Libertarians and war

The libertarian case against war is made on a daily basis on antiwar.com, which is a little nutty sometimes, but a very useful resource. Basically their position is that what happens in foreign countries in “none of our business” and that government intervention, by definition, will make things worse. Their ME-commentator Ran HaCohen is especially good.

Slightly OT: I remain puzzled concerning the stance of libertarian environmentalists. How can we combat climate change without charging for oxygen?

You hold, as Randy does (and I do) that libertarianism as such is underdeterminate with respect to foreign policy, and that arguments about foreign policy have to proceed on at least partly-independent grounds.

With respect to John’s ‘But the US Army is not a person, and US soldiers are not acting as libertarian free agents. The correct question is “Can the US government justly compel US citizens to finance, and US soldiers to implement, policies aimed at preventing rights violations in Somalia and elsewhere”.’– one might agree with all that, and still not hold that any injustice is being done *with respect to Somalia and Somalis*, which is really the heart of Randy’s disagreement with some of the libertarian isolationists.

John: Not bad! You’d have gotten full credit, though, had you managed to work Hayek into the conversation – CliffsNotes: The rest of the world is full of distributed information which is obscure to US planners, and which US intervention (central planning on the global scale) destroys. Each intervention creates the problems which, by the logic of the interventionists, requires the next, larget intervention.

Barnett’s strange hypothetical about individual soldiers who just happen to be in the neighborhood and pitch in on what appears to be their own initiative seems to have precisely no connection with the situation of actual soldiers or the organizations they serve. One must, indeed, look elsewhere for a libertarian guide to the dilemma.

I mentioned this in a comment to Gene Healy’s post on the same topic, but it seems worth mentioning again: Barnett also fails to address the issue of the rights of innocent bystanders who get caught in the crossfires of war.

The injustice done to Somalis, Iraqis, etc. by US foreign interventions consists in:

1. large numbers of them “accidentally” being killed in the course of said interventions (I use scare quotes because people who initiate wars know perfectly well that lots of innocent bystanders are going to be killed as a result);

2. the rule of the subsequent occupation force, which is inevitably arbitrary and often despotic, even if well-intentioned.

Now, such violations must in some cases be justified, lest we rule out even defensive actions. But surely a decent respect for individual rights– not to mention a pragmatic consideration of the likelihood of abuse– demands that they be limited to cases of pressing necessity, i.e. self-defense against an actual or imminent attack.

I certainly don’t see how a libertarian can justify them as “humanitarian”. Arguments of the “yeah, but Saddam was worse” type cut no ice here: after all, others’ failure to respect individual rights does not relieve you of your obligation to do so.

There’s no one libertarian political philosophy to be underde terminate. There are many, founded on many different principles, They wouldn’t be coherent on this issue, (which is actually their hardest problem, and which they evade as glibly as possible.)

Four years ago, I heard Harold Browne, their presidential candidate bloviate about how his defense policy would be to offer large bounties on the heads of any leaders of any attack on the USA. He thought that would be plenty to deter nuclear attacks. Pathetic in hindsight, isn’t it. Bounties didn’t work for Saddam or Bin Laden.

Libertarian isolationism is another glib answer, and about as realistic as pretending there are no externalities.

Libertarian attempts to weigh injustice versus benefits (for interventions and any other action) flounder on the fact that they abhor any ways of comparing utilities except through market interactions. Instead they tend to pick favorable examples and use a lot of hand waving to claim non-intervention has to be better. WWII is one counterexample that destructively tests nonintervention ideology.

I emailed Professor Barnett about this very post, and so I will just repost my response in it’s entirety.

I think your Volokh post makes sense amongst the things that you
include, but I tend to believe you left one-elephant-in-the-room
undiscussed, which doesn’t seem to be TOO big a deal pragmatically
but IS a huge deal (though perhaps not a dealbreaker) in
liberterian first: who pays? If taxing is not simply a “bad thing”
but a theft of the state on the private rights of its citizenships,
that humanitarian military intervention seems like it is as much a
theft of those that opposed the intervention (or, more to the
point, paying for the intervention) than, say, universal health
care.

Now, granted, I am not a liberterian, but I also think some of my
own views on war show the more pragmatic problems with your
hypothesis.  I supported Afghanistan (on defense principles), after
some thought opposed Iraq (because I believe the harm outweighed the
good), and would support a military intervention in Sudan (as I did
Rwanda), once again for humanitarian purposes.

But I think there’s a fair argument that against any non-Western
democracy, you’re going to be able to use your principles to avoid
dealing with any serious issues of liberterianism.  For instance,
Iraq certainly was NOT, at the time of invasion, the most abusive
regime in terms of total harm done or in terms of
harm-done-per-individual; now was it, on any measure of effort, the
best uses of our resources in ending abusive regimes.  In fact,
arguments have been made that more rights were violated by our
actions in Iraq than by keeping Saddam in power (see
https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001994.html).  While this can
be debated, it of course could be debated for China, North Korea,
Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, even Russia….which means that, without
additional principles, it is possible that your formulation, other
than showing that there may be no explicit theory of liberterianism
in foreign policy, has absolutely no safeguards and allows all wars
to be treated as pro-liberterian first principles.

I think this is entirely a means vs. ends problem, in two senses:

1. Libertarians (NOT anarcho-capitalists) believe in strong police enforcement of property rights, but their belief in these property rights places many restrictions on HOW the police can engage in this strong enforcement. The same would apply to war. You can believe that a war against a dictator is justified – indeed, the very fact that he is a dictator makes it justified – but also believe in major restrictions on how that war is fought. Thus, a privately owned power plant may be an illegitimate target, while actual military bases would undoubtedly be legitimate. It may be that a libertarian legitimate war is IMPOSSIBLE to fight on PRACTICAL grounds.

2. There are two types of libertarianism: “pure” deontological libertarianism and consequentialist libertarianism. Libertarianism is a political “stance” that can be justified on either grounds. The comments in this post apply only to the deontologists. A consequentialist libertarian could easily conclude (wrongly, in this case, but legitimately) that a war against a dictator, although inevitably resulting in the deaths of innocents, will advance the overall cause of freedom.

Indeed, expanding on point 2, it seems to me that the problem discussed here is not with libertarianism, but with deontology. Not only could a consequentialist libertarian easily support a war against a dictator, but ANY deontologist would have to oppose any modern war except to repel invasion. Is there ANY deontological moral code that would authorize the intentional killing of innocent workers at power plants?

testing

Testing 2.

Why libertarianism has a lot to say about foreign policy