Some years ago I read some interesting ideas about the standards of the Victorian gentleman. Superficially they were very strict. There were things gentlemen just ‘did not do’, but the superficial inflexibility hid a deep pragmatism. Sometimes one has to break standards in order to keep them. One must have ‘rough men’ on the borders and in the dangerous lands. One must sometimes compromise oneself or commit a crime against ones deepest beliefs and suffer a lifetime of remorse so that others may blissfully exist ‘within the code’.
This is why we need the Anti-war Libertarians. They are there to remind us that war is in general a bad thing; it is something which often expands state power. They provide us with an unbending code against which we must judge our actions.
Libertarians are thinking beings, not robotic ideologues. There are times when we must knowingly do things we find distasteful simply because it is the world we live in or because an action protects something we hold dear. The existence of a code, is important. Without one each new action defines a new central position which is no position at all.
We Samizdatistas are the rough men and women at the borders of Libertopia, ready and willing to sacrifice our souls that others may sleep peacefully with their more strict adherence to gentlemanly libertarian behavior.
I think Christopher Hitchens made an important point when he said the idea of a libertarian foreign policy (or libertarian perspective on the events of 1914 and 1848 etc.) was very difficult for him to imagine. I think the lack of any clear prescription on this issue could even be said to go as far as rendering libertarianism something slightly less than a complete political ideology. You could look at someone’s tax plans and determine they are not a libertarian, but I am not sure you could do that with someone’s foreign policy, whatever it might be.
Hmm. This seems real questionable. It probably violates Kant’s Universality Principle.
The standards exist to further some axiomatic goal — in our case, freedom of action for everybody. If in a particular case the standards do not advance the axiomatic goal, they need to be adjusted. This is quite different from “breaking the standards in order to keep them.” (This reminds me of “burning the village in order to save it.”)
“Standards” are like a computer program — you feed in a given set of circumstances and possible courses of action, and the standards tell you which course of action has the highest probability of advancing the ultimate goal(s).
In the case of the present war/cleanup, the standards tell us that a State which is busy grinding up its own constitution as well as the wealth and liberty of its citizens shouldn’t be trusted with governing its own territory, much less anyone elses.
If, in the final analysis, Iraq is fully cleaned up and total freedom is increased, then the preceeding assessment will have been shown to be incorrect, and the logic underlying the standards will have to be corrected.
We shall see.
It occurs to me that it might be possible to establish a sufficiently clean State, one which was so well contained that it posed no threat to its citizens. Such a state might then be used to crush other tyrannical regimes without running a high risk of itself becoming corrupted.
My claim is that no such states currently exist.
The state you propose would have, basically, the power to conquer the entire world (regardless of its own moral purity in restraining itself). That is not a well contained state (and would attract the worst elements on Earth to be part of it).
As an anti-war libertarian, I disagree. I consider the approaches that would have been “ethically correct” also *the right tools for the task*. You cannot create freedom by abrogating freedom. By doing so you just declare it provisional to your whim – ie: you declare yourself to be the new slaveowner in town.
It seems to me that there are utopian libertarians, who seek liberty for all humans, and–sorry, I’m at a loss for a better term–statist libertarians, who seek to advance liberties within their own state, but may have a pragmatic or utilitarian view of other states.
I’ll come right out and say that I’m the latter. My first priority is to advance liberties within my own state (Canada), and to try to protect it from external forces (including supranational entities) that might threaten our liberties from the outside. So I’m inclined toward a goal such as T.J. Madison’s clean state (above).
I agree with Scott Cattanach (also above) that following this view alone could lead to a world-conquering state, or at least a state that attempts such. And so I like very much the idea that we need anti-war libertarians, as an opposition on foreign policy.
But I’m not ready to become one. It’s impossible to work with moral issues without getting your hands dirty. Any attempt at moral purity is doomed to failure because morality just doesn’t work that way; nothing in the real world is all-white or all-black. Strict pacifism or anti-warism are important points of view, but too purist for me.
Tedd, I propose “global” and “local.” “Utopian” and “statist” are waaay too loaded.
Plus, global/local has the virtues (a) of analogy to mathematical optimization and (b) of playing off the tranzi-meme of “think globally, act locally.”
I am against the Iraq Attack. I am a libertarian? Does that make me an “anti-war libertarian”? Does this make me a gentleman, living within the code, while the rough, anti-hero libertarians are out there on the frontiers, keeping the world safe for civilization?
Let’s not go overboard, romanticizing our positions, shall we? In the event of an actual attack, I would be the first to say that we should respond in kind, and with militarily superior force, so as to disable the known attackers, and deter future attacks by others. I favored retaliation against Osama and his 9/11 gang. What I didn’t favor was the complete takeover of Afghanistan to do it. I agree that Saddam is a Very Bad Guy ™, and if he posed a credible threat or dared to attack us, I wouldn’t hesitate to put him down hard, but I don’t agree that the way to deal with him, or any of his thug peers around the world, is pre-emptive first-strike and invasion.
Do you want to understand how utterly self-defeating it is for a so-called libertarian to support pre-emptive, first-strike war? Think: libertarians say government is a necessary evil BECAUSE we need it to protect us against aggression. To the extent that more aggression occurs at any level of social organization, a level of government is needed there to mitigate that aggression. Now what happens when governments themselves become the aggressors? Do we not need — will people not demand — a world government with teeth to keep rogue states in check? And won’t a world government, vast in power and global in scope, serve only to further reduce true individual freedom?
To the extent that people govern themselves at the individual level — eschewing aggression — there is little or no need for an actual government to regulate their affairs. The same seems to be true of nations. If the trendy doctrine will be routine, pre-emptive first strike, this will increase demand for world government to unprecedented levels. Libertarians who buy into this kind of mental garbage play right into the hands of those who would ultimately constrain the freedom of everyone on the planet. The ONLY way for us to avoid that fate, it seems to me, is if we can rein our governments in, so that they use military power ONLY self-defensively, in response to proven imminent danger or obvious attack. Those nations that abandon the moral high ground will show themselves to be in need of tough, global government.
Suppose that global government does arise to keep the unruly states in line. The way things are going, it may appear that the US/UK alliance will establish such a government, but we’ll be talking about the US and UK in name only, by then. That’s the inevitable outcome of bartering away one’s soul.
To the extent that “antiwar” “libertarians” regularly end up effectively supporting the worse criminals, there is no way they can be described as “principled”.
They are only blind to the crimes of any government but the U. S., which is never justifiable.
One can understand that American libertarians who know nothing of the outside world and naturally hate their own government, could be this blind — although a dose of intellectual dishonesty is necessary to ignore the necessity to know the other government in order to decide which is the worse one.
But others? They have no excuse at all.
Hunden
1. How are the anti-war libertarians giving “support” to Saddam merely because they oppose U.S. Federal Government military intervention in Iraq?
2. I agree that Saddam’s regime was a vicious dictatorship which the U.S. Federal Government is not (at least not in the ways in which Saddam’s regime is). But I don’t see how that bears on the arguments. Surely whether or not it is a good idea to invade Iraq doesn’t depend upon a relative comparison of the moral qualities of those who make up the U.S. Federal Government and those who make up the Bathist regime in Iraq?
Cydonia
What does that make conservatives who are now interventionists?
What does it make libertarians who now favor going to war to spread democratic, and indeed libertarian values, to the middle east?
Though I fall strongly on the pro-war side, and living in D.C. I fall strongly on the pre-emptive strike side of things for personal reasons, I appreciate anti-war libertarians. I think it’s one of the principled positions one can hold. In contrast, I cannot comprehend how a so-called liberal can be anti-war — the universality of human rights is a central piety of modern liberals (neo-libs?) and should be grounds enough for a war, if human rights are indeed as important as the libs insist.
I think it’s important to look past the labels and look to what people actually believe and do.
Precisely because going to war involves violating rights. What, do you seriously believe that it is possible to wage a war without killing innocent civilians? Do you seriously believe that a state can go to war without conscripting its own citizen’s property into the effort? If rights are important, don’t violate them.
James Merritt:
Sorry, I should have been more clear about my use of the term “anti-war libertarian.” I meant a libertarian (self-described) who is opposed to war, period, i.e. a pacifist libertarian. So, no, you’re not an anti-war libertarian, as I meant the term.
If the trendy doctrine will be routine, pre-emptive first strike, this will increase demand for world government to unprecedented levels.
A fair point. But it’s a slippery-slope argument. I can support a pre-emptive strike in one case but oppose it in another, and I can support pre-emptive strikes in principle but oppose world government.
Your argument against pre-emptive strikes would be stronger if it addressed the principle justification for them, which is that, in an age of WMD, waiting for someone else to strike first may be an unnacceptable risk. Being a libertarian in no way prevents me from recognizing defense as the first duty of my government. I’m willing to listen to the argument that Iraq didn’t represent a credible first-strike risk to the U.S. or it’s allies (though I’m skeptical about it), but an argument against pre-emptive strikes that ignores the issue of WMD is incomplete.