M. Simon:

America didn’t just kill Indians. For the most part we were in a continuous state of war with them. The fact that the Indians liked to kill civilians (which was reciprocated to some extent) ought to enter into the calculation. Treaty breaking and various stupidites were done by both sides.

This is absolute nonsense on several fronts.

“America” was not a “side” in any war; it is a pair of continents. Nor were “Indians” a “side” in any war; the word describes several different independent nations of people spread out across those two continents, who have and had a bewildering variety of cultures, religions, economic systems, languages, technological levels, political constitutions, etc. etc. etc. over the course of tens of thousands of years’ worth of history, including nations that fought with white people and nations that allied with white people and nations that never met white people at all and nations that fought with or allied with each other. Talking about relations between “America” and its relations with “Indians” is precisely as historically enlightening as talking about relations between “Eurasia” and “Europeans.” Which is to say, not at all. If you want to talk about something specific (like the ethnic cleansing-cum-genocide committed against the Cherokee in Georgia, or the wars fought against the Creek or Seminole, or the wars against the Plains Indians in the late 19th century), then we can do so. I think you’ll find that each of these are quite different cases, and that some of them involved atrocities on both sides and others were little more than unilateral slaughter.

But the problem is that not only is this absolute nonsense, but also that the more specific cases you seem to want to refer to are one and all irrelevant to the point. There certainly were some wars with Indian nations in which atrocities were committed against white people by members of those nations. So what? The fact that atrocities are committed by both sides doesn’t make atrocities by either side justifiable. This is part of the ethical point being made throughout this thread: wrong is wrong no matter who, or how many, are doing it.

M. Simon, again:

And yes. Hitler loved cowboys and Indians. He patterned his camps after the camps for Indians.

That’s part of the reason why it’s not an apples-and-oranges comparison.

M. Simon, again:

So perhaps the calculation in WW2 (right or wrong) was to avoid repeating that mistake. We got to dictate the Japanese Constitution and their type of government. Something not possible without complete defeat.

…

The question in 1945 was not was Japan a current threat. It was – will they be one in the future without complete defeat. Once you pay the price for a hot war it is good to finish the job. if you can.

So do you believe that it’s OK to incinerate half a million innocent civilians, in a country that no longer poses any military threat to you, if you can make improvements to their constitution by doing so?

Can’t you think of any way of averting future wars that doesn’t involve the use of terror-bombing to kill hundreds of thousands of non-combatants?

I said a while back that, instead of sending Bob Wallace’s columns at LRC down the memory hole, a more honest way to deal with the situation would have been to leave the old columns up, and put up a note to the effect that LRC would no longer be carrying his columns for whatever reasons Lew has for not wanting to carry his columns anymore. Kinsella replied:

Kinsella: “I have seldom read more idiotic comments in my short life.”

The cheap shot reply would be to ask whether these comments were really more idiotic than “Jews will always be ostracized because of their attempts to destroy every culture that admits them.”

The higher ground reply would be to point out that Lew apparently thought that Wallace’s idiocy was embarassing enough to justify no longer carrying his columns. Given that this is the case, I wonder whether Kinsella really thinks that simply erasing the record of the old columns, without comment or explanation, is really the most honest way of dealing with the situation. For myself, I know that I don’t see much to admire in giving your past mistakes that sort of Disappearing Commisar treatment.

Joe Miller to Micha: “Why think that you need to have your consequentialist card revoked? There are good consequentialist reasons for thinking that there ought to be limits to the sorts of actions that are permitted in war. It just requires a move to indirect utilitarianism.”

Joe explains the line of argument further below: “I would argue further that, because exceptions are so rare and because the opportunities for mistakes are so great, that it’s also utility-maximizing to disallow making exceptions. That will mean giving up on some opportunities to maximize utility by breaking rules, but that loss is outweighed by eliminating all of the incorrect rule-violations.”

Well, this is one possible consequentialist ground for placing some means completely off-limits. I’m not sure it’s the most convincing one, though: at best it seems to make a case for a rule of extreme caution, not a rule of absolute prohibition; if it really makes sense to say that utility could ever outweigh the disutility of nuclear massacres, and all actions should be judged by the balance of utility over disutility that they cause, then all these constraints seem to suggest is that you should demand that people very carefully demonstrate the alleged benefits of the nuclear massacre before you let the bombs drop. But that hardly captures the intuition that a lot of people want to capture — that incinerating innocent people is categorically wrong, not just a policy that bears a very high burden of proof. Even if this objection is decisive, though, it doesn’t actually mean the end of the game for consequentialism; it just means the end of the game for utilitarianism. But not all consequentialists are utilitarians; and if you think (as G. E. Moore, for example, did) that consequences like cruelty, enmity, ugliness, etc. are great positive evils in themselves, without any reference to their effects on anyone’s utility or disutility, then you may have pretty strong grounds for condemning certain kinds of atrocities as evils in themselves (because they essentially involve some of these great evils) no matter what further effects they may have on things like pleasure-pain balances.

As I mentioned in the original post, I’m more interested in the meta-ethical issue here than the political one — not because the political one isn’t important, but rather because you need to be clear on what you’re arguing over if the argument is going to make any sense. (So accusations that Jacob was indulging in “moral relativism” are misplaced, because what he was actually arguing was precisely the opposite. The actual disagreement was either (a) over the general ethical principles that he was employing, or (b) his understanding of the specific historical case to which he was applying those principles; pretending as if he were indulging in relativism, and giving up on objective ethical principles entirely, just clouds the issue in a particularly inane way.)

However, a couple of notes.

Faré: “(1) 9/11 was not a military target at all, it had no military purpose whatsoever.”

You may be forgetting that there were actually two different targets attacked on September 11th. One, the World Trade Center, was clearly not a military target. Another, the Pentagon, clearly was a military target. (Also, of course, the attacks killed a few hundred civilians on the hijacked airplanes.) Complaints against the deliberate killing of civilians in the course of striking “non-military” targets apply to the attacks on the World Trade Center, but they don’t apply to “9/11” in general. (Of course, there may be other reasons to condemn the attack on the Pentagon while not condemning the incineration of Hiroshima. But distinctions between “military” and “non-military” targets won’t cut that ice.)

Dave: “I guess what I really object to is the finger pointing school of history where various people glean the record for ‘facts’, usually taken out of context which they then use to mislead the innocent, ignorant and score points in a debate which has nothing to do with the historical subject in question. This usually takes the form of apple and oranges comparisons such as ‘Well, how can you Americans be so indignant about up about the Nazi’s taking over Poland, Ha!, the Americans took over the Indian’s land.’ You can play that game ad nauseaum. On that basis we had no moral right to oppose the Nazi’s.”

I’m not sure at all why comparing Hitler’s war of conquest, and willingness to engage in ethnic cleansing and genocide, to the American government’s repeated wars of conquest, and willingness to engage repeatedly in ethnic cleansing and genocide against several different Indian nations over a period of a century or so, is an “apples and oranges comparison”—particularly when Hitler explicitly cited the treatment of Indians in the American West as a model for his own campaign for Lebensraum. But whether the comparison is a just one or an unjust one, I must say that I’m mystified by the claim that such comparisons issue in the claim that “we had no moral right to oppose the Nazis”. According to whom? All that follows if the American government’s treatment of Cherokees, Creeks, Sioux, Apache, etc. was morally comparable to Hitler’s treatment of Jews, Poles, Czechs, Romani, etc., then you can’t excuse one and condemn the other — they have to either both be condemned or both be excused. It doesn’t follow that the American government (far less individual American citizens) didn’t have the right to condemn the Nazis, nor does it follow that they didn’t have the right to use force to oppose them. It just means that if they are going to condemn them and advocate resistence, then they ought also condemn the American government’s comparable actions, and to endorse the Indians’ right to resist then. Consistency is the key here.

Now you might object they’re not really comparable. Fine, but then you ought to give an argument for why they’re not really comparable. Knocking down a strawman position that allegedly undermines just condemnation of, or forcible resistence to, Nazism, or Islamist terrorism, or whatever it is you happen to be concerned with at the moment, is just a distraction from the real argument.

Tom: “Not all objectives are morally equal. Killing the infidel because he’s an infidel is different than — and inferior to — defeating Japan because it posed a military threat to the U.S.”

(1) Tokyo was firebombed in March, 1945 and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were incinerated in August of the same year. Do you seriously intend to claim that Japan posed a substantial military threat to the United States in March – August 1945? If so, what in the world do you think they were about to do? If not, why do you claim that the “objective” of the bombings was to defeat a military threat to the U.S.?

(2) Micha actually nowhere claimed that all objectives are morally equal. (Even if he did, that would not be moral relativism either; it would be moral nihilism. Relativists don’t claim that no objective is better than any other; what they claim is that the question of whether one objective is morally better than another always has to be answered relative to someone’s frame of reference, and that the correct judgments can differ for different people.) All he claimed is that Truman and bin Laden are in the same moral position as far as means are concerned: if noble ends could justify Truman’s means (whether or not Truman’s ends actually were noble), then noble ends could just as easily justify bin Laden’s means (whether or not bin Laden’s ends actually were noble). And if the ends couldn’t justify bin Laden’s means, then they couldn’t justify Truman’s either. The point of raising this point is that a lot of people think that no possible end, no matter how noble or ignoble, could justify bin Laden’s means. But if they want to say that, they had better be willing to say the same thing about Truman too — and accept the logical consequences that follow.

Kennedy: “I don’t see how you can criticize LRC for punting Wallace. What reaction would satisfy you?”

Well, punting Wallace is for the best but the memory-hole treatment is not really an appropriate way to deal with embarrassing fascists. A public statement that they’d no longer be carrying Bob Wallace’s columns and the reasons for it would have been more honest.

Stefan: “How is the argument that open borders exacerbate terrorism a bigoted argument? Or the argument that since different groups can never get along, they should be separated in order to make everybody happier? Those don’t seem like bigoted arguments.”

Neither argument for immigration restrictions can succeed except on the presumption that it’s OK to use violent means to control the movement of individual foreigners, without any evidence of actual or threatened wrongdoing, in order to stop some vaguely-specified group of other foreigners from committing or threatening some vaguely-specified wrongdoing. That seems pretty bigoted to me. (It also usually requires some further forms of bigotry — e.g. the baseless idea that foreigners, as such, pose any greater threat to your safety than God-fearing Americans, or the similarly baseless idea that you can do whatever you like to innocent individual people in order to safeguard the Volkisch purity of your neighborhood. But even without these further premises, the position itself requires bigotry to justify itself.)

But Lopez is right to point out that he specifically mentioned racism, not bigotry at large. The reasons you cited are examples of reasons that are bigoted but not racist.

Brian Doss:

That’s true, there is a form of economic populism that intersects with libertarianism, though Jim is right in that this is not even remotely what Kos & Dean think of economic populism.

Worst yet, though, is that for even those on the left for whom these ideas have traction, the preferred solution (at least initially) in nearly every case is government action.

Point taken, but I’m not sure that you’re actually being entirely fair to the likes of Kos or Dean. It’s true that the understanding of “economic populism” that they have may often involve government action, but it’s not clear to me either that this is always a first resort or that interventionism is more essential to their position than populism is. So there’s a question of how to approach them: you can approach them as primarily interventionists (in which case a belligerent approach, on the grounds that what they’re doing has nothing to do with libertarianism, makes sense) or you can approach them as primarily populists who don’t understand the problems associated with interventionist means (in which case a charitable approach, based on pointing out how radical populism entails libertarianism, makes more sense). I tend toward the latter approach, since (among other things) that’s how I remember becoming convinced of libertarian arguments, and also because I think that philosophically left-liberals’ commitments to populism are usually much deeper than their commitments to government interventionism. (For similar reasons I think trying to approach the Right on similar terms is foolish—it’s a strategy not well justified by its success, and I think there are good reasons to suspect that most Rightist’s commitments to traditional orders of power run much, much deeper than any commitment to small government or free market principles.)

Kos: “The intersection of libertarianism, good government, and economic populism.”

Trent McBride: “I’m afraid the place where libertarianism and economic populism intersects could be termed an empty set.”

Well, if in your mathematical notation “an empty set” includes sets with several elements, I suppose it could be termed that. Otherwise, however, you seem to be overlooking all of the following: (1) opposition to corporate welfare, (2) opposition to the voracious crony capitalist appetites of the military-industrial complex, (3) opposition to agribusiness subsidies, (4) opposition to New London-style pillage for business gain, (5) (possibly, depending on the libertarian’s position) opposition to patent and copyright monopolies, (6) (possibly, depending on whether the libertarian has ever thought seriously about the issue or not) opposition to government-sponsored union-busting (Taft-Hartley, “right-to-work” laws, etc.), (7) (possibly, depending on whether the economic populist has ever thought seriously about the issue or not) opposition to government cartelization of industry through restrictive licensing, etc. etc. etc.

The idea that libertarianism is the economic thought of, by, and for Ebenezeer Scrooge has just got to die. It’s bad enough seeing it come from statists interested in defaming libertarianism; it’s worse when it comes from people purporting to defend it.

If you’re going to complain about something related to libertarian principle, it ought to be the alleged “intersection” of libertarianism and “good government,” since on principled libertarian theory the government which governs best, governs not at all.

Gus: “So — praise the most ruthless power in the White House for breaking the law to eliminate political oppoosition in order to help consolidate his hold on state power by punishing the wife of a man who told the truth about the government’s abuse of power, an abuse that has killed tens of thousands. Yeah, Karl Rove, defender of rights.”

According to the book of Revelation, in the coming ordeal, a servant of Satan or perhaps Satan himself will come into the world and destroy earthly tyrants as part of his rise to absolute power before the Second Coming. I mention this because I hear that Satan is a pretty bad guy, and his motives in destroying earthly tyrants will certainly be bad. But while these are good reasons to think poorly of Satan, they aren’t good reasons to cry about the trampled prerogatives of the fallen tyrants.

I mention this parable because, in the comment you are replying to, Stepp makes it quite explicit that his point is that if Rove outed a CIA agent, then he may be a real sleaze, but in this particular case what he did is, at worst, disregarding an expectation (confidentiality and support for members of a criminal conspiracy) that nobody has the right to demand be respected.

Stepp’s earlier claim that whoever did it deserves a “Libertarian Medal” is of course silly bluster. But so is your own reply, which simply substitutes a philippic against Bush and Rove in order to distract from the point being made about what CIA operatives do or do not have the right to expect — as if the sheer weight of their depravity could somehow make Plame’s complaint legitimate. You then follow up this red herring with a broadside against the intellectual “sophistication” of “anarchists, right or left”.

Come on, Gus. You’re smarter than that.

Macker: I have a question. Is this a lame attempt to paint those who are against open borders as racists? Are you trying to for instance smear Hoppe indirectly?

I believe the point is that Bob Wallace is a racist moron. This point is demonstrated by his statements to the effect of “Look at me, I am a racist moron. Here’s some unreconstructed anti-Semitism to go along with it, free of charge.”

The connection with Hans-Hermann Hoppe exists, as far as I can tell, only in your fevered imagination.

Macker: I guess Lopez thinks this style of argumentation is cute. I think it’s a vile ad hominem attack

The fallacy of argumentum ad hominem is committed when, and only when, irrelevant information about the person holding a position is used to dismiss the position without argument. Quoting idiotic racist statements that Wallace made in order to demonstrate that Wallace is an idiotic racist is not an argumentum ad hominem. It’s a straightforward argument from empirical evidence.

If Lopez were arguing, “Closed borders is a doctrine held by racists; therefore it is false” he would be using an ad hominem argument.

But he’s not arguing that.

drumgurl: “It’s possible that my perception of Republicans was wrong when I was a teen. But doesn’t it seem like things have gotten worse since 2000? Or did Republicans just spew small government rhetoric because Clinton was in charge? If so, I guess I fell for it.”

Well, I definitely remember a shift but I think it was probably earlier: certain members of the Republican leadership (e.g. Gingrich, Dole) were never anything other than opportunists, and the ideological foot soldiers’ focus seemed to shift heavily from any kind of principled opposition to big government to pure Clinton hatred somewhere around 1996 or 1997. (The Dole presidential campaign, for example, put about as much of an emphasis on smaller government as a convention of education bureaucrats.) By 2000 W. had made it pretty clear that support for the welfare state would be a key part of the electoral strategy and after 9/11/2001, rabid support for the State pretty clearly became the defining feature of the American Right.

On the other hand, it’s worth wondering how seriously committed Republicans ever were to smaller government, even back around 1994. I mean, yes, they asked for lower taxes, less federal welfare, and less federal control over education. But I remember that other big rallying cries included the push to expand State power in (1) cracking down on immigration, (2) harsher criminal approaches to victimless “crimes” such as drug use and homelessness, and (3) prohibiting abortion wherever possible. So there were small government elements involved but it also seems like there were substantial elements of the movement calling for a harsher, bigger police state when it could be directed against social “undesirables.” (I suspect because the Republican upswing in 1994 had little to do with small-government principles and a lot to do with the politics of white male rage: that is, substituting stick-based statism for carrot-based statism.)

Eric: “By the way Red, George H.W. Bush is what is typically referred to as a paleo-conservative (i.e. pre-Reagan, pre the original neo-cons).”

Well, no, he’s not. H. W. was a dyed-in-the-wool, realist / internationalist, establishment conservative, committed to some mild rollbacks of the welfare state and regulation along with a mildly pro-trade economic policy and a belligerent foreign policy allegedly based on realpolitik rather than ideological crusades. He’s much more like, say, Bill Buckley (who, like H. W., is widely despised by paleos) or Henry Kissinger. Paleoconservatives—such as Pat Buchanan, and the folks at The American Conservative—are often opposed to international free trade agreements, and sharply opposed to foreign interventions. (They call themselves “paleos” not just because they oppose the “neos,” but also because they think they hark back to the Old Right of the 1930s and 1940s, which opposed the U.S.’s entry into World War II; they also, as it happens, had their first major political break over establishment conservatism when Buchanan led a vocal opposition against H. W.’s war on Iraq.) So H.W. is properly neither a paleo (who are isolationists) nor a neo (who are idealist internationalists); he was just a jerk for his own reasons.

Robert: “My point is this: government is a convenient tool—used by various groups—to suppress ‘the enemy’, while promulgating ‘our’ agenda. I say a pox on all their houses. The state ought to be neutral…or non-existent.”

Since there is no such thing as a neutral government (any state requires coercively diverting resources from voluntary agreements at some point or another), this seems to entail (by a disjunctive syllogism) that the state ought to be non-existent. I don’t have a problem with that, but I wonder if you’re willing to draw the conclusion also. If not, you may want to reconsider the premises.

drumgurl: “I had to attend college my first year on the sly just to avoid severe beatings (or at least get them less often).”

Stephen: “I was born in a town of 5,000 people in farming country in Illinois. As you grow older, I think that you will find that your parents truly cared for you.”

By giving her severe beatings and trying to stop her from attending college?

Stephen: “Please take my advice, honey.”

She’s not your “honey.” Do you address male bloggers you’ve never met as “sweetcakes?”

Stephen: “My parents were a lot like yours and they were great people.”

You have absolutely no clue what her parents were like. Judging from the statements in this thread, in fact, it seems like there may be good reason to believe you’re positively mistaken about what they were like.

You condescending twit.