Being a university professor, even an acclaimed author, doesn’t mean that you are always right, even in the area of your expertise. Were it otherwise, we could just follow Plato and allow the philosophers to rule. But one of the great things about democracy is that the people often do know better and can avoid, if they choose, being led by someone who is smarter than he is wise, or indeed is not as smart as he is thought to be. One such instance, I have been asserting for a while, is Michael Ignatieff’s campaign for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada.

Ignatieff has made his claim to intellectual fame as an advocate of the “rights revolution�. The central idea here has been the re-assertion of rights as the ethical grounding for our political conduct. While few of us believe that rights are irrelevant to our conduct, the real controversy comes when considerations of rights conflict with considerations of well-being or with the thoughtful expression of the democratic will. This conflict arises, for example, in our effort to determine what our role ought to be in places where human rights are being abused.

Ignatieff maintains that because Afghanis would have their human rights trampled by the Taliban, this logically implies a duty upon Canada to intervene. If Afghanis have human rights that are threatened, then according to rights theorists like Ignatieff, we have an absolute duty to intervene to protect them, regardless of the costs of doing so in the way of human suffering, and regardless of what the “people� have to say about it. To do less is to act morally wrong, to be the proper object of the moral criticism of others. Such rights are powerful tools.

Wherever there are human rights abuses, on this view, the Canadian military should be there, securing the rights of others, at least when other nations are unwilling to do so, and to the extent that Canada has the resources available to intervene. Where such resources are insufficient, they should be strengthened, even if this means drawing monies from other spending to upgrade our military capacity. We need to be there to protect the human rights even if the consequences of our being there has no positive effect on the lives of Afghanis and makes all of us worse off. On Ignatieff’s account, shared by George W. Bush and Stephen Harper, considerations of well-being are irrelevant to our rights based duties.

Those of us who are democrats or advocates or concerned with the achieving the greatest amount of human well-being in any decision context, have difficulty accepting this sort of “all or nothing� rights discourse. Jeremy Bentham, of course, argued that “rights� are “nonsense built upon stilts.� We need not go, however, as far Bentham suggests in determining our morals obligations. We can believe that rights, while important, are improperly construed in an absolute way. Rights can be considered not as absolute moral laws, but instead as fundamental principles the respect of which makes humanity better.

On his alternative account, we still can quite sensibly hold that the domination of Afghani society by the Taliban is undermining the well being of Afghani citizens, especially women, and we can, accordingly, justify our involvement in such theatres to seek a better realization of their and our potential for human flourishing. We can, that is, take well-being considerations into account in determining our moral duties.

When we construe rights as guiding principles for our conduct, grounded in considerations of well-being, and open to democratic discussion, we no longer are acting immorally if we decide that we should intervene only when we have good reason to succeed, and when the costs of lives lost are not justified by the good we do. This sort of thinking might still leave us in Afghanistan. But unlike Ignatieff’s account, it requires us to consider the likely outcome of our interventions before we decide what it is right to do.

To illustrate the difference, it might have been better for Americans not to invade Iraq to topple the administration, even if they knew of human rights abuses, where doing so could lead, as it has, to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of American troops.

There is, of course, a danger in weakening our conception of human rights. But one of the advantages of less majestic, rights-grounded foreign policy is it allows us to think about the likely consequences of our actions as a basis for deciding when we should intervene to protect the rights of others. Ignatieff’s conception does not provide for such deliberations.