Harming the Beneficiaries of Humanitarian Intervention

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (2018) 21:1035–1050 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9944-0 Harming the Beneficiaries of Humanitarian Intervention Linda Eggert 1 Accepted: 22 October 2018 / Published online: 14 November 2018 # The Author(s) 2018 Abstract This paper challenges one line of argument which has been advanced to justify imposing risks of collateral harm on prospective beneficiaries of armed humanitarian interventions. This argument - the ‘Beneficiary Principle’ (BP) - holds that non-liable individuals’ immunity to being harmed as a side effect of just armed humanitarian interventions may be diminished by their prospects of benefiting from the intervention. Against this, I defend the view that beneficiary status does not morally distinguish beneficiaries from other non-liable individuals in such a way as to permit exposing them to greater risks of being harmed. The argument proceeds in four steps. I first show that the BP can neither be grounded in liability-based nor in lesser-evil justifications for harming. I then argue that a standalone justification for unintended harming based on beneficiary status would face at least two critical challenges. The first concerns the BP’s applicability to collectives; the second questions the normative weight we can plausibly ascribe to beneficiary status when beneficiaries are such by virtue of being victims of wrongful threats of harm. I argue that standing to benefit is morally irrelevant when the benefit consists in the mitigation or prevention of wrongful harms, and consequently suggest that the BP may only serve as a distributive principle in allocating risks of harm if it is disambiguated in a number of critical aspects and applied in a more narrowlydefined set of circumstances. Keywords Humanitarian intervention . Risk imposition . Collateral harm . Immunity . Liability . Lesser-evil justifications . Ex ante contractualism 1 Introduction Humanitarian interventions over the last couple of decades have resulted in large numbers of * Linda Eggert 1 University of Oxford, Oxford, UK 1036 L. Eggert civilian casualties as well as the destruction of countless homes, businesses, and vast infrastructure.1 Interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Libya, for instance, caused the deaths of over a thousand civilians, whereas interveners suffered no casualties in these cases.2 Consider NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999. The prospective intervening countries were faced with a critical dilemma. On one hand, they felt significant pressure to intervene, after the US and other countries had failed to take decisive action to stop the genocide in Rwanda five years earlier. On the other, there was significant pressure not to expose their own combatants to risks of lethal harm, after the gruesome killing of 18 American soldiers during the intervention in Somalia in 1993.3 The alliance’s response to this challenge was to rule out ground forces, and fly at altitudes out of reach of Serbian anti-aircraft weapons. However, this not only reduced the risk to combatants; it also reduced precision in targeting as pilots were unable to do their own reconnaissance, significantly increasing the risk of collateral harm to civilians. Whilst this strategy was successful in the sense that NATO forces suffered no casualties over the course of the war, this came at the cost of many innocent lives. An estimated 500 civilians were killed by a NATO intervention originally intended to protect innocent civilians.4 This case is by no means exceptional. It is standard practice for militaries to seek to minimise risk to their own forces to the extent legally permissible, a policy usually referred to as ‘risk transfer’.5 This paper challenges one line of argument which has been advanced by philosophers to justify transferring risks from intervening combatants to certain civilians in armed interventions. I call this argument the ‘Beneficiary Principle’. Against the Beneficiary Principle, which holds that certain civilians’ immunity to being harmed as a side effect may be diminished by their prospects of benefiting from an intervention, I defend the view that beneficiary status is morally void when the benefit consists in the mitigation or prevention of wrongful harms. To the extent that individuals stand to benefit by virtue of being victims of wrongful threats of harm, as is the case in just humanitarian interventions, I argue, their expected benefit does not plausibly justify their exposure to additional risks of harm. I maintain that the BP is inadequate as a distributive principle for determining the permissibility of risk imposition, unless we disambiguate it in a number of critical aspects. I begin by outlining the Beneficiary Principle in some detail (Section 2). In Section 3, I show that it can neither be plausibly grounded in a liability-based justification for harming nor constitute a lesser-evil justification in any conventional sense. I then consider whether the BP may provide a distinct justification for imposing risks on some individuals rather than others. However, I argue that a conception of the BP as a self-standing justification faces two critical challenges. The first concerns the BP’s applicability to collectives (Section 4), the second questions the normative significance of benefiting in the context of humanitarian wars (Section 5). 1.1 Preliminaries First, although not strictly the same, I use civilians and noncombatants synonymously here.6 Bystanders are those individuals who are not involved in the conflict. They neither contribute 1 Cronin 2014; Wise (2017). Cronin, ‘Killing Civilians’, 16. McMahan (2010a). 4 Human Rights Watch, The Crisis in Kosovo, available at: https://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/nato/Natbm20001.htm [accessed 14 October 2018]; Cronin, ‘Killing Civilians’, 18, 30; McMahan 2010b. 5 Shaw 2005; Pfaff 2000. 6 I largely adopt McMahan’s and Gerhard Øverland’s vocabulary. 2 3 Harming the Beneficiaries of Humanitarian Intervention 1037 to nor are affected by it, and do not stand to benefit from the intervention. They might be residents in the target party or individuals in neighbouring states who are in no danger. Beneficiaries or ‘to-be-liberated civilians’ are individuals in whose defence the intervention is carried out.7 They are the feared victims of atrocity crimes who are usually, but not necessarily, civilians. They are expected beneficiaries insofar as the intervention’s aim is to protect them from harm they would otherwise suffer from unjust threats. Although persons other than potential victims of atrocities may actually benefit from an intervention, I use the term to refer to those individuals in whose protection the intervention is conducted. By ‘beneficiaries’ (or ‘prospective’ beneficiaries to emphasise this fact), I therefore mean intended or expected beneficiaries, as opposed to actual beneficiaries, unless otherwise specified. Second, my concern in this paper is with the unintended infliction (...truncated)