Cosmopolitanism and Precautionary War

As discussed in Chapter 16, contemporary justifications for Western military action tend to emphasize the ‘principles’ and ‘values’ that such action is frequently held to embody. Altruistic concern for the suffering of ‘distant others’ and a determination to uphold normative standards of human rights and humanitarianism have frequently been offered as reasons for the sort of ‘ethical foreign policy’ espoused by Western governments in recent years. At the same time, however, in the post-Cold War era military intervention is also often presented as a purely pragmatic matter of risk-assessment: military action is justified as a precautionary measure against threats such as terrorism or weapons of mass destruction.