Pacifism Defended

I think the big problem with your theory is that it assumes the probability that you experience a threat of violence, and hence the expected amount of harm from capitulating, is exogenous.

However, if your pacifist position were widely known, you could expect every bully around to take advantage of you.

So it is disingenuous to calculate the cost-benefit of capitulating in a single conflict like WWI. Rather, you have to compare long term effect of different strategies.

Of course, there’s been a lot of work on such evolutionarily stable strategies. And as far as I know, unconditional capitulation isn’t one of them.

If you have an repeated game model that showed the superiority of your strategy, I would love a pointer.

I think this chain demonstrates the difference between ex post and ex ante reasoning.

Obviously Brian is right that ex post, there will be less suffering in the particular instance if you surrender immediately. But “always surrender” is not a very inspiring ex ante rule for discouraging future aggression.

The best way to win a game of chicken is to tear off your steering wheel and throw it out the window. Nations don’t resist invaders because they are trying to minimize losses ex post. They resist because they had already committed to resisting ex ante, in order to deter aggression in the first place.

However, if your pacifist position were widely known, you could expect every bully around to take advantage of you.

Exactly. If a nation embraced Caplan’s pacifist stance it should expect to be overrun by it’s enemies. Caplan’s strategy may be the “morally superior” one (I’ll just accept this as true rather than argue against it), but it’s also the strategy that will get those who follow it at best the subject of severe abuse, or everyone killed at worse.

So it is disingenuous to calculate the cost-benefit of capitulating in a single conflict like WWI. Rather, you have to compare long term effect of different strategies.

Why not use WWII as an example? If the Caplan strategy were used, then most if not all the Jews in Europe would be dead. Actually Gandhi advocated Jewish pacifism in the face of genocide IIRC. Which, again, may be the “morally superior” position, but it is also the position of a group which has allowed itself to be wiped out.

Is Caplan maybe just testing us so we all come to the conclusion that Nature does not support the human sense of right and wrong? What I mean is, pacifism may be “morally correct” but obviously Nature does not reward such a strategy.

Or maybe this is a test so we all accept that working within the confines of Nature is how we must actually live our lives. We may want pacifism to be morally superior, but if we are to survive and flourish then we must confine our moral judgments to within the boundaries nature has set.

‘Actually Gandhi advocated Jewish pacifism in the face of genocide IIRC. Which, again, may be the “morally superior” position, but it is also the position of a group which has allowed itself to be wiped out.’

Then its not morally superior but is the position of death and destruction. The evil would like nothing better than for their victims to not fight back.

All of three of your premises are off base, because you refer to the “war” in total costs, rather than from an individual country or group’s standpoint. Some wars have highly certain costs, particularly the ones where the enemy’s primary objective is to kill you. And, I think it’s correct to say the “war” has little long run benefit (in fact, virtually all are a net cost), but one side may have a net benefit if they win (or, at least less of a net cost than if they lose). Therefore, war is probably best framed as a prisoner’s dilemma, as economists often do.

The cooperative solution is clearly the “best” solution (i.e. everyone is a peaceable pacifist). But “cooperating” or being a pacifist when the others are “not cooperating” and attacking you will cost you. With pacifism, you face this cost with certainty (e.g. when the Germans vowed to kill all Jews) rather than fighting back and having some probability that you live. Both sides often act on what they see as their self interest (which is often off-base, as you point out, so we have way too many wars because of miscalculation), and arrive at negative sum outcome.

Properly framed, if a war is a prisoner’s dilemma, and you vow to be a “cooperative” pacifist, then that may simply spell your death. Sometimes, it doesn’t mean your death (like when conquerers just want to take over pieces of land or resources…so pacifists will have the make that judgment case by case), but in many cases it does (as the other commenters point out, that was the case for the Jews during WWII). But simply saying that the “optimal” solution lies in the “cooperative” pacifist square is not a good argument for being a pacifist! Would you tell the prisoner not to confess?

So, I am on board with you when you say peace is the best solution. And, war/pacifism will probably even be less costly than war/war. But you lose me when you seem to suggest pacifism as a dominant strategy. That is, in order for you to fully justify pacifism to an economist, you have to figure out a way to justify to the prisoner in the prisoner’s dilemma not to confess.

I don’t know if WWI is a good example. Visiting France and Belgium is giving me a different perspective on it to reading predominantly British and NZ history books. If the local museums are right, the Germans were indeed committing a whole bunch of atrocities against civilians in occupied areas. What is the basis for the belief that it would have been better for a country to unilaterally surrender?

And Japan became fascist even though it was on the winning side of WWI so I’m not so confident that things would have worked out for the better in the long run either.

We have to remember that Bryan is specifically talking about situations where the response to organized injustice is county vs. country warfare. For analytical/ blogging purposes, he is intentionally leaving a lot of response options off the table. Whenever extremes are used, there is a risk of coming across as absurd.

If he added responses such as a focused police action or a bribing scheme, then the analysis would come across sounder. We could then talk about the moral agency problems inherent in country vs. country warfare. That would be a more analytically rigorous path to take. But, I suspect it’s not blog friendly. (Two swipes down on the iPad is my limit.)

For those who think Bryan is just against big state wars, remember that he favors individuals running away when attacked. Always.

As others have noted, all the literature on the Prisoner’s Dilemma indicates that unilateral pacifism is not a stable scenario for pacifists in a world with even a few bullies and predators.

Moreover, to the extent that Caplan does not succeed in creating universal pacifism but merely weakening “our side’s” resolve in a threatening situation (again see WW2 or bin Laden’s reaction to the US running post Mogadishu) I blame him for some of the harm caused by the subsequent conflict.

Since he seems to deny such responsibility and thinks of morality only in terms of active harms while attributing secondary costs to warmakers but not secondary harms to peaceniks I’m content to say that his position is neither tenable, nor moral, nor even intellectually fair. And if he insists on his odd definition of morality, so be it. I sign up for the immorals and the Might Makes Right folks.

One question worth thinking about is the evolutionary stability of various strategies. If we focus only at the margin in our current world, it seems clearly better for a country like Luxembourg in 2011 to be pacifist, but how much of that is free riding?

The ability of states with aggressive goals and means like Nazi Gremany and the Soviet Union to gain strength over time is directly related to the way peer countries respond to them.

History is full of leaders who sought to advance through conquest. The fact that in 2011 such leaders have to consider that sometimes the US intervenes (as it did, for example, in the 1991 Gulf War) almost certainly diminishes the frequency with which such conquerers gain enough power to pose a global threat.

Unlike operations against small groups within a nation (as anti-terror campaigns usually are), security guarantees aren’t likely to shift the demand curve for crossing the guarantor. They aren’t free. I would model them as concentrating the losses from aggression into tail risk from a major conflict. Unlike minor wars, though, they don’t create reasons for 3rd parties to oppose the guarantor (e.g. Brazil didn’t arm against the US because it deployed troops to protect West Germany against the Soviets). Still, security guarantees prevent the scenario where an aggressive power grows over time because of its aggression.

Let’s imagine that we could have war according to the rules of medieval chivalry (even though we know that in practice these were usually honored in the breach): soldiers only attacked other soldiers, women and children were strictly to be left alone, peasants stayed with the land, etc, etc.

It’s still a pretty grim business. But I think one can make a case that Western civilization could never have developed without it, as it formed a major part of the evolutionary pressure that forced European governments into competence over the period of say 800 – 1800.

As a consequentialist libertarian, I don’t see a problem with a system that allows for a certain amount of war as long as the overall effect on civilization is positive. In fact, I would see prohibiting it as immoral.

Let me hasten to add that there is nothing in the foregoing that would justify current-day American adventurism.

I can’t really find anything that I disagree with in Bryan’s post. I don’t have the right to decide if innocent people should die in my defense. Nobody has the right to steal my money to defend themselves. The world would be a better place if citizens rejected government and rejected their governments foolish military adventures.

@J Storrs Hall:
As a consequentialist libertarian, I don’t see a problem with a system that allows for a certain amount of war as long as the overall effect on civilization is positive.

I have a hard time coming up with any examples of war where the overall effect on civilization is positive.

I have a hard time coming up with any examples of war where the overall effect on civilization is positive.

Part of the problem here is in thinking of ‘war’ as something you can either choose to do or not-do. Then you do indeed get results like: ‘WWII was bad for civilization! Golly, why did we do it!’

But that’s not the actual choice usually faced by anyone. Or, at most, it’s a statement one needs to direct towards Hitler. (Which, good luck with that.) In the WWII example, you can’t gauge the ‘effect on civilization’ of ‘doing WWII’ vs ‘not doing WWII’, to be doing anything meaningful you have to consider fighting back against and stopping Hitler vs. not doing so.

Note, in both options you had ‘war’ – there’s no ‘not-war’ option. It’s just that in the latter case you would have surrendered the war sooner. In any event, the idea that resisting and stopping Hitler was salutary for civilization is not even all that controversial or hard to defend, even if you think it’s not a slam-dunk.

@Sonic Charmer:

WWII was almost a direct result of the outcome of WWI and the treaty of Versailles. There’s a pretty good chance Hitler could not have rose to power without the crushing, desperate economic conditions imposed on Germany by the Allies and their demand for reparations. WWI was a stalemate before the United States decided to join. Seems to me like WWII is one of the best historical arguments for non-intervention there is.

darjen,

You’re not saying – at least, not convincingly – that WWII should not have been fought (from Allies’ side; remember, whether there was going to be some war had already been decided in the affirmative, by people like Hitler). Instead, you, like Bryan, are saying that it ‘could have been avoided’, if some other historical contingencies (decades prior), i.e. ‘WWI’, had not obtained.

That’s all well and good as a counterfactual historical thought experiment but has little bearing on an actual person actually living and holding authority at the time of Hitler and charged with deciding what if anything to do. He wasn’t faced with some other contingency, he was faced with that one. And even if the ‘could have been avoided’ claim is true (I am sympathetic to it), it’s not an argument against Allies waging WWII in the first place (it’s an argument against waging WWI).

Also, it’s a game that has no beginning. History did not begin with World War I. Undoubtedly one can find plenty of analysis tracing WWI’s roots to something else one chooses to cite/blame – misguided Victorian chivalry, or whatever. It really only depends on how far back you wish to trace the line (Napoleonic wars? Enlightenment? fall of Roman Empire?). All of history is like this so I don’t quite understand this sleight of hand attempt in choosing to draw the line at WWI and saying that it somehow proves all wars hence have bad outcomes. Although obviously such analysis has a long tradition tracing back almost to the close of WWI itself, ‘lost generation’ writing, etc.

It’s not irrelevant. Actually, there is nothing that could be more relevant. The unintended consequences of entering WWI have everything to do with the cause of WWII. You can’t tell me that WWII should have been fought on its own merits. WWII is inseparably connected to WWI.

Presumably humans are capable of learning from their past mistakes. And WWI was one of the biggest pointless mistakes of the past century. The sooner we learn this, the better. Nationalistic government must eventually be wiped out if we want to prevent any more world wars from happening. I’m not saying there would no longer be any conflict or war. But there certainly would be fewer global wars.

Ok, I’ll take a shot. Regarding your 3 points:

1. I don’t value all lives at $5M. I value “good people’s” lives at $5M. But “evil” people are valued at substantially less, and usually negative. [From your comments on this post, it sounds as if you agree]. Furthermore, I view an enemy’s friends as the approximately the enemy. For example, I don’t value German civilians killed during WWII at anywhere near $5M. Those are people who gave Hitler power and then did not try to stop him. They are essentially the enemy. The fact that they don’t wear uniforms does not mean they are my friends. Ditto German (private) property.

To summarize my objection to #1, the value of the damage done in war is substantially lower than you claim once you account for the fact that the damage I do to the enemy and those who support him are valued (by me) at very little.

2. The long-run benefits of war are substantial! What would have been the amount of lost output if Germany and Japan had won WWII? Even if we value each of the 4m axis civilian deaths at your $5m per (which I’ve already stated, I disagree with), that’s only $20 trillion. Wouldn’t a world run by German and Japanese dictators have experienced far more than that in lost growth, even now (which is “only” 70 years later; there’s still a lot more time to come)?

Or given the state of China (especially up until ~10 years ago), wouldn’t it have been worth more lives to try to stop communism there?

And then there’s the fact that generally violent dictatorships are not necessarily just going to stop trying to conquer people once they’ve conquered you. If you let them conquer you because the cost of fighting them is too high, then once they do, why are you so sure you won’t get forced to kill others (or killed resisting)?

So to summarize my objection to #2, the benefits of war are generally far higher than you assume.

I have no problem with your #3. I agree that the benefits must greatly exceed the costs. We simply disagree what those numbers are.

Even Bryan’s attempts to link more “just” wars to unjust wars (e.g. WWII and WWI) miss the standard economic point that decisions occur at the margin.

Who cares if WWII wouldn’t have come about if there had been no WWI? At the margin, weakness in the face of Hitler (and arguably disarming the US) encouraged the attacks in the 1930s.

If you want to play consequentialist, we can argue that civilization and trade itself led to wars.

After all if all humans were content to live as isolated pacifist hunter gatherer families then no conflicts would ever have started! There, see? I’ve used the Caplan arguments to show commerce led to wars. (Insert exploration of the new world, the desire for settled agriculture, etc.)

Bah. This is my last post on this. It’s too silly for words. I only hope Caplan never faces a world where his choices affect his immediate family in ways more terrifying than running away from ghetto thugs.

Thanks for taking the time to reply and now for my rebuttal:

“‘Unite and join an army’ always sounds good. But what exactly is this army going to do? Judging from virtually every army around, it’s going to recklessly endanger large numbers of innocent bystanders. And what are the odds its actions actually improve matters, rather than provoking reprisals and worse? My complaint is that proponents of war ‘hope for the best’ rather than facing these hard questions.”
I would rather risk large numbers of innocent civilians to defend myself against an invading army than to simply yield and hope for the best. Just because John thinks that the best solution to an oncoming army is to simply yield does not mean I will respect that decision. Sometimes fire must be fought with fire.

“And I say that most of these wars were themselves caused by earlier rejection of pacifism. To repeat, consider World War I. Any major power that swallowed its pride could have averted not just the horrors of World War I, but the subsequent rise of Communism, Nazism, World War II, and more.”
However, the past cannot be undone and we cannot live in the past wishing that had someone only done x then war could have been prevented. The initial conditions must be taken for granted so speaking how a different course of action could have changed them is nothing less than wishful thinking. Even if previous instances of war could have been preventable does not mean that instances now or in the future can be.

Even if WWI was folly and a necessary condition for the rise of both Bolshevism and Nazism, it does not follow that future wars involving both are illegitimate. How is that a relevant fact when the Red Army is invading Warsaw in 1920? Even the fact that the Polish-Soviet War was mostly the result of Polish aggression is still not something that will influence the morality of standing against the Bolsheviks at that point in time. The same is true in WWII, was the only moral decision available for the British government after Germany declared war on Poland was to go “This could have all been prevented if the Great War were avoided?”

Now I shall move to your premises:

“1. The immediate costs of war are clearly awful.”
True.

“2. The long-run benefits of war are highly uncertain.”
Both for the good and for the bad. In the explication of your premise:
“ Some wars – most obviously the Napoleonic Wars and World War II – at least arguably deserve credit for decades of subsequent peace.  But many other wars – like the French Revolution and World War I – just sowed the seeds for new and greater horrors.  You could say, “Fine, let’s only fight wars with big long-run benefits.”  In practice, however, it’s very difficult to predict a war’s long-run consequences.  One of the great lessons of Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment is that foreign policy experts are much more certain of their predictions than they have any right to be.”
you are one-sided since you do not mention that somethings the long-run benefits may be better than expected. I would say that the long-run benefits of WW2 were better than expected since the war stopped what would have been the eventual extermination of much of the non-German Eastern European population. Here, I must answer a potential critique that Nazi extermination policies were the result of WW2 and would not have to occur otherwise with the fact that there was a logic to Nazi racial policies that slowly built-up to the death camps (supporting this is Saul Friedländer’s research in Nazi racial policies) and Nazi plans made before the war to populate Eastern Europe with German colonists implying that the native population would have not been either removed or exterminated. Yes, the policies for extermination would have surely been different, but they would have had largely the same effect.

“3.For a war to be morally justified, its long-run benefits have to be substantially larger than its short-run costs.”
To be blunt, I do not think there is a sound concept here. The reason is not only is the entire idea that morality is nothing but a calculus or profit-and-cost extremely problematic (the utility monster being one troubling instance), but it begs the question who is the accountant that determines the moral worth of a war? Like it or not there is only one possible accountant, God, and I don’t see any reports about divine tabulations being given to the world, so God cannot be your judge.

Another problem, though not a necessary part of your argument even though it does display problems with it, is your suggestion that a just war would have a 5:1 profit-to-loss ratio. I think that this is completely arbitrary, but I will use it to get either an unacceptable position or a contradiction (I’ll let the readers choose which they prefer):

To start off, I will take as self-evident that the individual will be the only judge of the potential profit-and-loss of his actions. Ergo, using Caplan’s suggestion, in order for an individual to justly participate in a war there must believe that the war will have a 5:1 profit-to-loss ratio.

Let us assume that an invading army, the Black Horde, invades the free lands of Caplania. Before their invasion, the Black Horde has promised that they will only kill blonde-haired members of the Caplanian population and, using census-data gathered there, showed that they are only 1:10 of the population and own only 1:20 of the nation’s wealth. All non-blonde-haired citizens of Caplania will remain unmolested.

Now we have two individuals, one a black-haired citizen of this land and another a blonde-haired. For the black-haired citizen it is clear that not fighting the Black Horde would result in a loss ration definitely less than 1:5 since only 1:10 of the population will die and 1:20 of wealth destroyed while more would probably be killed and destroyed if he were to join an army to fight against the Black Horde. However, the blonde-haired citizen is in quite a conundrum and there are two ways he could go about deciding what to do: he could either decided that his life is the most precious thing to him and decide that therefore he should fight or he could decide that his life is not worth more than other people’s and decide that he should just submit to the Black Horde and die. If the former is true, then we have a contradiction since how could it be just for two individuals to take two diametrically opposed, and even incompatible, courses of actions (yes, it is possible to escape this contradiction, but I think that the metaphysical view that results is unpalatable). If the latter is true, then we must accept that one’s life is not the supreme moral good and I do not believe it should ever be morally necessary to not defend oneself for the sake of other individual’s lives.

Two final notes: 1. my moral intuitions inform me that giving up 1:10 of one’s neighbors to certain death without a fight is repugnant and 2. emigration is not always an option available to the vast majority of people so arguing that the blonde-haired citizens could have simply emigrated in wake of the Black Horde is not a sound reply.

For example, I don’t value German civilians killed during WWII at anywhere near $5M. Those are people who gave Hitler power and then did not try to stop him. They are essentially the enemy. The fact that they don’t wear uniforms does not mean they are my friends. Ditto German (private) property.

What about German babies? German toddlers? Germans who voted against the Nazis? Don’t pretend you’re not killing innocents in a war. You always are.

Question for all of Bryan’s critics. Why aren’t you trying to overthrow the government right now? I don’t care what your ideology is, there must be something it’s doing that you think is evil and bad. Why don’t your arguments for war and against surrender apply to war with your own government? Why don’t your fancy game-theoretic tit-for-tat reasonings apply to revolting against your government if it does something you really don’t like (gun control, socialized medicine, war on drugs, etc.)? I’m not saying you don’t have a good reason for supporting war, but not revolt. I just want to know what it is.

Once you’ve articulated you reason for surrendering to the government, please go back and make sure it’s consistent with your reasons for not surrendering to foreign invaders. Again, I’m sure many of you do have consistent reasoning, I just want to know what it is.

There’s only one stance on offer here that is blanket and intended to be applied independent of details, and it’s that of Prof. Caplan.

That has not been my reading of his stance, based on his previous posts. My understanding is that he believes that war, even defensive war, is usually more trouble than it’s worth because it almost always generates massive negative externalities against innocents. He doesn’t have anything against fighting in a perfect world that had no externalities (I remember in one post Bryan even argued revenge could be justified), his problem is that we live in a world where it’s nearly impossible not to generate externalities in the course of the fighting.

That’s why I keep commenting that Bryan is seriously misusing the word “pacifism,” it’s usually associated with absolute, total nonviolence, even in a perfect situation with no externalities. Bryan’s pacifism seems to be more of the Himura Kenshin/Vash the Stampede variety, where it’s acceptable to fight, but only if you don’t generate any negative externalities towards innocent people (which is, of course, really hard).

Evan, what is ‘a perfect world that [has] no externalities’? Whatever it is, we don’t live there. The case you seem to want me to focus on as something Bryan would allow as an exception to his rule, has roughly zero probability of occurring. So no, I don’t see that as refuting my claim that his stance is a blanket one.

That’s why I keep commenting that Bryan is seriously misusing the word “pacifism,” it’s usually associated with absolute, total nonviolence, even in a perfect situation with no externalities. Bryan’s pacifism seems to be more of the Himura Kenshin/Vash the Stampede variety, where it’s acceptable to fight, but only if you don’t generate any negative externalities towards innocent people (which is, of course, really hard).

They were actually more pacifists than Bryan, somewhere between him and absolute pacifists. They refused to kill even enemies.

I reject #3: “For a war to be morally justified, its long-run benefits have to be substantially larger than its short-run costs.”

I replace it with: “For a war to be justified, its properly discounted benefits have to exceed its properly discounted costs.”

If there are immediately apparent benefits to be gained, those should most definitely be taken into account.

Evan, what is ‘a perfect world that [has] no externalities’? Whatever it is, we don’t live there. The case you seem to want me to focus on as something Bryan would allow as an exception to his rule, has roughly zero probability of occurring. So no, I don’t see that as refuting my claim that his stance is a blanket one.

Any situation where engaging the enemy without being likely to kill any bystanders is possible counts. So shooting at the enemy as they’re crossing your border, attacking an invasion fleet, bushwacking a patrol, etc. all count. Rare circumstances in which the enemy is likely to kill all the bystanders fairly soon anyway (like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising) probably also count. This is a moderately common scenario in defensive wars, but many modern wars that superpowers engaged in don’t fit this model.

Also, some wars transition from a fairly just scenario with no externalities to a much less just scenario. The Korean War, for instance, was a perfectly moral war until MacArthur idiotically decided to follow the destroyed NK army over their border. If only he’d stopped there China wouldn’t have gotten involved and there’d have been so much less bloodshed.

I’m not as extreme as Bryan is, I recognize that there are some instances where you have to risk killing bystanders. To protect from the anti-foreign bias, I’d say it’s acceptable to attack an enemy city and risk killing civilians if you would, in an otherwise similar situation, attack an enemy-occupied city and risk killing your own civilians.

I posted this in a different thread, but for some reason it never made it past the filters…anyway:

Question: What’s the furthest you’ll take this argument when the innocent bystanders aren’t foreigners?

Your argument on this point reminds me of Adam Smith’s hypothetical about an earthquake that swallows China:

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people . . . . And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. . . . If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen them? Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could be capable of entertaining it. But what makes this difference? When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble?

Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

The hypothetical remains if it’s not the loss of his own finger, but the death of a countryman. There are circles of increasing indifference as one takes the loss outward from one’s self to close friends and family, then to more removed kith and kin, then to neighbors, then fellow citizens, then fellow westerners, etc. The more narrow the “ingroup” the more I will internalize their loss. By the time you get to innocent bystanders who happen to be citizens of an enemy nation, you are very clearly looking at people we would tend to identify as “outgroup.”

Evolution bred into us a strong set of ingroup/outgroup biases. Who is in the outgroup is obviously a very subjective matter, and for anyone who believes in objective morality, then the treatment of outgroup innocent bystanders should be no different than the treatment of ingroup innocent bystanders. In that case, one should never apply different standards to the kind of actions that are moral than one would apply if one’s own friends and family were likely to be in the area when that action was taken.

That said, the ingroup/outgroup distinction is hard to brush away, and we all struggle hard at times to see justify the differences. Taking a defensive action is perfectly moral, but if it is okay for a military to blow up a building with a rocket to kill an insurgent sniper, then it shouldn’t matter whether the building is in Baghdad or Baltimore. In that case, police should arguably have the right to blow up buildings if armed hostiles are inside shooting at them.

In fact, that has happened in the U.S. Contrary to what Caplan suggested, no one went to jail when, in 1985, Philadelphia police dropped a bomb made of C-4 and dynamite on a row home in North Philly, even though they burned down multiple city blocks (and more than 60 homes) as a result and killed all but two of the men women and children living inside (six adults and five children died). The crime these people had committed? They were violating Philly noise laws in the middle of the night (shouting religious and political rhetoric with bullhorns), they may have had inappropriately large compost heaps. They also started shooting at police who came to investigate those crimes.

Move Bombing

I personally cannot completely shake my ingroup and outgroup biases. Like the man in Smith’s hypothetical, if my brother lost his right hand on the same day all of Iran was swallowed by the Earth, my brother’s injury would probably cause me the greater concern. The question I do not know the answer to is whether my instincts are correct, or whether my rationality should overrule my instincts in these cases. I have a suspicion that evolution honed my instincts, but it honed them to enhance my survivability, not my morality.

It’s premise 2) that is the weakest, and I made (perhaps overlong) stab at attacking it here.

In a nutshell, I think you grossly overestimate your ability to determine the long-run consequences, and you may not even realize you are doing it.

Dave- good points. Also Rwanda.

Bryan’s pacifism seems to be more of the Himura Kenshin/Vash the Stampede variety…

I can’t believe you just made me look up an anime reference.

Bryan,

Practically every category of human action, and not merely acts of self-defense or of retaliation, has some potential to cause harm to others.

If you interpret the non-aggression principle to mean a strict moral obligation to avoid all actions that pose the slightest risk of causing a rights violation, then that principle would obligate every moral agent to do the impossible, or at least obligate moral agents to withdraw from society and live in autarkic isolation from one another. In this first interpretation, the real moral objection is to posing any risk to others, not to state-sponsored warfare per se. One could be just as fearful of driving a car down the street for fear of running the neighbor’s kid over as one would be of shooting at an outlaw and accidently hitting an innocent bystander.

On the other hand, if you interpret the non-aggression principle to mean that one must take responsibility for each instance where one violates the rights of another (presumably by submitting legal disputes to arbitration and by paying any arbitration awards to the victims of one’s aggressive acts), then it is morally permissible to put others at risk as long as one is willing and able to pay for any harm one causes, and as long as one doesn’t evade the legal processes by which the nature of one’s actions can be impartially adjudicated. In this second interpretation, the right of retaliation likewise is limited to targeting those outlaws who refuse justify their actions in arbitration proceedings or who refuse to compensate those identified in such proceedings as their victims.

In the second interpretation, we no longer have pacifism in the strict sense you have defined it. It is still possible to use force as long as one is prepared to take responsibility for one’s acts in the manner outlined above. Nevertheless, there still are ample grounds for criticizing the state’s war-making under the second interpretation. It is not simply the case that the state harms innocents in its pursuit of alleged aggressors; the state also refuses to submit its cause to impartial adjudication and to compensate the innocents that it harms.

You might well believe that, under an obligation to compensate, retaliation would be generally impractical. Your personal cost-benefit calculus might conclude that the costs of compensating innocents for collateral damage would always overwhelm whatever benefits would accrue from destroying the outlaws who have harmed you.

However, it is important not to confuse matters of principle with your personal cost-benefit analysis. Another person could still comply with the second interpretation of the non-aggression principle if they were willing and able to pay whatever compensation was required of them.

There is nothing in the non-aggression principle itself that specifies what price is worth paying for deterring aggressors. All the non-aggression principle really demands is that one does not shirk the costs associated with the harm one causes.

Likewise, the crucial problem with the state’s war-making is precisely that the politicians always strive to shift the costs of the state’s use of force onto others without their consent, whether these others be taxpayers, draftees, or innocent bystanders. In that sense, anarcho-capitalists are anti-war even if they don’t object to all uses of force as under your definition of pacifism.

Best regards,
Vince

Tim,

It has been awhile since we have discussed these matters, but reading your response to Bryan brings a couple of observations to mind.

First, innocent bystanders are under no moral obligation to pay for the costs of fighting your enemies. Most of the alleged benefits of the various wars you cite are simply irrelevant to the issue Bryan has raised–if such an obligation doesn’t exist, then it doesn’t matter how many Nazi dragons you slay. You still owe them compensation when you inflict collateral damage on them.

If you harm these bystanders, it is not rational for them to dismiss their injuries on the grounds that the devil made you do it, or that Hitler made you do it. The fact of the matter is that if you act, you are the cause of whatever consequences follow from your acts. To ask others to ignore your role as a causal agent, and to pretend that your enemies are automatically their enemies too, is to repudiate their status as independent rights-bearing moral agents.

Second, even if you could justify some sort of collective calculus for evaluating wars, the particular examples you cite leave you open to the charge that you are cherry-picking the outcomes you like. In each of the wars you cite above, one could also come up with compelling reasons for thinking that each war might have set back liberty in some ways.

There is a lot I disagree with in your interpretation of history, but let me stick to one war, namley World War II. In citing the Nazi threat, you neglect to mention that a couple of the enemies of the Axis Powers, namely Mao and Stalin, wound up killing and enslaving even more people than Hitler did. Chiang Kai-Shek was no slouch in the democide derby either, and the British, French, Dutch, and American Empires were not without their criminal features.

When someone goes around proclaiming that this was the “good” war, how does one go about deciding that sacrificing someone to Stalin is more than counterbalanced by saving someone else from Hitler?

Best regards,
Vince

Vince: Good to hear from you, I’ve been meaning to write you privately about another matter. To respond to your points in turn:

1) Innocent bystanders: The subjects of an aggressor regime may or may not be innocent. If they are supporters of the regime, then they are legitimate targets to the extent that they contribute to the regime’s military capacity. If they are not supporters of the regime, then they are obligated to oppose the regime as much as they can, and to stay out of the way of enemy attacks upon the regime as much as they can. As for compensation, Germany and Japan were compensated after the war with the democratization of their political systems, greatly increasing their freedom, direct economic aid to help them rebuild, and military protection against external enemies (e.g., the Soviets) ever since.

2) WWII: While it’s true that the alliance w/ Stalin compromised the morality of the Allied cause in WWII, at the time Germany was the greater threat, as it had a First World economy and military at its disposal and was rapidly developing the capability to project power across the Atlantic via the Amerikabomber and the naval buildup that was cut short by the outbreak of war, and he already had a big enough U-boat fleet to lay siege to Britain. Britain could only win the Battle of the Atlantic with the addition of the naval capacity of the USA. Hitler’s ultimate goal, as expressed in his Second Book, was war with the USA. Also, Stalin’s occupation of central and Eastern Europe was not a necessary consequence of WWII, as Patton had the men, material, motive, and opportunity to invade and get rid of Stalinism once and for all right before his death. He may even have been kileld for it. Mao’s triumph in China was due to the US withdrawal of support for Chiang Kai-Shek. Mao was unquestionably far worse than Chiang Kai-Shek.

3) Cherry-picking: I’m actually trying to address what I consider the strongest counter-examples against my position. There’s a lot more that I’ve left out. For instance, one of the long-term effects of the French Revolution was the demise of slavery in much of the world. The French invasion of Spain weakened Spain’s hold on most of its colonies in the Western hemisphere, thus enabling them to win their independence in the original “Wars of Liberation.” Those new regimes all abolished slavery. After the American Civil War, the only slave states remaining in the Western hemisphere were Cuba (still a Spanish colony until the Spanish-American War) and Brazil (a Portugese colony).

It may be that on balance any particular war was more bad than good. However, I rarely see any of the good taken into account by self-avowed pacifists like Caplan. If pacifism is to be a respectable and attractive position, then it must be after a full accounting.

CBrinton: Thanks for the correction. I didn’t know about Puerto Rico (although it stands to reason that it should have the same status as Cuba), and forgot about Paraguay. As I recall, slavery was weakened in Paraguay when slaves were granted freedom in exchange for military service in a war Paraguay fought with one of its neighbors.

Brazil is Jeff Hummel’s favorite example of peaceful abolition. However, military force played a big part there, too – specifically, the Royal Navy, which became supreme worldwide thanks to winning the Napoleonic Wars and was committed to enforcing the ban on the slave trade. Brazil refused to ban the slave trade until the 1850s, when Britain destroyed several of its slave ships in Brazilian waters. Then Brazil banned the slave trade, thus starting the inevitable demise of slavery in Brazil, as Brazil was like all slave societies in the Western hemisphere except the USA in that it had negative population growth and was thus dependent upon constant importation of new slaves. Within a generation, slavery was abolished in Brazil, too – the last slave society in the Western hemisphere.

Which is not to say that slavery was completely gone, of course. Mexico still had widespread illegal slavery before the Revolution, and in the United States we re-imposed slavery by another name after Reconstruction.