The responsibility to hold others responsible by MT Nguyen, NYC

Calls for intervention. People dying avoidable deaths. The specter of callous dictators (is there any other kind?) subjugating a helpless citizenry. A delayed, ineffective and disoriented international response.

This general scene can be painted without embellishment to represent any number of events in the past 60 years. The proximal causes of death, just to name a few, can be attributed to the dictators or to a natural disaster or, in the most recent case, to the indifference of dictators to a natural disaster. The basic problem lies in how to handle this indifference (to name the least) to avoidable death. Avoidable deaths implies avoidable by some agency. If one is the agent that could help effect change, some of our moral intuitions suggest that one must.

Take Peter Singer's classic example. A man walks past a shallow pond and sees a child drowning. He could save the child without significant cost to himself (only his clothing would be damaged) . The question is: Is he morally obligated to save the child? Singer asserts that the answer is: obviously, yes. And how could it be otherwise?

That example is well drawn for the political situation Singer grappled with, namely, the famine in Bangladesh in the early 70's. One primary cause of that famine was a cyclone, but that was unavoidable; Singer's piece was written to convince citizens of the developed world to help avoid further deaths. Can a similar conclusion be drawn for the most recent cyclone disaster?

Four weeks ago, Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar (or Burma, depending upon your political leanings) and killed, by some accounts, 100,000 people. What happened afterwards is morally worse: the Burmese dictators, slow to react, paranoid, and callous refused much needed foreign aid and foreign aid workers. In large measure, they failed and continue to fail in their role as agents of change. That illustrates one problem and sets up another. If a government refuses to protect its own citizens from avoidable death, then what is the responsibility of the international community?

Singer's example does not quite apply to Burma, for the appeal to aid can be effective only on the condition that the recipients accept. To be sure, the survivors of Nargis who require the medical care, fresh water and food would accept aid, but the problem is, and this is a significant obstacle, the route to them must go through their government. In such a scenario, is it the duty of the international community to do more than extend a helping hand? Some, notably Gareth Evans, called for military intervention to be put on the table. Willem Buiter at the Financial Times goes much further, calling for an immediate UN authorized overthrow of the Burmese government (!), and judged the current inertia to be "a confirmation of moral cowardice or incompetence, or both."

Buiter's piece addresses our problem quite cavalierly by asserting that national sovereignty has no intrinsic value and by implication should be subordinated and cast aside in cases of human rights violations. This is a stunning view because of its practical implications for international relations: essentially, the basic units no longer would be states but individuals, and the controlling interests would be those of individuals and not nations. Given that the whole international community is organized around the primacy of the nation, it is unclear how this suggestion, even if we agreed with it in theory, would be put into effect. To name but one concern, there should be skepticism (well-placed, given the history of interventions) that interventions are but handy tools for the advancement of developed nation's policy interests.

Nevertheless, Buiter's concerns with sovereignty are real. The case of genocide is the most extreme but instructive. That sovereignty has been invoked as a legal means to keep the international community at bay while a government slaughters its citizens should cause us to rethink things. We do not want a conception of sovereignty which permits murder with impunity.

A step in that direction is offered in the UN's treatment of this matter in their commissioned report 'The Responsibility to Protect'. Here the commission's authors (co-chaired by the above referenced Gareth Evans) recognize the significance of national sovereignty and attempt to arrive at a conception which does justice to our practice of human rights. Instead of seeing the two concepts as potentially hostile to one another (as Buiter's view has it), they build the idea of human rights protection into the analysis of sovereignty. This works by understanding the function of sovereignty not just in terms of the freedom to set the nation's own ends (constrained only by respect for another sovereign nation's ends), but additionally in terms of responsibilities, chiefly the responsibility to protect its citizens (particularly to secure the objects of a citizen's rights). The invocation of sovereignty would then imply accountability for rights protection. This conception preserves the centrality of the state, since it would remain the principle agent for ensuring rights preservation. However, since sovereignty is understood against the background of an international community, accountability would be to that community (specifically, to the UN). In the case of a nation's total failure to fulfill its responsibilities, there is no basis for a sovereignty claim.

This is a fruitful conception. Just as Kant believes individual autonomy implies moral responsibility, it is appealing to see that a nation's freedom cannot be the freedom to act in any which way it pleases. Sovereignty must be conditioned by some minimal conception of the good. Armed with this insight, we better grasp the grounds for any possible intervention into Burma. One advantage is that we need not put undue weight on the still infant notion of a human right. Another advantage is it clarifies the responsibilities at play. Accountability is genuine only when there is a practice of holding accountable. While the Burmese government bears the principle responsibility to protect its citizens, the international community (i.e. us) is responsible for holding them to that. This captures part of our duty as agents who can prevent avoidable deaths.

The case of Burma demands that the international community come to grips with its stance on the relationship between sovereignty and human rights. We need leadership, direction and decisiveness in this matter. Deliberation, by some accounts the pinnacle of rationality, is counterproductive when it means that people die in the meanwhile. This is not to say we shouldn't think about what to do; it is a lament that we haven't already come to a consensus about what to do.