Libya and Moral Responsibility
Much of the ongoing debate about Libya has rested on what I believe to the mistaken philosophical premise that the United States, or any other potential intervening party, becomes more morally responsible for the fate of Libya if it chooses to intervene than if it doesn’t. Ross Douthat presents the most sophisticated defense in this post. Most relevant line:
But America’s leaders are not directly responsible for governing any country besides their own, which means that almost by definition, they/we bear less responsibility for tragedies that result from our staying out of foreign conflicts than for tragedies that flow from our attempts at intervention.
Douthat here is equivocating two senses of “responsibility;” the first empirical, and the second philosophical. It is true that the United States is only “directly responsible” for governing its own citizens in a contingent sense: the only people subject to U.S. law are, well, Americans. But that brute fact says nothing “by definition” about who to whom the American government is morally responsible. Douthat’s arguments rest on the foundation that empirical responsibility entails moral responsibility: that if we cause something, we are more morally responsible for it than we would have been otherwise. But is this position defensible?