On the Legitimacy of Intervention

Abstract

My comment on the Legitimacy of Intervention has two interrelated parts. The first part is of a general nature and concerns the problem of the justification of legitimate intervention. The second part will address the main theme of the paper by Frederick Schauer (2014), i.e., the problem of intervention under conditions of epistemic and normative uncertainty. My comment will be based on a philosophical puzzle which is called the Munchhausen Trilemma. The Baron von Munchhausen was a German nobleman who lived in the 18th century and has become famous as a storyteller. In one of his famous stories he managed to pull himself and the horse on which he was sitting out of a swamp by his own hair. It was the German philosopher Hans Albert who first drew attention to how this story by Munchhausen is analogous to the following situation, which is typical not only of epistemology, but also of ethics and political philosophy. The search for truth or other values seems to be inseparably tied to the search for secure ground, for an absolute foundation or an ultimate justification. The search for an Archimedean point, the quest for an ultimate justification of values is a manifestation of the vain quest for certainty originating in the idea of a positive, sufficient justification. This general philosophical idea, operative both in epistemology and philosophy of science as well as in ethics and political philosophy, mandates the quest for an adequate foundation, a sufficient justification, for all convictions and principles. The demand for a justification of everything leads to a situation with three alternatives, all of which are unacceptable: the Munchhausen Trilemma, named such because of the analogy existing between this problem and one which that baron once had to solve in the story mentioned above. It is a situation characterized by three alternatives, all of them seemingly unacceptable or in other words a trilemma. “One must choose [...] between