome. While I do not deny that these arguments have their merits, do they justify us in generalising, or even in weakly presuming, that a disinterested, multilateral AHI will have a stronger prospect of success? In what remains I will suggest that the answer is no.

Ideals as Impediments Let us begin by revisiting some of the forecasts made by classical realist thinkers in the 1950s. Hans Morgenthau, once described as the Godfather of classical realism, warned against Bsentimentalism^ in foreign policy for a number of interlocking reasons. Here I will draw attention to the two most relevant to our discussion. First, Morgenthau argues that states lack both the will and the resources to pursue what he calls Baltruistic doctrines^ to a satisfactory completion. These doctrines are only ever implemented Bin fits and starts… here half-heartedly and with insufficient means, there with all-out military commitments, there not at all…^ Consequently the national interest is set back, and there is no humanitarian benefit sufficient to offset this cost. BPolitical success^ says Morgenthau Bis sacrificed without appreciable gain in universal morality^ (Morgenthau 1951: p.114). Thus Morgenthau draws a realist prescription from a realist description: since states are not, as a matter of fact, endlessly altruistic, they should not bother dabbling in altruism; it simply does not do anybody any good. If Morgenthau is right, disinterest does not improve prospects of success in humanitarian intervention. On the contrary it weakens them. This would mean, paradoxically, that the more closely an intervention approximates the ICISS ideal of disinterest, the more likely it is to fall short of the necessary requirement of a reasonable prospect of success, and therefore to be unjustified. Recent historical and social-scientific evidence suggests that Morgenthau may have been onto something. Since the end of the Second World War Western publics have grown gradually less tolerant of military casualties on their own side: what is sometimes referred to as the Bcasualty aversion^ phenomenon. A number of influences are at work here. Many countries—especially Western counties—have fewer children per couple than at any other time in their history. In the 19th Century it was not uncommon for children to die as a result of illness, accident, or war, but families were generally much larger and this to some extent compensated for the loss of any one child. Now that families have on average two children or fewer, each one is expected to survive into adulthood and each embodies Ba larger share of the family’s emotional economy^ (Luttwak 2009: p.111). 3 An understandable by-product of this is greater parental 3

See also Luttwak 1995.

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resistance to military engagement and a lesser tolerance of casualties (Smith 2005: p.501). The population is also ageing. The baby-boomers have just about reached retirement age, and modern medicine is keeping more people alive for longer. Thirty years from now the proportion of the world’s population over the age of 65 will grow from around 14 % currently to between 25 and 30 % (Peterson 1999). What this means is that an ever smaller segment of the population is engaged productively in the workforce, paying taxes, and shouldering the burden of caring for the rest. Sending these individuals to war deprives their respective economies of much-needed productive services, at least temporarily. The deprivation becomes permanent when soldiers are killed or seriously wounded in battle. Casualty aversion is partly a response to the economic and social imperative to avoid further depletion of our scarce human resources (Smith 2005: 501). The decline of religion in the West is believed to have made matters worse in this connection. The thought is that young people are less likely to take risks and make sacrifices for the state if they believe that life here on earth is the only one that they are going to get (Mandelbaum 1999b). Military recruitment and retention has therefore become increasingly difficult as religion and the accompanying belief in afterlife have declined. This in turn has impacted upon the military’s readiness to expose soldiers to danger (Smith 2005: 502). Finally, the advent of the all-volunteer force is thought to have contributed to casualty aversion. Where military service is compulsory, as long as it is properly enforced and administered the costs of war are seen as being shared among all classes and social groups. In an all-volunteer military, on the other hand, the poor and minority groups tend to be over-represented. This is why some critics condemn the all-volunteer arrangement as a Bpoverty draft^: individuals are still conscripted, albeit by their own social and economic desperation. Military sociologist Charles Moskos shows that the degree to which a community is willing to accept casualties in war depends crucially on whether the children of social elites are (perceived to be) bearing their fair share costs and risks.4 The perception that the burdens of war are not distributed equitably under an all-volunteer arrangement has thus compounded casualty aversion. Importantly, however, the research reveals that there is a persistent exception to the casualty-aversion phenomenon. As long as vital national interests are seen to be at stake, Western publics remain prepared to sacrifice the lives of their young men and women (Smith 2005). In other words, the demographic, cultural and institutional shifts discussed above produce casualty aversion only in the context of political disinterest. On several occasions in recent history, this produced precisely the kinds of adverse outcomes that Morgenthau warned of. On one occasion casualty aversion impeded the success of humanitarian intervention by affecting premature withdrawal. The humanitarian crisis in Somalia in 1992 had little perceived bearing on US national interests, but the situation attracted much media coverage so that when President Bush Sr. resolved to take action, a New York Times/ 4 Hence it was not until Vietnam that the Bbody-bag effect^ really kicked it. During the two World Wars and the Korean War, conscription ensured that the costs were shared by all sectors of American society, whereas in Vietnam many of the privileged managed to escape the draft by living abroad or extending university studies. Moreover blacks remained over-represented on the casualties list. Since fewer of them had formal education, they were assigned disproportionately to the combat-intensive infantry (See Moskos 2002).

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CBS poll showed that he had the support of 81 % of the American public (Durch 1997: p.320). That was until October 1993, when US soldiers were ambushed in Mogadishu and 18 Rangers were brutally killed. Pictures of their mutilated corpses were broadcast back into American households. The public demanded withdrawal and the government obliged. Casualty aversion cut the intervention drastically short, and as a consequence Operation Restore Hope is usually to be found on lists of unsuccessful humanitarian operations.5 But this is not the only way that political disinterest can impede success. Recall Ellen Wood’s explanation for why the Kosovo intervention was such a disaster: the campaign was limited to high-altitude bombing because this is what best served the selfish ulterior motives of NATO’s member states. Yet an equally plausible explanation is that this method of war was adopted precisely because NATO states had no strategic or economic interests at stake. This made a ground assault politically unfeasible, since democratic citizens have shown themselves unwilling to tolerate military casualties purely for the sake of defending foreign nationals. On this occasion, then, it was arguably the purity of the humanitarian motive that undermined the humanitarian outcome, this time not by affecting premature withdrawal, but by leading to the adoption of methods of war that were not well suited to achieving a humanitarian objective. There is, of course, enduring disagreement as to whether casualty aversion is a morally appropriate disposition for Western states and their populations to have. At the time of the operation in Somalia Samuel Huntington was famously quoted opining that Bit is morally unjustifiable and politically indefensible that members of the [US] armed forces should be killed to prevent Somalis from killing one another^. On this view, casualty aversion in humanitarian operations is perfectly justified. Westerns populations do not, and should not be willing to sacrifice their armed servicemen and women for the sake of international altruism. Some take issue with this attitude. David Luban, for instance, points out that wars of self-interest are not typically fought to repel would-be conquerors, but rather to defend strategic or economic interests: to secure trade routes, access to raw materials etc. They are not fought for national survival, but to enable citizens to Bcontinue to be able to gas up their SUV’s at a comfortable price^ (Luban 2002: pp.86-7). Since we are willing to compromise the safety of our troops for such trivial national interests, Luban argues, we really should be willing to put them at risk for the sake of fundamental human rights abroad. On this view, there is something deeply objectionable about our unwillingness to sustain losses for the sake of humanitarian operations. I have no intention of weighing in to this debate here.6 Whether casualty aversion is morally acceptable, my point is just that it is a political reality that has bearing on prospects of success in humanitarian intervention. Wherever states are disinterested their populations tend to be less willing to endanger soldiers, and this can be a significant obstruction to the achievement of humanitarian objectives. Richard Falk (1993: p. 760) writes that Bthe higher value attached to the lives of the intervening side… led to a callous disregard for the lives of the indigenous people, especially civilians^, who were killed indiscriminately by American forces. The battle that killed 18 US Rangers claimed the lives of several hundred Somalis; a statistic that history forgot. 6 I have addressed this issue elsewhere (See Dobos 2010b). 5

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Morgenthau suggests that, in addition to suffering from a commitment shortfall, militarized actors with altruistic motives are especially disposed to a dangerous sense of self-righteousness. The Bmoral disease of the crusading spirit in politics^ is said to generate violent abominations Bunknown to less moralistic but more politically minded ages^(Morgenthau 1951: p. 37). This is a legitimate concern. The more soldiers see themselves as the defenders of justice, good, and civilisation, as opposed mundane national interests, the more likely they may be to Bsimplify the moral boundaries of the conflict^, to quote Anthony Coates, and to perceive the enemy as the embodiment of injustice, evil, and barbarism; as an opponent that is not deserving of the respect that is usually owed to the enemy (Coates 2006: p. 76). As a result, disinterested military conflict may be conducted with greater savagery and ruthlessness. An acute awareness of the self-serving nature of a military operation can help to prevent the enemy from being demonised and dehumanised in a way that threatens to undermine humanitarian outcomes. I do not mean to suggest that pure humanitarian motives invariably impede humanitarian outcomes, or even that they typically have this effect. My point is simply that they can and sometimes do. But this, I think, is enough to show that the ideal of disinterest cannot be grounded in or justified in reference to the success principle. In some cases pure motives may be instrumental to success, but it seems just as likely that they will obstruct the realisation of positive humanitarian outcomes. Much the same can be said for the ideal of multilateralism. A rapid response is crucial for the success of most any humanitarian intervention. During the Rwandan genocide, approximately one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in the space of 100 days. That amounts 10,000 murders every day, 400 per hour, 7 per minute (Mistiaen 2004). Since a UN mandate comes via negotiation and deliberation, it invariably brings delays that cannot be afforded. In cases where the UN seeks to prosecute intervention under its own command the delays tend to be exacerbated. This is partly because the UN does not have a standing army. It therefore needs to raise a military force from scratch on every occasion; it must cobble together whatever troops and equipment its member states are willing to offer (Seybolt 2007: p. 273). In addition to this, Seybolt suggests that soldiers provided to the UN as part of any such multilateral operation will tend to be under-trained and poorly equipped. The UN Security Council is described as being Bextremely sensitive^ to maintaining political balance and equal representation of different states and regions of the world. Earlier I suggested that this can enhance prospects of success by reducing suspicion of and hostility towards the intervening force. But at the same time this desire to be diverse and representative can prevent the UN from selecting people for the job purely on the basis of their qualifications and abilities. Seybolt writes: BMany UN mission personnel are highly dedicated and good at what they do, but many are not… [making] UN operations militarily weaker than [those of] voluntary coalitions^ (Seybolt 2007: p. 273). A commitment to multilateralism can also run contrary to basic military understandings of unified command (Heinze 2004: p. 119). During the Yugoslav civil war, there was a plan to have NATO provide air support to UN peacekeepers on the ground protecting the Bosnian population inside the designated safe areas. Each air strike required approval not only from NATO—which has its own sometimes cumbersome

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collective decision-making procedures—but also from the civilian leadership of the UN. There were effectively two chains of command, each wielding veto power over the other. This hindered the effective use of NATO airpower. What happened next was one of history’s most shameful episodes: a Bsafe area^ was overrun by Serb forces and thousands of innocent civilians were massacred. While the legitimacy conferred by the multilateral decision-making arrangements may have rendered the intervention more politically acceptable to international society, on this occasion it seems to have compromised the humanitarian outcome that was the objective of the operation. In several respects, then, aspiring to the ideal of multilateralism can undermine an intervention’s prospect of success. To the political realist this would not come as a surprise. International institutions and their Blegalistic exercises^, says Morgenthau, do Bnothing at all^ to advance peace.

Conclusion I have not argued for a generalisation that the ideals of disinterest and multilateralism obstruct positive humanitarian outcomes. My claim is more modest: We cannot generalise that these ideals are conducive to a positive humanitarian outcome. In fact, I submit that we are not justified even in presuming that as a rule the fulfillment of these ideals will make humanitarian outcomes more likely. There may be some reason to believe that disinterest and multilateralism enhance prospects of success, but there is also reason to believe—and in my estimation equally compelling reason to believe— that these ideals diminish prospects of success. If this is right, to be sure, it does not follow that the ideals of disinterest and multilateralism cannot be justified and ought to be discarded. But it does follow that the success principle cannot be relied upon to do the justificatory work. One of the most normatively powerful reasons we have been given for aspiring towards the ideals of disinterest and multilateralism, it turns out, rests on dubious empirical generalisations and perhaps a bit of idealistic wishful thinking.

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