The Justifications for Intervention: Needs before Contexts

Abstract

If we are to justify intervention there is the problem of whose values we employ: our values or those of the society in which we are proposing to intervene? One important way of thinking about politics, called ‘interpretivism’ or ‘contextualism’, is well employed by Michael Walzer in his book Spheres of Justice. It is based on the idea that we should abandon the search for transcultural moral foundations for thinking about politics at all. Rather, we should fix our attention on the values of the community that we are thinking about, whether it is our own or another. This does not mean that we are committed to some kind of unthinking conservatism. It does mean that the only basis for criticism in either our own society or another society is the existence of inconsistency between the basic values of that society and the way those values are realised in its social and political arrangements. In Walzer’s view we can develop a strong theory critical of many Western societies. Their background and entrenched ideals about moral equality are not practically realised in their political and social culture. One can pursue similar arguments with other societies. This kind of view is anti-foundationalist. As such, it explicitly rejects the transcultural basis of theories of rights, which tries to provide universal criteria for political morality, responsibility, and action. Contextualism argues that there are no such transcultural foundations. We have to look to the way of life of particular societies and develop a critical perspective from that.