There are many justifications for democracy. Democracy has intrinsic value to the extent that it realizes the freedom and equality for all individual persons demanded by universal human rights, respects the moral worth of each individual human person, and fairly distributes the opportunities for leading a good human life. But these arguments do not exhaust the possible justifications for democracy. It could also be thought to be instrumentally valuable to the extent that democracy is a necessary means to achieve particular valuable ends or to avoid terrible evils. Strong evidence suggests that democracy is instrumentally valuable in preventing great evils, such as war, famine, and human deprivation generally. It also may be the means to attain important moral ends, most importantly peace, both inside and outside its borders. Indeed, social scientists and philosophers have argued on empirical grounds that democracies are inherently more peaceful than nondemocracies, so peace is one of the benefits of a democratic order. The so-called democratic peace hypothesis has often been used by moral cosmopolitans and by liberal nationalists to justify the policy of fostering democracy within states as the best means to create a peaceful international order of autonomous political communities. Recently, democracy has been seen as so valuable that its promotion provides the basis for a just war, or at least a justification for military intervention by democratic states into nondemocratic ones for the sake of establishing more democracies as a means for peace and security.