- 22 Jan 2014 11:05
#14356162
A society without toil. A society of robotic property.
This will be a long post, I'll summarize the rambling to bullet points if requested...
Libertarians occupy a position on war which is pretty much purely defensive. Yet, on the personal scale, this extends to defending others who have had aggression initiated against them.
There's a good reason for this difference; war in defense of foreign powers with different governmental structures and cultures is a very complex prospect that cannot be boiled down in such a way that is equivalent to going over and bashing a neighbor who is bullying a random innocent individual. On the scale of entire cultures, belief in the idea of "innocents" ends after the point of ignorance of children. Random adult persons cultured in a society that fosters certain political beliefs, are full of potential as actors, and are unvetted, rather than innocent.
The idea of assumed innocence is pretty much the same as believing that any deviations from your own values are small enough not to be points of conflict in their own right. As we've seen repeatedly in wars, this is not the case. Rarely do nations intervening across the world find goodies to defend from baddies. Syria is the perfect example, and the perfect quagmire; a disgusting dictator being pitted against a melting pot, in which a not-trivial amount want an Islamic theocracy. Iraq is another good example, but at a slower pace. None the less, that country is now pulling itself apart.
The complexity and inherent moral ambiguity created when intervening in wars with politically distant actors mirrors the idea of one-size-fits-all regulation by bureaucrats who are distant from all the local problems they are attempting to solve with one sweeping regulatory absolute. It is this, more than the NAP, that makes libertarians anti-war, I think.
But if that is the case, then we can construct wars that are more just than others, on the basis of them being more simple and locally accessible in terms of the allegiances of the competing actors. Ironically, perhaps, one such war would seem to my mind to be the American Civil War.
Many libertarians (especially of the "conservatarian" stripe) although they oppose slavery as a concept seem to oppose the (libertarian compliant) authority to make those engaging in slaving stop, even more. As such, they tend to treat the Civil War as mainly a war about centralizing authority, and couch their opposition to slavery in the idea that the slaves should have rose up in the newly seceded Confederate States, and then they'd have the best of both worlds; small government, and freed slaves expressing their self-ownership. They are of course arguing here for not helping the slaves in their fight by intervening, but sitting on the sidelines as if that were more libertarian, while shouting inspiring slogans.
The thing about this is that most libertarian moral theory, especially where explicitly reliant on the NAP, allows you to not only defend yourself, but others who are being aggressed against and having their self-ownership abridged. So, again we get back to the question of whether we can determine whether there were clear morally wrong actors in the Confederate States, and whether we understand the political climate of the place we are attempting to intervene in. The Confederate States were, as it happens, violating libertarian theory at its very most basic level by oppressing not merely an extension of the self-ownership principle into the products of the persons it was oppressing, but their very self-ownership itself. The political culture was if divided, understandable by the North. Furthermore, those being oppressed did not possess ideologies en mass which revolved around installing a new kind of equally bad tyranny after they were freed, at least not relative to the level of authority worship already in vogue.
So with that, the stage is set to ask why the CS's right to secede was paramount before the slaves rights to self-ownership? The right to politically secede, though important, is simply an extension of the more basic moral principle the seceders were violating.
It seems to me that I have found the most libertarian war by my criteria, and the irony is it's the one libertarians tend to fall uneasily on the wrong side of. The North, though a bad actor in what kind of authority it wished to maintain, most certainly had the morally legitimate (according to libertarian morality) right to smash the slavers until they stopped being slavers. Far from being rebels fighting against federal tyranny, the Confederate States enshrined a worse tyranny in their very constitutions. The North was a tyrannical power too, but if there was ever a clear case of evil and much much more evil, it is here, and in a way that cuts to the core of libertarian founding principles.
Libertarians occupy a position on war which is pretty much purely defensive. Yet, on the personal scale, this extends to defending others who have had aggression initiated against them.
There's a good reason for this difference; war in defense of foreign powers with different governmental structures and cultures is a very complex prospect that cannot be boiled down in such a way that is equivalent to going over and bashing a neighbor who is bullying a random innocent individual. On the scale of entire cultures, belief in the idea of "innocents" ends after the point of ignorance of children. Random adult persons cultured in a society that fosters certain political beliefs, are full of potential as actors, and are unvetted, rather than innocent.
The idea of assumed innocence is pretty much the same as believing that any deviations from your own values are small enough not to be points of conflict in their own right. As we've seen repeatedly in wars, this is not the case. Rarely do nations intervening across the world find goodies to defend from baddies. Syria is the perfect example, and the perfect quagmire; a disgusting dictator being pitted against a melting pot, in which a not-trivial amount want an Islamic theocracy. Iraq is another good example, but at a slower pace. None the less, that country is now pulling itself apart.
The complexity and inherent moral ambiguity created when intervening in wars with politically distant actors mirrors the idea of one-size-fits-all regulation by bureaucrats who are distant from all the local problems they are attempting to solve with one sweeping regulatory absolute. It is this, more than the NAP, that makes libertarians anti-war, I think.
But if that is the case, then we can construct wars that are more just than others, on the basis of them being more simple and locally accessible in terms of the allegiances of the competing actors. Ironically, perhaps, one such war would seem to my mind to be the American Civil War.
Many libertarians (especially of the "conservatarian" stripe) although they oppose slavery as a concept seem to oppose the (libertarian compliant) authority to make those engaging in slaving stop, even more. As such, they tend to treat the Civil War as mainly a war about centralizing authority, and couch their opposition to slavery in the idea that the slaves should have rose up in the newly seceded Confederate States, and then they'd have the best of both worlds; small government, and freed slaves expressing their self-ownership. They are of course arguing here for not helping the slaves in their fight by intervening, but sitting on the sidelines as if that were more libertarian, while shouting inspiring slogans.
The thing about this is that most libertarian moral theory, especially where explicitly reliant on the NAP, allows you to not only defend yourself, but others who are being aggressed against and having their self-ownership abridged. So, again we get back to the question of whether we can determine whether there were clear morally wrong actors in the Confederate States, and whether we understand the political climate of the place we are attempting to intervene in. The Confederate States were, as it happens, violating libertarian theory at its very most basic level by oppressing not merely an extension of the self-ownership principle into the products of the persons it was oppressing, but their very self-ownership itself. The political culture was if divided, understandable by the North. Furthermore, those being oppressed did not possess ideologies en mass which revolved around installing a new kind of equally bad tyranny after they were freed, at least not relative to the level of authority worship already in vogue.
So with that, the stage is set to ask why the CS's right to secede was paramount before the slaves rights to self-ownership? The right to politically secede, though important, is simply an extension of the more basic moral principle the seceders were violating.
It seems to me that I have found the most libertarian war by my criteria, and the irony is it's the one libertarians tend to fall uneasily on the wrong side of. The North, though a bad actor in what kind of authority it wished to maintain, most certainly had the morally legitimate (according to libertarian morality) right to smash the slavers until they stopped being slavers. Far from being rebels fighting against federal tyranny, the Confederate States enshrined a worse tyranny in their very constitutions. The North was a tyrannical power too, but if there was ever a clear case of evil and much much more evil, it is here, and in a way that cuts to the core of libertarian founding principles.
A society without toil. A society of robotic property.
- By Saeko
- By wat0n