In his chapter Raymond Plant, with the gentle trailing of the cloak, writes: "It seems fairly obvious that a rights-based theory would be most congenial for someone who wanted to think about intervention".² Other chapters have invited us to think of alternative starting places for an analysis of the ethics of intervention: realism offers us interest or prudence; the morality of states offers us rights, not of individuals but of states; and the Aristotelian position offers us virtues, in particular the virtue of humanity. These are rival and perfectly legitimate starting points for a theory justifying intervention, or non-intervention. Nevertheless, as will be seen below, the rights thesis is the most challenging one and the one to which the strongest antithesis should be offered.