I will be arguing against a school of thought and an epistemology. The school of thought is ‘scientific neorealism’, as it is called in the study of international relations. This perspective is shaped by the insistence that ethics and international politics have nothing to do with one another, save insofar as morality is brought in as window dressing in order to disguise what is really going on: the clash of narrowly self-interested powers. The world of international relations is construed as a zone of self-help in a Hobbesian clash of a war of all against all. For more than twenty-five years now, I have argued that, to the contrary, ethics does not stop at the water's edge and morality is not silent during war.

In this essay, I offer a utilitarian perspective on humanitarian intervention. There is no generally accepted precise definition of the term ‘humanitarian intervention’. I will provisionally, and roughly, define humanitarian intervention as the use of force by a state, beyond its own borders, that has as a purpose or an effect the protection of the human rights of noncitizens or the reduction of the suffering of noncitizens.

A variety of arguments have been advanced that deliberation should be at the center of any good political regime in which there is popular self-government. Deliberation is to be the basis for lawmaking, that is, for the making of the collectivity's binding decisions. Thus, John Rawls says, “[O]f course, actual constitutions should be designed as far as possible to make the same determinations as the ideal legislative procedure.” This procedure, in turn, is defined as having laws that result from “rational legislators … who are conscientious, trying to follow the principles of justice as their standard.” These legislators “are not to take a narrow or group-interested standpoint.” Joshua Cohen broadly agrees with Rawls and characterizes Rawls's view as one that argues for a democratic politics that is built around public deliberation. Cohen says (agreeing with Rawls) that “an ideal pluralist scheme, in which democratic politics consists of fair bargaining among groups each of which pursues its particular or sectional interest, is unsuited to a just society.” John Dryzek shares these views and comments that the “essence of democratic legitimacy should be sought … in the ability of all individuals subject to a collective decision to engage in authentic deliberation about that decision.” Others have argued along similar lines, including James Bohman, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, David Gauthier, and Jurgen Habermas.

If we wish to assess the morality of elected officials, we must understand their function as our representatives and then infer how they can fulfill this function. I propose to treat the class of elected officials as a profession, so that their morality is a role morality and it is functionally determined. If we conceive the role morality of legislators to be analogous to the ethics of other professions, then this morality must be functionally defined by the purpose that legislators are to fulfill once in office. Hence, the role morality of legislators will largely be determined by our theory of representation. We will need not a normative account of their role, but an empirical explanatory account. In David Hume's terms, the morality of role holders is one of “artificial” duties, that is to say, duties defined by their functional fit with the institutional purposes of a profession. Our most difficult problem, therefore, is to understand the role of our elected representatives.

Until recently, with one historical exception, America was able to take for granted a coherent national culture and identity. Successive waves of immigrants entered a country that assumed that their ultimate assimilation was a desirable, not an oppressive, outcome. The United States did not prove equally hospitable to everyone: some groups endured enormous hardships on their way to a fuller realization of America's great promise of opportunity and freedom. Yet, throughout U.S. history, the dream of common purpose and community propelled the collective desire to live up to this promise and provided the framework within which progress was understood and made.

What are our political obligations to future generations? How does morality suggest that we weight current interests against future interests? Do politics or markets place greater weight upon interests in the very distant future? How should we discount future costs and benefits?

In 1995 the United States National Security Agency (NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) made public the story of a forty-year American intelligence operation code-named Venona. Shortly after the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939, American military intelligence had ordered companies that were sending and receiving coded cables overseas, such as Western Union, to turn over copies to the U.S. government. Hundreds of thousands of cables were sent or received by Soviet government bodies. Beginning in 1943, spurred by rumors and concerns that Stalin might conclude a separate peace with Hitler, the U.S. Army's cryptographic section began work trying to read these Russian cables. It had very limited success until 1946, by which time the Cold War was already underway. Some twenty-nine hundred cables dealing with Russian intelligence activities from 1942 to 1946 eventually were decrypted successfully in whole or in part as a result of Soviet technical errors in constructing and using “one-time pads” that American code-breakers were able to exploit. These cables implicated more than three hundred Americans as having been involved with Soviet intelligence services during World War II, a time when the United States and the USSR were allies.

A more provocative subject than “lying in politics” is difficult to imagine. Everybody, from the proverbial “Joe Sixpack” to ivory-tower philosophers, can wax eloquently on the subject, if only because easy-to-find, shocking (and occasionally sexually “juicy”) examples abound. If moral outrage were judged an essential vitamin, then condemning dishonesty undoubtedly guarantees a daily megadose. Unfortunately, at least for those who crave self-indulgent outrage, the anti-lying case is less than 100 percent compelling. It is a quagmire of the first order, if only because those who cherish frankness also usually confess to lying. Hannah Arendt once suggested that lies are a necessary and justifiable tool of the statesman's trade. Formulating damnation criteria invites mind-boggling paradoxes, and strident defenders of truth-telling, with scant exception, admit that falsehoods are “sometimes” permitted for “good” reasons. And what might be these “good reasons”? Who can say for sure? Centuries of erudite scholarship on this point might be encapsulated as “Lying to me is bad, but I can consent to deceiving others for noble purposes, as artfully decided by myself.”

In recent years it has become increasingly common in the United States and in the United Kingdom for newspapers and other media to expose problematic aspects of the private lives of political (and other public) figures; or, since the facts may already be in the public domain, to draw wider attention to them and to make them the subject of commentary. These “problematic aspects” may include past or continuing physical or psychological illness, eating disorders, drug and alcohol abuse or dependence, financial difficulties, family conflict, infidelity, or certain sexual proclivities of both the political figures themselves and of their family members or intimates. In the United States, the most prominent cases are probably those of President Bill Clinton in relation to a series of alleged extramarital affairs leading up to the scandal involving White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and of President John F. Kennedy, also in relation to marital infidelities. The latter exposure was, of course retrospective, as were revelations of similar matters concerning other presidents and holders of high office. Up until the mid-1960s, while it was sometimes known to the press that politicians had “problems” in their private lives, it was rare for these to be made public. Sometimes it might be reported, or more likely hinted, that a figure had a “complex” or “difficult” personal life, and the public was left to infer whatever it might from this (generally concluding that infidelity, alcoholism, or both, were probably at issue). The recent culture of exposure results from a combination of factors, including changed attitudes toward public discussion of sexual conduct, changed standards of sexual behavior, recognition of the scale of Cold War espionage and of its practice of blackmail, a general decline in social deference, a threat to the print media posed by the growth of television, and the rise of satirical entertainment. All of these elements were present in the case that marked the establishment of the culture of exposure in the U.K.: the ‘Profumo scandal’ of 1963. For those unaware of this episode, it may be sufficient to say that it involved the then-secretary of state for war, members of the British aristocracy, a Soviet naval attaché, and a number of “society” call girls, and that it contributed to the resignation of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and the subsequent fall from power of the Conservative Party. In the United States, the culture of exposure developed somewhat later and took shape in the period of the Watergate scandal, which damaged the American public's perception of the governing classes just as the Profumo scandal had in Britain.

A fierce debate about civic education in American public schools has erupted in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Many liberals and conservatives, though they disagree strongly about which civic virtues to teach, share the assumption that such education is an appropriate responsibility for public schools. They are wrong. Civic education aimed at civic virtue is at best ineffective; worse, it is often subversive of the moral purpose of schooling. Moreover, the attempt to impose these partisan conceptions of civic virtue on America's students violates the civic trust that underpins vibrant public schools.

A remarkable feature of contemporary political discourse is the dominance of morality. One legacy of logical positivism (which was dominant from the mid-1930s until the end of the 1960s) and analytical (or linguistic) philosophy was the reluctance of political theorists during the twentieth century to engage in substantive argument about appropriate social ends or individual rights and values. Philosophers were content to describe the linguistic framework within which related political proposals were discussed without offering any proposals themselves. It was felt that the philosopher was not especially qualified to give political advice or make any recommendations. The technical political theorist was properly confined to the second level of inquiry, that is, explanation of the meaning of concepts, not the first level, which was concerned with questions of how we ought to live, or issues of public policy. Economists and sociologists might have the technical skills appropriate for inquiries into public policy, but as to the big questions—such as the ends and purposes of man and society—almost anybody could make pronouncements. The important point was that reason was incapable of adjudicating between rival versions of the good life.

When Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, and other ethicists of caring draw the contrast between supposedly masculine and supposedly feminine moral thinking, they put such things as justice, autonomy, and rights together under the first rubric and such things as caring, responsibility for others, and connection together under the second. This division naturally leaves caring ethicists with the issue of how to deal with topics such as justice, autonomy, and rights, but it also leaves defenders of more traditional moral theories (now dubbed “masculine”) with the problem of how to treat (if at all) the sorts of issues that ethicists of caring raise.

These days, American politicians are loath to cite biblical passages for fear of being charged with breaching the wall between church and state. There was a time when a presidential candidate could claim that a certain monetary policy would “crucify us on a cross of gold.” This kind of rhetoric is now taboo. America's national leaders even avoid quoting the religious phrases from the Declaration of Independence, particularly its references to the “Creator” or “Nature's God.” Although in the past some of the greatest American political oratory—Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg (1863) or Martin Luther King, Jr., at the Lincoln Memorial (1963)—relied unashamedly on biblical sources and imagery, it is no longer considered acceptable to argue publicly in the language of either the Hebrew or Christian Bibles. However religious American society might still be today, political rhetoric is noticeably nonreligious.

It is easy and popular these days to be a political liberal. Compared to ‘ethical liberals’, who justify the use of state power by way of one or another conception of people's true moral nature, ‘political liberals’ seek a less controversial foundation for liberal politics. Pioneered within the past twenty years by John Rawls and Charles Larmore, the ‘political liberal’ approach seeks to justify the coercive power of the state by reference to general political ideas about persons and society. Since it abandons the debates about personal moral value that have historically dogged liberal theory, political liberalism offers itself as a more latitudinarian, indeed a more liberal, form of liberalism. Being a political liberal is not the only way to be a good liberal, but this approach has become prevalent enough that I shall focus upon it here.