Should Australia send soldiers to protect civilians in a foreign country?
My gut reaction is - no.
I'm not keen on having Australian blood spilled in faraway dictatorships, even if the aim is to protect civilians.
Let other countries sort out their own problems.
Yet I find myself being persuaded by the moral arguments of Aussies whose jobs involve diplomacy and warfare.
The latest is Gareth Evans, the former Labor foreign minister and now president of the International Crisis Group, an independent, non-profit NGO based in Brussels which is dedicated to preventing warfare.
He hails the countless lives saved by the UN Security Council's unanimous decision last year to authorise the use of "all necessary measures" to protect civilians at imminent risk of massacre in Muammar Gaddafi's Libya.
"Those lives were saved," said Evans, "and if the Security Council had acted as decisively and robustly in the 1990s, so might those of 8000 others in Srebrenica and another 800,000 in Rwanda."
The United States, Britain and France did the world's dirty work this time, but in other circumstances Australia might have been asked to help.
So the question is relevant.
We are no strangers to peacekeeping in our own part of the world, having led the UN-mandated force in East Timor.
I was impressed by the way the commander of that operation, Peter Cosgrove, saw Australia's mission: "We looked over our front fence and saw our neighbour's house on fire and a big bully punching the neighbour in the nose. We hopped the fence."
Cosgrove's homespun wisdom has a point; reducing weighty world problems to neighbourhood level can help us determine what is the right path.
So my opening question could just as well be: should you hop the fence and intervene if you see your neighbour assaulting his wife and kids?
Australia's geographical isolation often makes us immune to such considerations.
Because we share no borders with any other country, intervention anywhere requires the deliberate act of leaving our island continent.
But human suffering is no respecter of international boundaries.
Gareth Evans was once touted as UN secretary-general material, a possible heir to Boutros Boutros Ghali.
Evans has hailed the UN decision to intervene in Libya as the coming of age of the so-called "R2P" - responsibility to protect - principle embraced by the world body in 2005.
Its central theme is this: if states fail to protect their own people from genocide and mass-atrocity crimes, the international community has the responsibility to act - by persuasion if possible and by force if necessary.
Sadly, this is not about to happen in Syria, despite a death toll well over 5000 and an outlook worse than Libya.
Evans outlines the reasons: potentially explosive regional sectarian divisions, no Arab League unanimity in favour of tough action, a long Russian commitment to the Assad regime, a strong Syrian army and a welter of criticism about how the initial NATO-led action in Libya became a push for regime change.
Australians do inhabit a lucky country. It would be nice to pretend we weren't part of the big, bad world, but we are.
And sometimes that means we have a duty to protect non-Australians at risk.
Now, how do you feel about boat people?
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