ABSTRACT
Needless to say, good intentions are not always sufficient to produce desirable results. In an imperfect and unpredictable world, human rights INGOs often face ethical dilemmas that constrain their efforts to do good in foreign lands. How do people who want to do good behave when they meet obstacles? Is it justifiable to sacrifice some good in the short term for more good in the long term? And which human rights concerns should have priority? Like other organizations, INGOs are constrained by scarce time and resources and must choose between competing goods. Human rights practitioners experience hard choices, compromises, and prioritizing as ongoing features of their moral world. In such cases, long lists of fairly abstract desiderata such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that do not take into account real-world constraints
do not help much. So how do human rights INGOs set their moral priorities? On what basis do they choose how to do good, and where to do it? How should their decisions be critically evaluated? Can their choices be improved? What role, if any, can theorizing about human rights contribute to these questions?
