Humanitarian Intervention, Other-Defense, and Consent

This chapter examines the role that the consent of intended beneficiaries plays in the moral permissibility of humanitarian intervention. When consent is not unanimous among a group to be defended, many doubt that consent has any bearing on the permissibility of defending others. It is held that allowing the refusal of consent to bear on the permissibility of other-defense wrongly enables some subset of the group to control whether the group as a whole is saved. This chapter argues that this view is mistaken. By refusing to consent to intervention, people leave in deliberation their rights against being subjected to risk and make it impermissible for interveners to appeal to the good of saving them. This makes it harder to justify intervention. Conversely, by consenting, people allow interveners to appeal to the prospective good of saving them to justify intervention. This makes it easier to justify intervention.