Military Intervention in Two Registers

The ethics of care is, for Held, the more promising approach. [...]she claims that the ethics of care is better than other ethical theories "for longer-term evaluations of political institutions and practices, of groups and the violence they often now employ, and of how these domains should be configured within wider societies including potentially a global one" (1). While she aims to restrict the wide reach of alternative moral theories, permitting them to function in relation to law or politics, she does not limit the wide reach of the ethics of care as a connective tissue and horizon. Because of how she sees the relationship between moral theory and politics, she remains within a model of thinking about politics that construes it as lacking in values and norms that in quite a strong sense could be said to be its own.3 Either because she thinks of the relationship of moral theory and politics as she does or as part of constituting the relationship of moral theory and ethics in this particular way, Held turns to truth-yielding procedures that she believes can be used analogically in the case of moral theories in order to determine their validity and which is the better moral theory (Held 1983). [...]is the balance of harms and their remediation, which is what most people, and unfortunately Young too when she departs from what she learns from Arendt, focus much of their attention on and what leads to narrow consequentialist constructions of the justification of violence or their critique. According to Habermas, at least neighboring democracies have the right, if not the duty, to militarily intervene and protect a victimized population like the Albanian Kosovars, since even under current international law state sovereignty does not protect the territorial integrity of any country whose government breaks international law as Serbia did in Kosovo.