We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Part II of III
What would be the requirements of a libertarian just war? Libertarianism permits the killing of another if it is an act of reasonable self-defence. Nothing in libertarianism precludes the possibility of a collectively exercised right to self-defence. This has been accepted by most libertarians as one of the few valid functions of a ‘night-watchman’ state. As long as every individual in a society agreed to be defended by a state and the state acted against only those individuals who were actual aggressors, e.g. an invading army, on what grounds could a libertarian object?
Given that it is not practically possible to fulfil the above conditions, especially the first one, it seems to me that many of those who engage in the debate about war on Iraq for genuine and morally inspired reasons are trying to choose between two evils. Their side in the debate usually depends on which of the two evils seems more morally unacceptable to them. There are also those who find it impossible to choose, their instincts oscillating between the need for self-defence and protection, and fear of compromising their fundamental principles by condoning killing of innocent civilians. One of those is Chris Newman whose comment captures the agony of such moral choice.
The statement ‘as long as harming innocents is not the objective, if a given use of force is justified then innocent bystanders are often just a regrettable consequence’ is based on the acceptance of the doctrine of double effect. It is a useful rule, often used in moral dilemmas that can be summed up as “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”. An act with both good and bad effects is morally permissible if and only if the following conditions are all met:
- The action itself is not forbidden by a moral rule.
- Only the good effect is intended.
- The bad effect is proportional to the good.
- The bad effect is not a direct means to the good effect (e.g. bombing cities to demoralise a population and hence hasten a war’s end).
And since Michael Walzer’s influential book Just and Unjust Wars (1971), in the context of war it is common to see added the following condition:
- Actions are taken to minimise the foreseeable bad effects, even if this means accepting an increased risk to one’s own combatants (e.g. one’s own soldiers)
In modern warfare the principle of the double effect is frequently applicable. In waging a just war a nation may launch an air attack on an important military objective of the enemy even though a comparatively small number of non-combatants are killed. This evil effect can be compensated for by the great benefit gained through the destruction of the target. This would not be true if the number of non-combatants slain in the attack were out of proportion to the benefits gained, as is clear from the fourth condition. Furthermore, if the direct purpose of the attack were to kill a large number of non-combatants, so that the morale of the enemy would be broken down and they would sue for peace, the attack would be immoral because the third condition for the lawful use of the principle would not be fulfilled. It would be a case of the use of a bad means to obtain a good end.
Chris Newman takes a similar route but ends up with a different point and in the utilitarian camp:
“…our moral calculus has at least three variables: the importance of the objective, the efficacy of a given type of force in achieving that objective, and the cost in innocent lives of using that type of force. Presumably, for any given values of the first two variables, there will be a point at which the value of the third becomes too high, so that the action cannot be justified…”
There appears to be a conflict between a moral justification for waging a just war and a strategic aspect of it. But does exploiting the advantage of superior military capabilities amount to using incommensurate or disproportionate force? It doesn’t because force is defined by effect on the enemy including the civilians, not by the amount of firepower. You can use superior fighting force and technology in order to shorten the war and ensure you destroy enemy fighting forces rather than civilians. → Continue reading: Just war and libertarians
Part I of III
Arguments over war in Iraq and its justification, recently fuelled by emotions running high over the first anniversary of the Sept 11th attacks, have been plaguing the libertarian camp. Samizdata decided to summarise its contributors’ positions on war in general and Iraq in particular and received some interesting responses. There are many strands of arguments for and against war on Iraq and it is impossible to even mention them all in one posting. There are several interesting points I wish to add to or stress in the debate.
One of the objections to Perry’s position on the destruction of tyranny and libertarian opposition to it comes from Julian Morrison (a comment on the above linked article):
There are many ways and means of destroying tyranny, but the only ones that are “libertarianly correct” are those which do not involve harm to innocents. Assassination is far preferable, for example, to war – and hand-to-hand war is preferable to blanket bombing. There exists no right to murder, regardless of how convenient it might be.
Here justification of war is reduced to the effects it may have on the civilian population or innocents. This makes opposition to tyranny impossible. For example, makes it impossible to fight anybody ruthless enough to use human hostages.
Ignoring for a moment the other important conditions of just war, which I will deal with in Part II, I want to look at Nazism and communism as examples of historical tyrannies that were accepted as evil to be justifiably eliminated. Opposing Nazism by force was justified as self-defence and the war against Hitler and Germany has been accepted as a just war. The WWII experience proves appeasement wrong on both grounds – moral (fails in self-defence) as well as strategic or practical (gives the enemy opportunity to accumulate weapons and pose a greater threat).
Although during WWII the distinction between a dictator and the nation he lead was blurred, the Cold War made abundantly clear that there is a difference between a dictator waging a war with the country behind him and a dictator with the civilian population being at his mercy and under the same threat as his opponents.
Perry mentions Czechoslovakia as a case in point and I will merely add to his voice. During 1968 Prague Spring civil resistance the Warsaw pact used military threat on the civilian population and in the early days of the Velvet Revolution of 1989 there was in our minds a real threat that the communist government would use the army on the demonstrators. How could an attack by the West make the situation any worse in a country where the state is ready to use ‘military force’ (not just law enforcement) on its citizens? Whether I die being run over by a T-55, shot by AK-47 or by a stray ‘Western’ bomb does not make much difference to me as an individual in such situation. In fact, young and idealistic as I was in those days, I’d probably prefer the latter, given that being killed during a ‘Western liberation’ would at least serve a purpose I agreed with, whereas being killed by communists wouldn’t.
We know Saddam has used military force and chemical weapons on Kurds and will not hesitate to use such force again… Those who oppose war on Iraq on ‘moral grounds’ will find it hard to wriggle out of agreeing that it was right for the West to fight Nazism and wrong to leave the nations of Eastern Europe under communism. The problem is that Nazism and communism are obviously wrong ex-post and the current debate is about determining the moral and strategic position ex-ante.
To be continued…
Doctrine of Just war and libertarians (Part II)
Strategic considerations for attack on Iraq (Part III)
You may be aware that there are blogs for every corner of the human mind. Well, almost every corner, since the thought of blogs for some of the corners of the human mind makes me shudder. It is also axiomatic that people who came up with the weblog technology will have their own corner (or basement) of the blogosphere where their blog about blogging, that is, meta-blog to their heart’s content.
Although I am not a techie by any stretch of imagination (thank you, you may stop now!), I am very interested in technology and so the following post of a techie blogger, Jon Udell of John Udell’s Radio Blog caught my eye:
Every web user engages daily in this process of information refinement. Many share their results – that is, URLs with annotations – in the form of FYI (“For Your Information”) emails. Some also share their results on personal “links” pages. And a few employ a new tactic called weblogging. A weblog is really just another kind of annotated links page, typically in the form of a daily Web diary that filters and reacts to Web information flow according to personal and/or professional interests.
The current weblog craze is, in all likelihood, a passing fad. If you visit Blogger, a portal site that aggregates over 1000 weblogs, you may conclude that this form of communication has already suffered the same fate that befell the Usenet. One “blogger” (short for “weblogger”) recently complained that although there was once a hope that the weblog could become a powerful tool for reaching out and connecting with the world, it has become a powerful tool for self-gratification and self-absorption.
Two years later, he makes a similar argument:
Despite massive uptake of blogging in certain circles, I don’t see evidence that it has made much of a dent in scientific communities. The same is true, I think, in many other professions. Blogging seems huge to those of us engaged in it, and in important ways it is. Culturally, it represents a style of communication that is genuinely new. Technically, it may be the most popular application of XML. But blogging is still a drop in the ocean of email. It’s far from ubiquitous, and at the ETech conference, both Sam Ruby and I were surprised to see how little-understood RSS feeds were even among experienced bloggers.
Whether Jon Udell is right about the overall impact of blogging is not central to my point here, which is simple – understanding the technical side of information generation and dissemination opens more opportunities to generate and disseminate them as well as maximises the use of existing channels.
Underlying the weblogging movement are two technological trends – RSS headline syndication>1 and pushbutton Web publishing. I have recently come across the squabble over RSS formats that from a fifty-thousand-foot perspective looks like a tempest in a teapot. Neither the simplicity of RSS .9x nor the extensibility of RSS 1.0 matters to someone who has yet to experience the ‘virtuous cycle’ that is only recently being discovered by so many – for example, Don Box:
While spending my evening with RSS, I had two epiphanies:
1. The connection between blogging and RSS is deep.
2. WS-IL>2 is the closest we have to RSS in the web service space.
With respect to the first observation, the cycle looks something like this:
while (true) {
ScanRSSFeeds();
RantAboutStuffYouSawFromRSSFeeds();
ExposeYourRantsViaRSS();
}
What an amazingly virtuous cycle!
Before you start thinking of how sad spending one’s evening with RSS is and of any stupid puns on epiphanies or of any of the usual responses that the non-techies fall upon to compensate for their lack of understanding of squiggles, a much more important perspective springs to mind.
The above is worth noting, as technology is making difference to those who find themselves opposing the mainstream or standing aside from it. Communication via the internet, email, weblogs and other channels to come has transformed and will continue to transform the private and public discourse. Many bloggers have discovered the joy of sharing with the world ideas whose expression had, until recently, been confined to conversations over a pint of beer or a cup of latte. Not that there is a cause for rejoicing every time such idea is liberated and this freedom has its price (for a more precise total scroll down the left hand bar here for Havens of Fluorescent Idiocy). I do believe that we have merely scratched the surface of what blogging could do in terms of generating information and, more importantly, in terms of its aggregation.
On a more immediate note, RSS has to do with information filtering and as such is relevant to the blogoshpere. Various blog digests have been set up and disappeared, trying to find an intelligent way of sorting out the data and passing on information that is of interest. Preferences akin to mail filters would allow the user to filter only the data in which they are interested onto the page, from the entire pool of data. For example, a user interested in articles about “Football” would be able to set up a personalised channel that simply consisted of a filter for Football, or even for a particular team or player. Or for all references to Slashdot.org, or whatever. This would give him the largest selection of content, with the greatest degree of personalization available. Tools would be made available to simplify the process of creating these files, and to validate them, and life would be good.
I have risked boring you to tears with techie acronyms in order to get my message across – I see technology as the main tool (and a weapon, if necessary) of education, development, protection and dismantling of the modern state. If we fancy ourselves as making any impact with our arguments, campaigns, thoughts and outpourings via blogging, let’s at least explore it’s potential to the full.
Disclaimer: Those who blog purely for personal gratification and self-absorption, please ignore my rallying call. No need to spend evenings with RSS and various assorted technologies. 
Note1: RSS – a dialect of XML, a vocabulary for representing annotated links. What exactly RSS stands for is itself a subject of controversy – Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication, or John Udell’s favorite, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Note2: WS-IL – Web Services Inspection Language (WS-Inspection) 1.0
More on the environ-mental note… (David, do you put the hyphen in to emphasise the ‘mental’ in the word? Nothing gets past me!) 
The Gauteng provincial government set up a scheme, encouraging delegates to the Earth Summit (governments and environmental groups alike) to pay into a novel fund to compensate for the pollution caused by flying to South Africa, using electricity and driving around. A remarkably free-market approach – a delegate travelling from the United States, for example, would pay about $100 to offset the 10 tons of carbon dioxide emitted by flying to and staying in Johannesburg.
The fund will put the money raised into environmentally friendly schemes ranging from solar water heating to tree planting and improving energy efficiency in buildings. The contributions to the fund were voluntary and only 40,000 tons of carbon dioxide had been offset.
What the environ-mentalists forgot, perhaps, that such voluntary contributions will also act as a signal about how credible, popular or appropriately priced such fund is. For who should know better than the environ-mentalists themselves just how deranged and pointless is their way of approaching the environment and its problems.
Amazing image by www.scrofula.com (click image)
In preparation of the anniversary of 9/11, The Brains Trust have devised a Griefometer to answer the question of “just how upset should you be when disaster strikes?”, using the death of Diana as a benchmark. All in the best possible taste, of course. 
For example, the Holocaust scores 4 Dianas and 7.7 Dandos1, with the statistics of 9,000,000 dead, on average 50% cute, in a location of 80% importance. The event had 90% visual impact and the story lasted for 825 days.
Please have a go and let us know how you get on. I put in Titanic – it hardly registered…
Note 1: For those not following the UK affairs too closely, Jill Dando was the BBC Crimewatch UK presenter murdered in April 1999. She was shot in the head at close range with a 9mm semi-automatic pistol, on her doorstep. Her death caused a tremendous public response. In other words: 1 dead, on average 35% cute, in a location of 55% importance. The event had 10% visual impact and the story lasted for 7 days – death of Jill Dando scores 1.0 Dandos.
I have been reading my morning dose of news when I came across ZDNet reporting that a new law against gambling was passed in Greece. Law Number 3037, enacted at the end of July, explicitly forbids electronic games with ‘electronic mechanisms and software’ from public and private places, and people have already been fined tens of thousands of euros for playing or owning games.
It also transpires that the true meaning of the wording of the law means that anybody carrying an electronic game – even if it is just on a mobile phone – could face a hefty fine or lengthy jail sentence! According to the Greek newspaper Kathimerini,
“The police will be responsible for catching offenders, who will face fines of 5,000 to 75,000 euros (US$4,967 to US$74,506) and imprisonment of one to 12 months. The blanket ban was decided in February after the government admitted it was incapable of distinguishing innocuous video games from illegal gambling machines.”
One online report said that even watching a film on DVD – many of which contain promotional games linked to the movie – had resulted in an arrest and a 10,000-euro (US$9,934) fine.
Internet cafes are allowed to continue to operate, providing all gaming is prohibited: if a client is found to be running any sort of game, including online chess, the café owner will be fined and the place closed. The law applies equally to visitors from abroad:
“If you know these things are banned, you should not bring them in”
said the commercial attaché at the Greek Embassy in London – who declined to give her name.
Now, so many words spring to mind – most of them not suitable for a ‘family’ blog. I will restrain myself and focus my disbelief and fury on one point – the government imposes a blanket ban on games (electronic in this case presumably because it has already banned the other kind) because it is incapable of distinguishing innocuous video games from illegal gambling machines! Not only have governments been preventing people from all sort of activities, now they can’t even be bothered to find out what exactly it is they don’t want us to do! Somebody wake me up, please, I must be having a nightmare…
I do have a life. I know because I was holding on to it at 7.30am last Thursday while sliding down the tarmac unseated from my Monster bike by an act of altruism.
Well, altruism mixed with incompetence but it’s the motivation that counts. I was hit by a scooter who rammed into the back of me. Those who have seen a picture of my Ducati Monster Dark may ask why would a 900cc bike be worried about a scooter?! Well, this baby was a 400cc Piaggo weighing about 200kg (400lb)!
The cause of the collision was a cyclist who just spilled herself and her bags to the left of me and I, moved by an altruistic impulse, decided to stop. I checked the road to my left, started braking and as I was about 10 yards from the hapless cyclist, the earth moved closer and then disappeared. When I came to, there were three men peering into my face asking me whether I am OK. After I replied “No I am bloody not!”, two of them disappeared, leaving a rather peevish looking scooter rider behind to face my wrath.
The whole incident boils down to the fact that both of us were looking to help the cyclist. My brakes being far superior (the same as Formula 1) to the scooter’s caused the rider to miscalculate the braking distance. If one or both of us simply decided to ride past nothing would have happened. As it is I damaged my bike, my helmet and more importantly my knee. I have been out of action for several days and have suffered pain for no other reason than trying to do the right thing.
So here we are altruism does not pay and if I were rational, I should not repeat the same ‘mistake’ next time. However, I know if I face the same situation, I couldn’t live with myself, if I didn’t stop for a person who just had an accident. So am I irrational and therefore immoral? Balls!
I am not really interested in arguments such as that stopping to help someone is not really an act of altruism because one can do this in hope that others will stop for you when in need and belief that this needs to be generally encouraged. Or the anti-altruist classic that such an act makes me feel good (or not stopping causes negative feelings), and so my action wasn’t without self-interest. Why don’t I buy those arguments? Because it is harder to prove that an altruistic action is motivated by self-interest somewhere along the motivation chain than it is to disprove that a self-less act is just that.
I believe altruism is connected to free will. To say that all our actions are motivated by self-interest at some level smacks of determinism to me. If we are free to act, we should be able to act without the constraints of self-interest and be able to chose an act that may not bring us any direct benefit.
As things stands I hope my bike will get repaired and my knee will heal soon, so I can continue to make the world a happier place.
I love the taste of tarmac in the morning
it smells of…victory
My suspicions have been confirmed! Now I know what a large proportion of car (and van) drivers are thinking when I ride past them on my motorbike during rush hour traffic.
Adriana had a calming effect on the drivers in the traffic jam
Just because you’re sworn enemies doesn’t mean you can’t be friends, does it?
– Snibril of The Carpet People by Terry Pratchett
Although the BBC was unable to prove that government officials had hacked its system, the staff were “morally certain” it had happened. Leaving aside the meaning of “morally certain”, this is a serious matter. The way this breach of the BBC’s already dubious independence was perpetrated was that one correspondent noticed that when he wrote a script on the newsroom computer for the next news bulletin “he would be rung up by Downing Street before it was broadcast and lobbied on a point or two”. This didn’t happen just once or twice and John Simpson, the BBC’s world affairs editor, claims in his new book that the tactics were part of widespread attempts by the government to pressure the BBC and other broadcasters into more favourable coverage of its politics.
Apparently, another BBC broadcaster said the corporation knew the identity of the hacker but lacked the evidence to make a complaint. This is the bit I can’t understand, as someone has to be at the other end of the phone persuading the reporters to temper bulletins that had not yet been transmitted. My first reaction would be: “how the hell did you know what I just wrote on the newsroom computer?!” It seems a measure of how unquestioning of the government the BBC must be, if no one has challenged their big brother tactics. Or is it just ‘cos its family.
Oh, and the government officials say:
This story is utterly ridiculous, complete drivel.
But then, they would say that, wouldn’t they?
When the state watches you,
dare to stare back
“Cleanse The State With The Blood of Martyrs”, rumbled Three Yoked Oxen. Rincewind spun around and waved a finger under Three Yoked Oxen’s nose, which was as high as he could reach. “I’ll bloody well thump you if you trot out something like that one more time!” he shouted, and then grimaced at the realisation that he had just threatened a man three times heavier than he was. “Listen to me, will you? I know about people who talk about suffering for the common good. It’s never bloody them! When you hear a man shouting “Forward, brave commrades!” you’ll see he’s the one behind the bloody big rock and wearing the only really arrow-proof helmet!”
– Rincewind, the Wizard from Terry Pratchett’s Interesting Times
Absolutely, Perry, I couldn’t agree more though moral (un)ambiguity of collaborating (via commerce or otherwise) with a repressive regime was not in question at all. My point was either you condemn Yahoo! for doing business with China in the first place or boycott them all, not just Yahoo! as other global companies are guilty of the association with or assistance to the Chinese government.
The argument that Yahoo!’s measures are “analogous to Coca Cola agreeing to embed a recording device in each bottle so that the state can hear what each person is talking about whilst they sip their drink” does not fairly capture the moral charge of the comparison. Yahoo!’s business is communication, mediation and information and these are not intrinsic to Coca Cola’s business. That is, Yahoo! by the very nature of its business has to comply with the Chinese government requirements or not do any business at all. If Coca Cola company installed listening devices into its bottles, it would amount to a step beyond the one Yahoo has taken in agreeing to allow monitoring of its services de jure, so to speak, (which the Chinese officials can carry out de facto anyway).
As with Coca Cola, it is communism’s hapless victim for the most part who are able to surf the internet even in its truncated form. And they know very well (or should) what their government is capable of and will not (or should not) be using it in a way that will expose them or get them into trouble. For example, in the Cold War days dissidents knew that phones were not reliable and tried to use them ‘safely’, i.e. in a way difficult for authorities to decypher.
Again, I agree that it was wrong for Yahoo! to take that step and do prefer Microsoft’s hard headed approach (there is a first for everything!). So, boycott Yahoo! alongside those companies who in dealing with China help its officials to repress their victims instead of treating Yahoo! as the only big business without a back-bone.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
