Should libertarians more readily condone violence?
Sorry for my long absence. I’ve been occupied with a more pressing agenda lately.
The question I pose in the title is meant to sound odd. Though the spectrum of libertarianism is wide and varied, libertarians generally try to work a strong commitment to non-violence into their theoretical framework somewhere, e.g., the non-aggression principle. This is perhaps largely because they take moral issue with the violence that is implicit in almost any state action. Given that, theoretical elegance would then favor a broadly anti-violence stance. However, it seems to me that a lot of libertarian arguments against violence in certain circumstances very readily suggest arguments for violence in different ones, ones in which we (or at least I) rarely hear libertarians call for the use of force.
For example, one of the more common and (I think) effective ways to argue for more libertarian policies is to use thought experiments about pre-state societies to probe at our moral intuitions about when and to what degree one person should be able to infringe on the autonomy of another. As it turns out, it’s very difficult to square our intuitions about what kinds of things a “government” should be able to do in a 5-person society with the things that everybody accepts that modern governments should be able to do. For a good, made-for-broad-consumption example of this, check out You Can Always Leave. For a perhaps meatier approach, see The Problem of Political Authority. (I admit I haven’t read this yet, but the reviews I’ve read suggest it exhibits this approach.) I think these kinds of arguments exhibit a good approach to moral reasoning: straightforward argument from fundamental moral intuitions and relatively uncontroversial empirical premises. (See this.) However, whenever I consider such arguments, as much as they prime my intuitions to condemn the initiation of force, they also prime my intuitions to condone the use of defensive force.
To see what I mean, suppose that Lumpy and Grumpy both live on a desert island and have been subsisting there for a long time without any problems, generally staying out of the other’s ways. One day, Lumpy discovers that if you burn a certain flower on the island and inhale the smoke, you feel really good for a few hours. For those hours, he completely forgets that there isn’t anyone on the island for him to have sex with and that the constant sun exposure is almost certainly brewing melanomas all over his body. Even though this activity has no direct effect on Grumpy, Grumpy decides that he doesn’t like this. He thinks it’s wrong to purposely distract yourself from your troubles through the use of chemicals. (Well, at least not through those that you inhale; washing away your troubles with fermented coconut drink is perfectly Christian!) Hence, Grumpy starts raiding Lumpy’s hut at night, holding Lumpy at spearpoint while he rifles through his things, destroying any demon plants he might find. Anytime he finds those plants, he confines Lumpy to a small cage for an entire month. Eventually, Lumpy goes to more extreme measures to hide his plant, so naturally Grumpy has to start performing body cavity checks during each of these raids. No choice!
Most people would say Grumpy’s behavior here is immoral, and you can imagine a libertarian posing a situation like this and asking why Grumpy should be condemned while the modern state should be allowed to carry out the drug war. Of course there would be a lot of debate about why this is or isn’t a good analogy. I won’t go into that here. What I’m more interested in is our moral intuitions about Lumpy’s response. What if, after much pleading and debate, Grumpy refuses to relent? Personally, I’m perfectly happy with Lumpy smashing Grumpy’s head in with a rock while he sleeps, and I suspect most others would be, too. My question for libertarians is, if the above (or something like it) is indeed a good analogy for modern drug prohibition, what is the correlate for smashing Grumpy’s head, and shouldn’t it be morally permissible? And if you change the example a little bit, beyond being permissible, shouldn’t libertarians consider some such violence obligatory? Or, if not obligatory, at least supererogatory? After all, what if it’s not Lumpy who is being oppressed? What if instead it’s Susie? Susie also lives on the island and is a 14-year-old girl with a chronic pain condition. Wouldn’t it be morally obligatory or praiseworthy for Lumpy to kill Grumpy in her defense?
Here’s another example. Recently, I watched an excerpt of a debate between Bryan Caplan and Jan Ting over the question of Is War Ever Justified?, which is also linked to from this post. You should watch it. The next paragraph won’t make sense if you don’t! (Aaaaaand my other reader closes the browser tab. Oh well.)
Done? Good.
Now, it probably won’t come as much of a surprise to you that I found Caplan’s argument pretty formidable, as I think would a lot of libertarians. What I noted about Caplan’s argument, though, is how important war’s toll on innocent lives is to it. The fact that war results in the killing of innocent people seems to do all of the “heavy lifting” on our moral intuitions. To borrow the example from the debate, I sympathize strongly with Caplan’s skepticism about whether war with Japan in WWII was clearly the right choice. However, if we imagine that instead of an atomic bomb the US had possessed an amazing piece of technology that would have allowed us to press a button and instantly kill only Japan’s warmongering military and political leaders, my pacifism completely evaporates. Now, of course Caplan could make a different argument against war that assumes that no innocent people will die, but it’s pretty clear that it will almost certainly be a much weaker one. And so, it seems his best argument against things like violent resistance against DEA agents must also be much weaker than his arguments against even those wars most widely believed to be justified, e.g., the Civil War and WWII.
These questions seem like really natural ones to ask, so perhaps there is a lot of libertarian literature dealing with them and I’m just ignorant. If not, why not? Are my intuitions just wrong? Something else I’m missing?