You wrote: “The question is are we going to be concerned about winning a philosophical argument or are we going to be concerned about some American soldier in Iraq being blown up by a roadside bomb in 2010?”

Dude, this is a ridiculous cheap shot and you know it. I could just as easily go around telling those, such as Gordon, who attempt to give philosophical defenses of voting for Ron Paul, “The question is are we going to be concerned about winning a philosophical argument or are we going to be concerned about some woman dying in a back alley in 2010?” or “The question is are we going to be concerned about winning a philosophical argument or are we going to be concerned about some immigrant dying of dehydration in the Arizona desert in 2010?” Your argument cuts as much ice as either of these, which is to say, none at all. All the parties to this debate are arguing over issues that have real and grave human consequences in the near term.

As for radical feminist literature and action, Roderick and I discuss that at length in our essay, so it would be more productive to engage with what we said there. For what it’s worth, there’s nothing inherently unlibertarian about broad sexual harassment policies, free daycare or employer paid maternity leave (or, what radical feminists are more likely to advocate, radical transformation of the economy away from an employer-employee model and towards ownership of the means of production by working women and men). These ideas may be wise or foolish for other reasons, but libertarianism as such only comes up when we turn to the question of whether these kind of measures are to be attained through voluntary means or by means of the State. As Roderick and I explain in the essay, while there are many radical feminists who advocate State action, there are many others who distrust State action for practical reasons or even reject it entirely on principle.

You write: “I also recall prominent radical feminists arguing that sex between a man and a woman in marriage was a form of rape.”

Can you specify which radical feminist(s) you’re referring to and where she or they say this? (If you’re referring to Andrea Dworkin’s discussion of martial rape laws in Right-Wing Women, that’s not actually an accurate statement of her conclusion, but in any case you should know that even if it were, she was discussing the ramifications of a legal context has mercifully ceased to exist since the book was written.)

As for the radical feminist menace to the safety of men’s wing-wangs, the legitimacy of violence depends on whether it is aggressive or defensive. Given the radical feminist emphasis on the prevalence of violence against women, I’d suggest that even if that talk were meant literally rather than rhetorically, that wouldn’t necessarily be an objection to it.

Aeon,

But is the standard being employed here “Which President did the least damage,” or “Which President did the least damage in proportion to the damage he could have inflicted if he’d had a mind to?” Because if it’s the relative standard rather than the absolute standard, then it seems like the Cold War Presidents are the obvious winners. After all, any one of them could have incinerated most of the world’s population by authorizing a full-scale nuclear war, if he’d had a mind to. But none of them did, in the end. Can’t say that makes me too enthusiastic about the “winners,” though.

Sure, but the whole enterprise comes off a bit like “What’s the best method of public execution to be killed by?” If I had to be executed, and they gave me the choice, I suppose I would probably choose a well-sharpened guillotine over hanging, firing squad, electric chair, lethal injection, gas chamber, burning at the stake, crucifixion, etc. But it seems silly or even morbid to dignify the enterprise with time, attention, or the title of finding the “best” way to get yourself killed.

http://dulceetdecorumest.org/

“The purpose of this weblog is to abolish war, immediately, completely, and forever.

“That’s a tall order for a website, particularly a small website run by somebody with little money and no influence in the halls of government. But my aim is not to make a change in the halls of government by exercising political influence or force; it is to make a change in the culture by undermining the moral legitimacy that the self-appointed heroes of the War Party claim for themselves. My aims are not constructive, but rather destructive: I hope to do my part towards knocking out the cultural supports that prop up the War Party with the whole force and ideological backing of the State. My end is schism and discord: that is, to agitate against, and encourage people to turn against, any civil, religious, or political institution that tolerate, sustain, or practice wholesale slaughter. The War Party is sustained largely because of a vast array of parades, pageants, celebrations, memorials, re-enactments, pop histories, and holidays, all devoted to inculcating the myth that warfare is something glorious, that the warlords are great leaders of heroic efforts, and that the engines of war are worth exulting over and regarding with awe, rather than horror. Many people accept that myth, and many more are bullied into playing along with it, because they are insulated from the reality of war, and because serious and thoroughgoing anti-war sentiment doesn’t have enough of a cultural presence to overcome the official ideology of the Warfare State. I hope to undermine that; I want people to look on the carrion fields with loathing, and to turn that loathing against everything that produced them. …

“… The means my ends will be anti-war cultural artefacts, both historical and contemporary. I don’t just mean agitprop by anti-war activists; I also mean artefacts that record the experiences of ordinary soldiers and civilians in times of war. This is not the place to go for commentary, analysis, or debate on current events; more or less none of the content will even be original to this website. It will be a place for facts, and for things, and for people. My intent is simply to remember our history (including the history we are making right now), and in so doing to strip the mask from off the War Party, revealing not glory, not honor, not heroism, but rather a grinning Death’s Head underneath.”

E. Simon,

I don’t know what you mean by my “contingent position.” Contingent on what?

My position is that warfare as it is conducted in the modern world is almost never justifiable because the circumstances under which you can excusably kill innocent people in the course of protecting yourself from an unrelated menace are very limited, and the number that you can excusably kill is “almost none.” For a more detailed discussion, see Roderick Long’s essay Thinking Our Anger. I’d be glad to discuss the issue at more length if you want, but I’d like to suggest that it’s far less urgent for me to spell out the details of my view than it is for you to spell out the details of yours, because I’m not trying to defend a fucking war as proportional retaliation.

I should note that I am no more ignorant of the doctrine of double effect than you are. I’ve nowhere suggested that civilians were deliberately targeted by the IDF (how would I know?). What I am suggesting is one of the traditional conditions on the doctrine of double effect: that to be excusable, the evils inflicted must not be disproportionate to the goods achieved. So just pointing to double effect does not absolve you of the intellectual responsibility of spelling out how many people can be (regrettably but expectedly) killed and maimed in the course of retaliating against unrelated menaces, and how much killing and maiming of the innocent would make the policy intolerable for reasons of proportionality.

I’ve accused you of dodging the issue because if you do not have an answer to that question, then you can have absolutely no moral basis for endorsing the war. If you don’t even have a ballpark estimate of what a tolerable civilian body count is, then you have no idea whether or not the killing and maiming of innocents has gone beyond the limits of proportional self-defense. And if you don’t know that then you don’t know whether or not the war is legitimate self-defense or a massacre. If you treat the question as some higher mystery beyond your ken, then you have thereby admitted that you have no idea whatever whether justice demands that the IDF continue or that it relent.

If, however, you profess not to be able to answer the question, but then turn around and continue supporting the war, particularly with polysyllabic hand-waving at pacifying abstractions such as “collateral damage” and “appropriately disincentivizing,” then what I have to conclude is that you are quite satisfied with the level of killing, burning, bombing, and maiming being inflicted on innocents, but that you’d rather not say so because it would sound too brutal coming from your lips. If that’s not so, then you could refute my claims by actually coming out and giving us some idea of what you consider acceptable rather than setting the question aside unanswered and trying to describe what happens to men, women, and children when bombs are rained down on their neighborhoods, when their homes or farms are destroyed, when their flesh is burnt by fire or torn up by sharpnel or crushed by rubble, and when their lives are snuffed out or forever marked by permanent wounds, with words like “cost” and “disincentivize” and “collateral damage.” If you want to defend war, then there it is: defend it. And if you don’t like Orwell being quoted at you, then stop writing about real violence being inflicted daily against real people as if it were nothing more than some debit on an accountants’ ledger somewhere in the Ministry of War.

As for States and their boundaries: I am an anarchist, so I don’t give a damn about which side of the bloody line in the sand people are on. But even if I were not an anarchist, it would hardly change my position on this question. However many special obligations a State may have towards its subjects over and above the obligations it has towards the subjects of other States, it is no more entitled to go out and slaughter alien subjects than it is its own subjects. If you accept the legitimacy of the State then you might very well think that governments have more of a duty to rescue their own subjects than to rescue the subjects of other governments from a pre-existing danger; but that does precisely nothing to license going out and actively killing or maiming innocent subjects of other governments in the process of trying to rescue your own subjects from an unrelated menace.

Max,

Not everybody in those “building complexes” has any particular choice about who stays there. For example, how exactly are the scores of children who have been killed in the bombing and shelling of residential targets to blame for who is or is not quartered in their homes, or riding with them in their cars? What did families vacationing on a beach do to deserve getting shelled by the IDF? What attempts are the IDF making to limit the killing and maiming of unrelated third parties from bombing of houses in residential neighborhoods and rocketing of cars on civilian streets? The answer appears to be “more or less nothing,” given the massive scale of destruction to civilian infrastructure and the escalating body count in both Lebanon and Gaza. Not surprising, because aerial bombardment is not exactly a precise form of warfare and it is nearly impossible to carry it out in civilian areas without killing or maiming a lot of innocent people.

You mention, “Since, [terrorists] are not a formal group of war, which is distinguishable by uniform or location. They are difficult to attack.” But I find it hard to work up much sympathy for the IDF in spite of the difficulties the poor dears must be laboring under. If it is difficult to identify the guilty or difficult to attack them without snuffing out or ruining the lives of lots of innocent people, then you had bloody well be much more cautious about doing the attacking.

The current war on Lebanon, let us remember, started over the death or capture of some 10 Israeli soldiers in combat. Even if one stipulates to the claim that the Hizbollah attack on the soldiers was an act of aggression (something I’m willing to stipulate to, but others might not be), that does not give the IDF a blank check to use any level of retaliatory violence they please in order to try to stop future attacks. Not even the subsequent murder of about 10 Israeli civilians following the beginning of the onslaught does that. So far about 280 Lebanese people, most of them civilians, have now been killed in the bombardment and Israel shows no signs of letting up. It seems to me that on absolutely any plausible understanding of the principle of proportionality this is morally criminal, whether or not the cause for which the IDF is going to war is a just cause. Just causes neither justify nor excuse wholesale slaughter of unrelated third parties, whether they are killed as the result of direct targeting (terrorism) or whether they are killed as an expected and accepted side-effect of attacking some unrelated target (so-called “collateral damage”).

Incidentally, pointing to Dresden (or the terror bombing of World War II more broadly) won’t get you very far. I consider the firebombing of Dresden to have been an indefensible massacre and a war crime of the first order.

As for sympathy, well, it’s not about sympathy. While there are some people in Lebanon who celebrated Hizbollah’s attacks and some people in Gaza who celebrated Hamas’s attacks, there are also many who were disgusted by them, but people are being killed quite independently of what they thought. And no matter how unsympathetic I may be towards people who “celebrate” such attacks, merely celebrating an evil is not a hanging crime.

E. Simon: And yet, the use of Israel’s military will prevent Hizbullah from intentionally causing the loss of similarly incalculably valuable Israeli lives.

I’m aware that this is one of the professed aims of the attacks. However, you’ve merely dodged the question rather than answering it. Just how many of those “incalculably valuable” lives of innocent third parties in Lebanon is the IDF entitled to snuff out or ruin in the process of trying to to protect the “incalculably valuable” lives of innocent Israelis? What are acceptable ratios here in your view, and what would amount to disproportionate violence? Fewer civilians killed than were saved by the attack? One-for-one? Two or three Lebanese civilians killed for every Israeli civilian saved? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? Or is any body count at all acceptable?

I should note that I’m asking you this, not because I’m naive about what modern warfare involves, but rather because I’m all too familiar with what it involves, and I happen to think that the nature of modern warfare makes concerns about proportionality of violence very important. Given the fact that some 235 people, most of them civilians, and including scores of children, have been killed in Lebanon so far in retaliation for the death or capture of ten soldiers, along with the murder of about ten civilians in various attacks over the course of the conflict, it seems particularly urgent in this conflict.

E. Simon: But Israel is not responsible for Lebanon’s failures in necessitating that most unfortunate decision.

No, but neither are unrelated third parties who happen to live in Lebanon responsible for Hizbollah’s crimes. Whatever causes the Israeli government may have for going to war, it is certainly not entitled to use any means necessary to achieve its war aims, and if there is no way to carry those objectives out without inflicting wildly disproportionate suffering on innocent third parties in the process, then its objectives had jolly well better be left unachieved.

E. Simon: There are costs, no doubt. But the costs of not thusly, and appropriately disincentivizing against murder are much riskier, given the total analysis.

Please. Do you think I give a fuck about “appropriately disincentivizing against murder”? The issue here is how many innocent people you can maim or kill in the process of protecting yourself or others against being maimed or killed by some unrelated menace. This is life and death that we are talking about, and passing it off as “costs” of diddling with incentive structures is frankly obscene.

George Orwell: In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

“While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.”

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

(from Politics and the English Language)

E. Simon:

And just how many unrelated third parties do you think the IDF can legitimately kill or maim in the process of retaliating against “Nasrallah and his supporters”?

“But rights,even natural rights, are not packed into one’s suitcase and transported from country to country, especially while breaking the law. Distasteful as it may be, and to the extent they’re honored, natural rights are protected, recognized, and practiced under the laws and mores of the State, they are not free floating, trans border entities, …”

Pardon? Of course they are. Part of the concept of a natural right is that it INHERES IN THE INDIVIDUAL wherever she may be, and under whatever conditions; they do NOT derive from the constitution of this or that state to which she may be subject at any particular time. It is precisely for this reason that they are described as “natural,” not conventional, civil, or political, rights. If you want to devise a theory of something else that you call “rights,” which governments other than the one that claims a particular subject’s allegiance are not bound to respect, then you can do so, but you certainly have no basis for confusing the concept of natural rights with whatever it is you’re on about.

“It lends itself to the dilution of adherence, gratitude, and loyalty to the land they have, [temporarily?] chosen, …”

You say that like it’s a bad thing.

I happen think that the revolutionary implications of the natural rights doctrine is one of its chief virtues, not one of its vices. Loyalty and gratitude must be earned; they don’t just spring up out of the soil. And neither any actually existing State nor any self-appointed representatives of a blood-and-soil ambiguous-collective DESERVE one bit of adherance or loyalty, let alone of gratitude, if they go around invading the natural rights of people who have done no violence to person or property.

David,

Here’s an example from around when the Passion came out:

“‘YOU’RE GOING to have to go on record. The Holocaust happened, right?’ Peggy Noonan asks of Mel Gibson in the Reader’s Digest for March.

Gibson: ‘I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. He worked in a concentration camp in France. Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century, 20 million people died in the Soviet Union.’”

The phrase “The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives, especially when followed by the gratuitous change of subject to the horrors of Marxist-Leninism in the 20th century, minimizes and obscures the nature of the mass murder of Jews under the Nazi regime. It is also typical of the kind of weaseling routinely engaged in by Holocaust denial outfits such as the IHR (in which something called the “Holocaust” is sometimes admitted to have happened, so long as the word “Holocaust” is revised to mean something other than what everyone else means when they say “the Holocaust”).

It is possible that Gibson could utter something like this without intending to go on record as denying or minimizing the Holocaust, but given the conversational context of the question (including accusations of anti-Semitism and the controversy over his father’s clearly Holocaust-denying views), Gibson certainly should have known that such a weasel-worded statement would be understood as Holocaust denial, and the fault for the misinterpretation, if it is a misinterpretation, lies on him, not on the reader.

David Bernstein has a good discussion at Volokh Conspiracy ( http://tinyurl.com/z74wt ).