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The Ethics of Interventionism
In discussing this topic, we should start off by noting that, when it comes to conflicts between states – entities which are unethical and unjust by definition – it is difficult to make neat categorisations between aggressor and victim. States are fundamentally aggressive by definition, and so it is difficult to talk about them as if we are discussing the rights and obligations that arise between private individuals and entities. As such, any acts by states can often be judged not in terms of right or wrong but only of what is better or worse for the freedom of the citizens who must suffer from their rule.[1] In fact, the Russia/Ukraine/NATO conflict is an exemplar of this. Moreover, much interventionism that feigns to be defensive tends not to be so – the Iraq war being a prime, recent example.
However, if we ignore this complication by assuming that the assessment of a given situation provides a clear distinction between an aggressor state and a victim state, what can we say about interventionist efforts by third party, non-aggressing countries to either prevent or quash the act of aggression?
To be a libertarian is to believe that the initiation of force against the person or property against another is inherently unjust. This belief proscribes neither the right to self-defence of one’s person and property, nor the right to provide defence services towards someone else who is the victim of aggression. There are two key elaborations to make to this principle.
First, libertarianism itself does not state that someone must defend himself or rush to the defence of other people. One may, by another standard, incur a moral obligation to do so, but such an obligation cannot be enforced by the law, as this would itself breach the non-aggression principle. Indeed, one is perfectly entitled to live as a pacifist, eschewing any kind of force whatsoever. It is quite consistent, therefore, to state that someone should choose to aid a victim of aggressive violence but that he should not be forced to do so.
Second, if you do decide to respond to an act of aggression then you do not have the right to inflict aggressive violence on an innocent party in the process, either by forcing them to assist you or by making them the victims of so-called “collateral damage”. One would not, for instance, launch a nuclear warhead, slaughtering the population of an entire landmass, in order to neutralise a single murderer.[2]
Knowing this, we can summarise the basic position libertarian position on these matters as follows:
- No person has the right to initiate violence (aggression) against any other person in any circumstance;
- Where a person is the victim of aggression he has the right to defend himself;
- Where a person attempts to defend himself he has no right to initiate violence against innocents during the act of doing so, including their enforced participation and causing “collateral damage”;
- Where a person attempts to defend himself, other people have no right to initiate violence against him in order to stop him from doing so;
- A person has the right to solicit, contract with or otherwise co-operate with third parties in furnishing his defensive capabilities;
- Third parties, likewise, have the right to provide their funds and resources towards defence, either through a negotiated contract (security services) or charitably;
- Third parties providing defence services have no right to initiate force against innocents during the act of doing so; this includes forcing others to contribute towards the same, and causing “collateral damage”;
- Where a third party provides defence services it not may be forcibly stopped from doing so by others;
- Whether the injured party or a third party should or should not act to defend the former against an act of aggression, or whether such an act of defence is a “good” or “bad” thing by some other moral standard may be debated; however, the conclusion may not be enforced violently on any party that is not committing an act of aggression.
When it comes to the mainstream debate of the interventionist efforts of our governments, the question tends to be presented as all or nothing: should we all – via our government – intervene, or should we all not intervene. But, in light of the summary we have just outlined, there is a distinct problem with each of these holistic responses from a libertarian perspective.
Those who answer in the affirmative have rightly recognised that defensive force may be used in such a situation because the non-aggression principle has been violated by another party. However, they are overlooking the fact that the funds to be directed towards military intervention are extracted forcibly by the state through tax revenue – in other words, people are being forced to fund the interventionist venture. They are mistaking the right to intervene on the one hand with a violently enforceable obligation to do so on the other. But this violently enforceable obligation is itself a breach of the non-aggression principle, and is, therefore, anti-libertarian and unjust. These advocates of interventionism are most welcome to criticise other people from the point of view of moral standards that are separate from, but compatible with, libertarianism. Indeed they are most welcome to contribute their own legitimately earned wealth (if they have any) and that of anyone whom they can persuade to join them voluntarily in the venture towards defending the victim country. But what they do not have is the right to force other people to the same, either by extracting funding through taxes or by enforcing conscription.
Those, however, who answer in the negative – that we should not intervene – may recognise rightly that we cannot force people to participate in intervention. But now they seem to be making the opposite mistake of preventing people who want to intervene from doing so – especially if their justification for that denial is that there are “better” things that “our” taxes should be spent on. As we just mentioned, if someone is genuinely outraged by the infliction of violence (believing that his assistance against such heinous acts is a worthwhile devotion of his own funds) then he is quite within his rights to contribute those funds accordingly. In fact, he may even decide to join a voluntary defence force, providing personal support for the victims. To stop someone from doing this if that is what they want is as much an affront to the non-aggression principle as forcing their assistance if they are reluctant. Once again, we must emphasise that it may not be a good thing, by some standard exogenous to libertarianism (e.g. pacifist morality), for a person to engage in intervention; but that does not mean that this person may be violently prevented from doing so.
All of this points towards one conclusion: that, given the unjust nature of the way in which the state could carry out its interventionist efforts, states should never intervene overseas – even for ostensibly just and noble causes. Whether such causes should be either supported or ignored is a matter for each, private citizen.
Such an outcome is bolstered by the fact that “war is the health of the state”. Never matter the reason why it is carried out, war hands to the state on a silver platter every excuse it needs to swell its power through an almost limitless list of outlets: forced redirection of the economy towards the war effort overseen by vast bureaucracies (which often form the model for subsequent peacetime, bureaucratic management); censorship of the press and of speech; endless propaganda; the possibility of conscription; rationing of basic goods. All of this is before we even mention the direct effects of death and destruction that war brings in her wake. The avoidance of war is, therefore, one of the highest priorities for anyone keen on preserving the liberty of the individual.
Thus, from both a theoretical and a strategic perspective, libertarians can find little, if any, justification for the interventionist efforts of states, and they should be opposed in each circumstance.
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Notes
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Notes
[1] See here for a detailed explanation of these difficulties.
[2] The only exception to this rule is if the actions of an aggressor have made it reasonably impossible for the victim to take defensive actions without harming the third party. For instance, if P steals Q’s car to run over R, R is entitled to shoot at Q’s car in order to stop P. In this case, P, not R, would be responsible for compensating Q for the damage to the car. For a more detailed explanation of this, see part of this essay.
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Public post
Against Exceptionalism
Fighting the State's Hypocrisy
The Western condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has once again served to highlight the exceptionalist attitude of the West, and of the United States in particular. Whichever standards other countries and governments are held to, the West believes that it is permitted to deviate from, or even obliterate those standards, labelling its own interventionist feats with some other, innocuous term, while utilising a half-baked moral justification in order to promote its acceptability.
The Western condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has once again served to highlight the exceptionalist attitude of the West, and of the United States in particular. Whichever standards other countries and governments are held to, the West believes that it is permitted to deviate from, or even obliterate those standards, labelling its own interventionist feats with some other, innocuous term, while utilising a half-baked moral justification in order to promote its acceptability.
For instance, what is, for other countries, an illegal invasion of a sovereign state is, when the West does it, an act of “liberation”. When someone else organises a rebellion against a foreign government it’s a violation of “sovereignty” and of “international law”; but the West only “spreads democracy”. When other states commit horrendous acts of torture or indiscriminate murder they are “war crimes”; for the West, they are the “enhanced interrogation” and “collateral damage” necessary to fulfil a just and noble cause.
One does not have to endorse any of the motives or methods of the Russian state vis-à-vis Ukraine in order to point out this out; indeed, the precise details of this whole affair are outside the scope of this article. However, we might as well note that Russian concern over its Western border region is likely to be far more pressing than any interest that the West has either there or wherever else it has poked its heavily armed nose, such as Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. This serves merely to magnify the West’s unrelenting hypocrisy.
While the attitude of exceptionalism is, no doubt, bolstered by faith in the values which furnished the West with an untold level of prosperity, it is not something that is necessarily restricted to the West, nor is somehow born out of the Western psyche. Rather, the real root of exceptionalism can be found in how the state operates domestically.
If people steal from each other, it is called “theft” and is criminalised; but when the state steals, this is permitted, and is referred to as “taxation”. If a company dominates an industry it is called a “monopoly” and must be broken up; but if the state does it, we can call it “nationalisation” (“for the people” etc. etc.). If a fraudster takes cash from customers to pay returns to previous investors, it is called a pyramid or “Ponzi” scheme, and he is locked up; when the state does precisely the same thing it is called “Social Security”. If the mafia forces you to pay tribute in return for security it is called a “protection racket”; but when the state forces you to contribute to its armies, navies and air forces it is called “national defence”.
In conjunction with all of this, the state necessarily conditions its operatives to believe that they are exempt from the common standards of morality to which all other human beings must adhere. This would be bad enough if such an attitude was restricted to acts taken within an official capacity. But the level of corruption in our state apparatus is now so grave that the private malfeasance of favoured, high profile state operatives is also swept under the carpet.
None of this is different from exceptionalist attitudes on the international scene; such attitudes gain traction when a particular state, or group of states, becomes the de facto most powerful government on Earth. So in just the same way as the state does not have to behave in the same way as its citizens, neither does the most powerful state have to behave like any other state.
In recent decades, that has been the US, although, as the Russian challenge is demonstrating, the era of American global dominance is coming to an end. However, the US is not an historical anomaly in this regard, having been preceded by other wealthy and heavily armed states such as Ancient Rome, and the British Empire. Of course, many beneficiaries of this dominance will be well aware that they are engaging in outright plunder and pillage. But it is not unusual for them to become blinded by the hubristic belief that, as representatives of the pinnacle of “civilisation” in an otherwise barbarous world, their acts are somehow qualitatively different from those of others. St Augustine relates an anecdote of a pirate brought before Alexander the Great. When prompted by the undefeated conqueror to explain his actions, the pirate delivered a bold but truthful reply: that what he, the pirate, was doing, was exactly the same as that which Alexander was doing; the only difference was that Alexander terrorised the seas with a “great fleet” and was styled an “emperor”, while the pirate did so with a "petty ship" and was thus brandished a “robber”.[1]
The conquest, therefore, of the exceptionalism of the most powerful nation can be achieved only by eradicating that exceptionalism at home – in domestic government and domestic policies. All human beings, whether they are “public” or private citizens, must adhere to the same common morality, and must be held to the same moral standards. Better still, eradicate the state completely so that its political caste – together with the divisions it creates between itself and those of us less exalted – will disappear. Only then can we hope for a peaceful world in which all humans are equal before the law – both nationally and internationally.
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Notes
[1] St Augustine (tr. Rev. Marcus Dods), The City of God, in Phillip Schaff (ed.), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Series, Vol. II, WM B Eerdmans Publishing Company (1886), Book IV, Chapter 4, 165.
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Notes
[1] St Augustine (tr. Rev. Marcus Dods), The City of God, in Phillip Schaff (ed.), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Series, Vol. II, WM B Eerdmans Publishing Company (1886), Book IV, Chapter 4, 165.
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Public post
Liberty and International Relations
An Article from Free Life
Recently, I posted on Free Life an analysis of the threats that can be posed to liberty by interstate relations and conflicts. Today, I wish to reiterate one particular part of that analysis: that we cannot analyse relationships between states by reference to libertarian principles in exactly the same way in which we discuss relationships between individual people.
Recently, I posted on Free Life an analysis of the threats that can be posed to liberty by interstate relations and conflicts. Today, I wish to reiterate one particular part of that analysis: that we cannot analyse relationships between states by reference to libertarian principles in exactly the same way in which we discuss relationships between individual people.
Only individuals have rights to the physical integrity of their own bodies and to that of goods they have acquired, either through original appropriation or through voluntary transaction. Consequently, concepts such as “ownership”, “property”, “sovereignty”, “aggression”, “criminality,” etc. only have a concrete meaning when applied to individuals. If, for instance, P initiates physical force against Q – say, by shooting a gun at him – we can say clearly that P, by violating the property rights of Q, has committed an act of aggression against the latter. Further, should Q act so as to protect himself then, subject to certain limits, we would easily classify this response as self-defence. If P happens to be a state goon – say a policeman or tax collector – initiating force against Q on the state’s behalf, then we may summarise P’s action as being that of the state. However, the basic clarity of the analysis remains: he who initiates force is the aggressor; the recipient of that force is the victim; the former is the clear affront to the liberty of the latter.
States, however, exist only by violating the rights of others. Each and every single one of them is an occupying force of the particular territory over which it claims to have jurisdiction. None of them has any basic right to anything at all, and all of their actions are prima facie illegitimate. Even the most ostensibly peaceful state action will have been funded not from the personal assets of the particular politicians in question, but by taxation mulcted from the citizenry. Thus, given this fundamentally unjust nature of states, the use of binary distinctions such as those between “peaceful” and “aggressive” behaviour, or between “aggressor” and “victim”, makes little sense when discussing interstate relations. At best, we can ask only whether a particular act of a particular state, relative to that of another state, is likely to be better or worse for the liberty of those who have to suffer under state rule, both immediately and in the long run. In this regard, concepts such as “sovereignty” and “borders” – whether our concern is with invasion, secession, immigration, trade or any other interstate act – are useful only insofar as they can serve as a shorthand or proxy for the rights of individual people.
For example, say that the state of Ruritania invades the state of Muldania. To say here that Ruritania’s invasion is an act of aggression simply repeats a truism. We know already that Ruritania is occupying territory to which it has no right (just like it has no right to occupy its own territory), and that innocent civilians are likely to end up as casualties, either intentionally or as so-called “collateral damage”. But neither does Muldania have any inherent right to that territory either – indeed, to assert that Ruritania is “the” aggressor is to implicitly legitimise Muldanian rule. According to libertarian principles, the reason this invasion should never have happened is not just because it is an aggressive act but because neither Ruritania nor Muldania should even exist in the form of states in the first place. But given that both states do, in fact, exist, and given that the invasion has, in fact, happened, it can be classified only as a fight between different aggressors, not between aggressor and victim. Rather than being like a straightforward bank robbery, the situation is more akin to a shoot out between two different gangs of thieves, each of which is trying to rob the bank for itself. In assessing the impact on the individual people affected, we have only a choice of which acts by either state end up being better or worse for their liberty, and this will depend upon the particular circumstances.
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Anti-War and Anti-State
To Oppose War we Must Oppose the State
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has, once more, brought war and international relations to the forefront of the political agenda. Given that Ukraine’s support from Western countries, both spiritually and financially, seems aimed at exacerbating this conflict rather than abating it, it is critical for those committed to peace and prosperity to grasp a key fact if their stance is to be successful: that one cannot be truly anti-war without also being anti-state.
If one is to be anti-state (or, at least, in favour of a smaller state), then it is quite obvious that one must be anti-war. The warmongering right, forever whining about state overreach in the domestic sphere, has no problem with siphoning billions of taxpayers’ money in order to support a huge military while furnishing corporate welfare to arms manufacturers. Forgotten by these chicken-hawks is the fact that “war is the health of the state”. During wartime – or even in the milieu of a merely purported threat – a government can enact heinous levels of oppression and control that would be unthinkable in a time of peace. Curiously enough, such measures have a habit of sticking around as soon as the alleged enemy is vanquished. Thus, to support war and foreign interventionism is to ultimately destroy freedom at home.
However, to be truly anti-war requires one to be also thoroughly and uncompromisingly anti-state. If war feeds the state then so too does the state feed war. Indeed, the very desire to create a bigger state makes war more likely. War is always propagated by states, between states and for the benefit of states – the bigger and more powerful they are, the more catastrophic and destructive their wars are likely to be. The ideological left, with its anti-imperialist and anti-war profiteering motive, has often been a louder voice than the right in castigating the warmongers and interventionists in conflicts past and present – at least, that is, when the “wrong” president happens to be in the Oval Office. But many of these anti-war activists of the left have no problem with state largesse when it comes to economic and social matters, spreading alleged “fairness”, “equality” or whichever other emotive but elusive goal happens to be the cause du jour. It is ridiculous to think that such interventionism will be restricted to the domestic sphere, let alone to believe that a large state can be the promoter and preserver of peace. Let’s look at this in some more detail.
First, by virtue of its very existence, the state will always produce conflict. The precise means at the state’s disposal, the only means that distinguishes it from other institutions, is force. The imposition of force results in the constant diversion of scarce resources away from the ends of their owners and towards the ends of others. The state is effectively engaged in a constant war on its own citizens, forever plundering and pillaging them to fund their lavish lifestyles and to line the pockets of their friends under the guise of wasteful socioeconomic programmes. Foreign war, fundamentally, is no different, and every motivation for it – ideological or economic – ultimately reduces to a battle for influence, territory and resources.
It is, therefore, incongruous for an anti-war activist to allow a state to war against its own citizens on the one hand, but to pipe up as soon as war is projected outwards against foreign nations on the other. Regardless of how correct this latter reaction may be, not only is it hypocritical but it is also dangerously naïve to expect the state to keep its tentacles out of foreign affairs while it maintains a vociferous commitment to meddling in the domestic. Such a bifurcated stance also makes it extremely difficult to see any sharp distinction between what we are told are “good” regimes and “bad” ones. Nazi Germany, for example, was met with such ambivalence – even celebration – during the interwar period precisely because its ideology of big government control and intervention was of no particular distinction from that which was gathering momentum everywhere else in the wake of the Wall Street Crash. The only difference was that it was prepared to take this ideology to its logical extreme, additionally piling on racial dogmas and nationalistic overtones that resulted in crimes which, however horrific and unforgettable, obscure its fundamental resonance with the zeitgeist of the time.
Second, big states attract the attention of control freaks and the greedy. The more money that is stashed in state coffers then the more there is to be leeched away by bloodsuckers and parasites. Having pinched one slice of the pie, it is difficult to stop them from salivating for another, and then more after that. Once government intervention has destroyed all productivity, with no more pies left to be eaten, the siren song of war becomes ever sweeter to governments and their sponsors, not only as a distraction from their own economic mismanagement but as a way forward to secure a flow of resources from abroad. As a bonus, they get to tighten their grip on the domestic citizenry through lasting wartime or “emergency” measures.
Nor must we forget, for the political class, the allure of graduating to the level of a wartime leader or “warrior”. Vanquishing a foreign enemy, or saving one’s people from an overseas threat (real or imagined), is judged to be the pinnacle of statesmanship, worthy of the highest honours and decorations. The fostering of “mere” peace and prosperity, on the other hand, is rather dull and uninspiring. Indeed, the most highly rated leaders all made their mark during wartime, or, at least, were perceived as “hawks”: Lincoln during the War between the States, Roosevelt and Churchill during World War II, and Reagan and Thatcher during the Cold War, for instance. Even our study of history tends to be enthralled to conquerors such as Alexander the Great or Napoleon. Only when a conflict becomes so obviously pointless, futile and unjustified – such as those in Vietnam and Iraq – does this strategy backfire, as it did upon Johnson, Nixon and the Bush/Blair duo.
Finally, in countries which have a history of relative freedom, the degree of state intervention necessary to create alleged social or economic benefits has usually been a legacy of wartime control. The institutions of the New Deal, for example, had their precedent in the wartime regime of Woodrow Wilson; World War II on the New Deal; the post-war “Great Society”, the fight against poverty and the Civil Rights era all came after these wartime regimes were firmly in place. The citizenry have to be “united” (or worn down) by something such as war before they can ever begin to accept the degree of interference necessary to promote big state measures during peacetime. Ironically, therefore, a lot of the big government cravings of the anti-war left – if they ever have the hope of seeing the light of day – are reliant upon war. The cycle then continues as a bigger state begets more war.
In sum, therefore, to be anti-war but pro-state is the epitome of all dangerously ill-informed and contradictory positions, giving birth to the very thing it seeks to destroy. Rather, to be anti-war one must also be thoroughly and unreservedly anti-state, recognising this evil entity for precisely what it is – perpetual and endless conflict and violence. Only when we are well and truly rid of this scourge will there ever be a chance for peace.
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