ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the requirement that a humanitarian intervention, to be justified, must be accompanied by the right intent. It shows that current views on right intent are too simplistic and do not do justice to the complexities of the relationship between intention and permissibility of action. Humanitarian intervention is a war characterized by a specific cause: saving persons from attack by their government or other groups in their territories. This raises the question of right intent: must those who start a humanitarian war act on the humanitarian motive for the war to be justified? A humanitarian intervention is much harder to justify than a war of national self-defense because such justification must defeat the justificatory reasons that the target state has for exercising its self-defense. The chapter recognizes that the intentional structure of an agent can be quite complex in the sense that the humanitarian rationale may show various degrees of intensity.
