Response to Pattison: Whose Responsibility to Protect?

Abstract

James Pattison's argument for the assignment of a duty of humanitarian intervention is interesting and offers a new perspective in the humanitarian intervention debate. However, Pattison's argument suffers from three main problems, each increasingly serious: his definition of success is vague and raises questions about the content of a duty of humanitarian intervention; his consequentialist foundation raises problems of prospective and retrospective judgment; and his intentional omission of the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties leads to conceptual difficulties.