Good point, Steve. That provides some context for my example. Let me add, however, that as far as I know it doesn't always work out like in your scenario. Take an emergency room. The victim of an accident. Unconscious, so he can't sign anything. Survival chance without operation: 10%. With operation: 90%. The doctor operates, the patient dies. An autopsy shows that he died due to the operation. Did the doctor act immorally?

Analogy: a Nastonian. A 90% chance to save him from dictatorship, set him free, and make sure the dictator can't murder him. A 10% chance to kill him in the process.

Yet, I don't want to dwell on that example too long. What I was trying to say was just that as all human activity is inherently dangerous, the risk of accidentally harming someone cannot be a moral factor for remaining inactive. (Supposing everything humanly possible to avoid all accidents and collateral damage that can be avoided has been done.)

If "collateral damage" were a moral argument, you could not be allowed to do *anything.* Driving always entails the risk of traffic accidents. Should all cars be banned because they're inherently dangerous? Flying entails the risk of a plane crashing in a building owned and inhabited by innocent bystanders. Should all aircraft be abolished because those bystanders did not agree to the existence of aircraft?

"You take a chance getting up in the morning, crossing the street, or sticking your face in a fan." — Lieutenant Frank Drebin  

If Nastonia were a threat to our country in such a way as to make self-defense reasonable then the those deaths would not on our heads, but rather on the head of the dictator. If it Nastonia isn't threatening us then we are morally responsible for the deaths. That is the reality.

No, those deaths are still on the head of the dictator. We have a right to help enslaved Nastonians A, B, and C, who approve of (and maybe even requested) our invasion. If we accidentally kill Nastonians D, E, and F, who disapproved of our invasion, preferring to be "red" over being dead, their deaths are still on the head of the dictator, because he initiated the use of force against all of them in the first place.

The chain of causality is this: (1) dictator initiates use of force against Nastonians => (2) Nastonians have a right to self-defense => (3) Nastonians have a right to outsource self-defense => (4) we have a right to invade.

Let me point out that though I say, "Nastonians," plural, I do understand that any right is individual. In extremis:

• even if only one Nastonian asked us for help, and all others preferred to be slaves
• even if the invasion kills all Nastonians except this one

the invasion would still be moral.

That is the logical consequence of individualism. And I add, it is not just the consequence of an optional -ism, it is the consequence of man's nature as an individual. Anybody who does not wish to face this truth has to flush the last traces of collectivism from his system. There can be no moral justification for sacrificing one individual, even if this sacrifice were necessary to save seven billion others.

By the way, if you disagree with (3) you would have to contend that any kind of government and private security firm is immoral. Would you say a police officer has no right to try and shoot a would-be murderer because he might kill innocent bystanders who do not approve of the existence of police officers?

I'd like to conclude with pointing out that the statistics of the issue skew the picture in favor of pacifism. Let's assume for the sake of the argument that probabilities have anything to do with morality.

You drive. What is the chance that you kill somebody? Let's say it's something like 0.001. So you keep driving.

What is the chance that the war will kill any given individual Nastonian? There are thousands of deaths out of presumably millions of Nastonians — so the chance to kill any one of them is 0.001.

So that war is immoral? Not more immoral than driving. That war will kill thousands. Driving kills thousands every year. That war only looks worse because anti-war protesters will bandy about the thousands of dead more volubly than the DMV does the tens of thousand of deaths on the highway. If that war is immoral, so are cars, aircraft, and every human activity.

(Edited by Alexander Butziger on 4/04, 1:40pm)

That's because principles are means to ends, and not ends in themselves.

There still are people in this country who lost loved ones in World War I. There are more people who carry the unhealed wounds of World War II, of Korea, of Vietnam. There are the disabled, the crippled, the mangled of those wars’ battlefields. No one has ever told them why they had to fight nor what their sacrifices accomplished; it was certainly not “to make the world safe for democracy”—look at that world now. The American people have borne it all, trusting their leaders, hoping that someone knew the purpose of that ghastly devastation.

                                                                     "Moral Inflation" in The Ayn Rand Reader, pg 103, ISBN 0452280400

Your scheme would mean that it is perfectly moral to start a full out bombing war of Canada in support of single Quebec citizen who has a right to not use the French language in their business as they are required to do by those immoral laws.

You talk about when a country's leader starts "acting like a dictator" - that is a subjective standard.

Robert,

We disagree on the invasion of Iraq, but I’m glad to see that it is a matter of what the facts were or  the degree of immediacy they implied - and not a matter of principle.  You believed at the time that our nation was in danger of attack by Iraq.  At that time I was very torn and at times I also thought we had reason to attack.  

I’m glad to find that we are in agreement on the “altruistic campaign of neocon nation-building” as well.

This whole subject has been a shock to me - finding out how many people are calling themselves Objectivists and yet advocating altruistic wars of liberation.  And the people that are just so fuzzy on the principles.

I think I’ve seen where some of the errors are coming from.

• From not examining the actual end which is altruistic.
• From equivocating on the word “self” in “self-defense”
• From misusing the word “threat” (not impending or not physical or not against the nation)
• From mistaking a particular national interest as being adequate in the absence of self-defense for launching a war.
• From an error in delegating defense from the victim of a foreign citizen to our country as the defender.

 

(Edited by Steve Wolfer on 4/04, 8:26pm)

A soldier who goes to war does not know that he will kill an innocent civilian, as little as the driver does.

As for the commander who sends all those soldiers into Nastonia, and who according to your appeal to statistics would have to be able to predict that there will be collateral damage: He would be as little to blame for any innocent dead (if there are any) as Henry Ford can be blamed for all the highway dead of the last hundred years.

Our government was not instituted to wage war in service of the defense of the rights of citizens of other countries.  Your scheme would mean that it is perfectly moral to start a full out bombing war of Canada in support of single Quebec citizen who has a right to not use the French language in their business as they are required to do by those immoral laws.  If even a single Canadian citizen residing in Quebec asked for our help it would be moral for us to kill every other Canadian according to your ‘principles’. 

If the Canadian dictator points a gun at a single individual victim of his, anybody would have a right to help the victim.

If a fuel bomb headed for that dictator happens to set fire to the immense oil field that (unbeknownst to us) stretches under all of Canada only one inch below the ground, killing all Canadians, that would be too bad, but it would not make helping immoral.

If you personally are so afraid of harming innocent bystanders, fine, then don't volunteer. But your own choice does not give you any moral cause against anybody who comes to a different conclusion upon weighing the possible risks and benefits.

So you would not help that Canadian guy forced to speak French, you would not help those enslaved Nastonians about to be murdered, you won't do anything unless a gun is pointed your way.

Would you say it would have been wrong to liberate the slaves in the South by force? Would you say it would have been wrong to enter WWII to save six million Jews? Neither of those wars was waged to helps those people, but I would argue that they should have, and that it would have been moral to do so. Do you disagree?

It would be moral to abolish all governments that loot taxes, it would be moral to defend the Canadian, and it would be moral to liberate the Nastonians. Yet, as you cannot practicably make war on all governments of the world at the same time, you pick your fights. One possible course of action is to go after the worst offenders, who do most harm, first. That would mean to first liberate Nastonia, then Canada, and finally abolish taxes.

Helping the Nastonians is not altruism. If I sympathize with some bright Nastonian kid who's being dragged into a temple of the Nasty religion, or a Nastonian barracks, or a Nastonian concentration camp, and decide to make war to help him, then it is morally no different from using force to defend a loved one or a friend. Would you argue that "self-defense" is so narrow a term that it only refers to your own body? Have you no right to defend your family, for instance?

BTW, my principles may be so odious to you that you have to put them in distance quotes, but at least I'm not a fair-weather individualist.

I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need. — Howard Roark

Is that no longer true when the claim is "do not defend a friend, because we're afraid of collateral damage" and those who make the claim are all Canadians, or the whole **** world "community"?

 

(Edited by Alexander Butziger on 4/05, 6:10pm)

And I notice you used the word "volunteer" - that isn't applicable here since the whole country gets committed when war is launched, not just those who agree.