When is force justified?
Political, Law ·Friday December 18, 2009 @ 04:52 EST (link)
When may one use force? To secure rights.
In the liberty traditions (classical liberalism, libertarianism, objectivism), an action does not acquire morality because it is done by a group, no matter how that group was formed, even if it calls itself "government" and claims to be above the laws of man and nature. So although initially I thought I would have to clarify that I was considering group, even government action, in fact there is no distinction in terms of the question.
What are rights? Let's start with what they are not: rights do not require others to do work to provide them; they cannot exist at the expense of others: there is no right to enslave. (Sometimes the distinction is made between negative and positive rights; I will use the terms rights and privileges.) Rights can only require others to abstain from acting: to not stop me from speaking, to not trespass on my property, to not commit violence against me. The fundamental rights are to personal physical security and to security of one's voluntarily-acquired property (a thief has no right to security of his ill-gotten gains); one could even frame this as Rand's one fundamental right, either to one's own self (and by extension property), or, rephrasing, to property, beginning with self-ownership.
Privileges are too often claimed as rights. For example, Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Economic bill of rights" including such absurdities as the right to a job, a right to food and clothing, for farmers to to sell food at a certain price, to a home, to medical care, to education. For all of these, one naturally asks "Who will provide it?" The list clearly is not talking about voluntary contractual associations: for then it would be foolish to describe these privileges as rights, since they must depend upon mutual agreement. For a job such agreement is between employer and employee, and contains such terms as the work performed and compensation provided in return. No, in this case it would require an employer who does not want to hire someone to hire him, or to keep him employed against his will, or to pay him more than he is worth; all of these things are clear violation of his right of association, of private property (who he allows on it, who he gives it to); they are unjust takings, i.e., robbery and theft. And indeed, the "New Deal" did all these things (see, e.g., Schlaes' The Forgotten Man, or Folsom's New Deal or Raw Deal?). Going down the list, we see outright theft in the alleged "right" to have particular goods; price-fixing (which in practice involved massive destruction of salable goods), to the hurt of the consumers without political leverage; and enslavement of those forced by a tyrannical government to work but not receive the just fruits of their labor.
Clearly, physical self-defense is the first and most obvious justification for use of force; ideally commensurate with the force initiated against one; if there is an option, one should prefer flight, except on one's home ground, where all possible force may legitimately be brought to bear against an intruder and attacker. In the aggregate, a nation may also defend itself from aggression. Such defense secures one's right to physical security (you own yourself exclusively). By extension, one may defend others with their consent.
But nations fight other nations, for other reasons, sometimes even legitimately. (One must take an aside to consider what is a nation? When was the United States of America a nation? From the time a group declared it so. Does this mean that I can declare me and my house an independent nation? Yes: it is my property by dint of voluntary purchase and by residence; but I would face too many logistical difficulties to make that viable; for example, I would be surrounded on all sides by those obliged neither to allow me passage nor transact with me.)
The so-called American Civil War, or War Between the States, or Southern War for Independence, is whitewashed in the histories to associate it with freeing the slaves, but contemplation of the events thereof will indicate that that was merely fortunate happenstance and the war was fought, as usual, for money, land, and power. But let us suppose it was fought to free the slaves; then was it a legitimate war? Referring back to our thesis, we must answer yes; but that certainly doesn't make every act committed during such a war legitimate. It is reasonable to undo the suppression of rights by freeing the slaves; it is not reasonable to suppress speech and assembly rights (or even habeas corpus), or to murder, rape, pillage and burn noncombatants. But as fought, with it expressly declared by many including President Lincoln himself that the war was not started with any goal of freeing slaves, it was unjust initiation of aggression unconnected to the aggressive acts by certain landowners against those held as slaves, and as such the South had the moral right to stop it in any way possible.
Similarly one may examine the war against Iraq: was the goal to eliminate Saddam because he was tyrannizing his people, restricting their freedom, even torturing and killing them? No: it was to stop a potential and very vague threat, which brings to mind the old saw about a female interviewer criticizing a military camp teaching boys to shoot: "You're equipping them to become violent killers!" To which the blunt camp commander replies, "Well, you're equipped to be a prostitute but you're not one." We're all equipped to harm other people; freedom demands leaving people that potential until they demonstrate they are unworthy of it. Contrast when the US was attacked on December 7, 1941: we fought back in self-defense, not acting as initiators (I will leave for another place the debate over the need for using nuclear weapons on Japan except to say that response to aggression is not carte blanche; a subway shove does not justify murder in response).
Was the American Revolution justified? Was "taxation without representation" enough of a scourge to go to war? Given that other means had been tried, as spelled out at length in the Declaration of Independence, to all of which the king had turned a deaf ear, then certainly: rights were being violated and a rational man has a duty to himself to fight back. But "taxation without representation" did not go far enough. Is it any better to be coerced into action (perhaps into war, by a draft), or to have property confiscated, or rights restricted, if the majority in a particular surrounding geographic area has consented to it? No! So the objection ought to be instead to coercion of any sort, including taxation (which, if done by anyone but this theoretical body called government, would be mere robbery), and practically that was an objection one reads in the papers of the framers (chief among them Thomas Jefferson).
The Articles of Confederation did not allow for forced levies, and was primarily a consensual form of government with little interference. Even if such was not written into the document, the frame of mind of the rugged individuals of the time would not permit—at bayonet-point if necessary—interference into their individual and sovereign affairs. Even the Constitution did not allow most of the egregious thefts of today (e.g., the "New Deal" or "Great Society" social programs) and the same frame of mind of individual sovereignty reigned, so by twisting plain meaning and omission of things entirely obvious to the framers, the founding document has been found to support all these things by complicit executives, legislators, and courts. But in reality on the first day the first tax collector came to an American door and demanded of his increase, he had the thorough moral right to refuse, with whatever force (and companions) necessary if force was proffered, and we still have that right.
For one does not fight a revolution merely to pay the same taxes to a different overlord; one fights it to throw off a burden, to find that light yoke of an ideal government (or none at all) that acts with subsidiarity, that protects rights, that is unable to add aught to its power and remains weak enough that if it should ever do otherwise, it may be dissolved by withholding from it the private resources it needs to survive. So we find of the American Revolution: it was not fought to pass the same yoke from the hands of a distant tyrant king to the hands of a distant tyrant president, but because "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" and "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
A narrow construction of "consent of the governed" is warranted (as with the rest of the Constitution, intended to be a precise document if any document ever was); i.e., the consent of every one of the governed, and, lacking that, they can take themselves out of that group (as, at a larger level, states were able to leave the union up until the tyrant Lincoln's greed barred it), and form their own township or other body on their own land. The United States was formed with the noble goal of instituting governments whose sole role was to protect rights (leaving as much freedom as possible to individuals); with the novel goal of right trumping might: yet how soon we faltered!, and now someone who I acknowledge not at all as representative of me barters favors in a faraway capital with the result that they get to accumulate more power and my taxes increase and freedoms decrease. How would this be different if we were governed by the King of England? It is the sheep and the wolves voting on dinner; it is a group of thugs gathering around a victim and voting 10-1 to assault and rob him and feeling noble because they allowed him his one vote.
Our government has failed in its role of protecting rights, instead becoming the primary violator! May we not thus say with the colonists, of modern so-called government, "[They have] erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance" and "[taken] away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments"? Should we not respond as they did, "That these united [People] are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent [People], that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the [present government],… that as Free and Independent [People], they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent [People] may of right do.—And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor."
