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Abstract Political and legal scholars rarely deal with the ethics of armed humanitarian intervention (AHI) into human rights crises where rights violations are rooted in popular will. When they do, they justify AHI by invoking universal moral principles that supposedly supersede local moralities. Especially after the subjective turn, critics of AHI like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, as well as Talal Asad, emphasize the particularity of morality and the role that culture and circumstance play in moral formation. However, such critics of AHI often fail to provide an alternative account for how the rescue of vulnerable populations from atrocity may be morally justifiable without universal moral norms. I argue this moral conundrum is due to the fact that moral frameworks for evaluating AHI presented by both proponents and opponents of AHI view societies systems whose cultural identity and value formation is monistic and causa sui. I turn to the theocentric ethics of James Gustafson to sketch an ethical framework for the consideration of AHI that relieves some of this tension by offering an alternative view of cultural value, identity formation, and the ethical enterprise itself, as a dialogical process. For Gustafson, moral value formation is a dialogical process colored by a culture’s unique circumstances and encounter with a sovereign god. Rather than view god as a supreme being, however, Gustafson understands god as a symbol for the natural, historical, and cultural forces that condition human experience, a collective Otherness upon which human life is dependent. Within such a system, one measures the appropriateness of moral acts and attitudes by their proper orientation to Otherness, as well as the contributions of those acts and attitudes to the common good of relevant interdependent wholes. My thesis is that, rather than underwriting a dismissal of AHI, a dialogical view of ethics is useful for constructing an alternative model of the relationship of individual societies to each other and to international norms in which AHI can be justified. It does this while still adopting a humble epistemological posture that acknowledges the limitedness of one’s moral perspective. A dialogical framework for AHI under these terms understands external influence as a natural part of cultural identity and value formation and not an interference in that process. My work will demonstrate that such a perspective accounts for particularism in a way that leaves open moral avenues for the rescue and safeguard of vulnerable populations. It also provides more nuanced guidance on the responsibility of intervening actors to respond to the needs and desires of the societies they intervene upon, since dialogue implies obligations that flow both ways in a relationship rather than a one way imposition of norms.

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