November 2023 – Dean Cook

The Basis of Punishment of Criminals When Reading Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand

The Basis of Punishment of Criminals, Based On My Reading of Ayn Rand’s Theory of Rights and Government

As far as I can tell, Ayn Rand did not discuss the details of government much beyond saying that it would have police, military and courts:

“The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.” (Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, emphasis added, http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/government.html)

Since Ayn Rand said that there would be police, and did not give any other definition of what “police” are, we can assume that she generally accepted the role police play in contemporary society today, so long as that role was delimited to protecting rights.

The way police function today is by catching criminals, taking them to court for an adjudication of guilt or innocence, and then incarcerating those found guilty for a period of time. (Leaving aside certain petty crimes that only involve a fine, and assuming the death penalty does not exist.) Presumably Rand thought arrest and incarceration was appropriate, but how exactly does incarceration protect rights, and whose rights does it protect?

It does not appear that Ayn Rand ever explicitly discusses how it is that the police and the incarceration process protects individual rights. She says that the purpose of government is based in the right to self-defense:

“The necessary consequence of man’s right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.” (“The Nature of Government”, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand, emphasis added.)

I can see how an individual can prevent himself from being murdered by using self-defense. If the victim is armed, he can try to outshoot the person trying to murder him, thereby saving his life. If the victim is a quicker draw than the person attacking him, or just a better shot, then he can stop the attacker with a bullet. But, in the case of a person already murdered, he cannot act in self-defense, and the state cannot defend him, because he is already dead. How is the state prosecuting the murderer, after the fact, self-defense? It must be in the sense that every other living person needs to stop the murderer from killing again, and for their own self-defense, rather than the defense of the murder victim, who is beyond help.

Even for lesser crimes, what is the probability that the criminal will re-victimize that particular victim? If a bank robber robs a bank, wouldn’t he be more likely to rob a completely different bank in the future? The bank that was just robbed is more likely to take additional security precautions, so it would be smarter for the criminal to find a new target. Although the government is defending the bank already robbed, it is also protecting other banks that have yet to be robbed.

Also, this still doesn’t explicitly answer the question of exactly how does locking up a person convicted of murder help defend the still living, in the case of a crime like murder? (And, I am just assuming that Ayn Rand would be in favor of incarceration, because I don’t know that she ever explicitly says that this is how criminals should be punished.) I don’t think Ayn Rand explicitly answers the question of “how”, but I think I am able to see logical implications based on her writing. For instance, Ayn Rand said the following:

“If a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door-or to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the degeneration of that society into the chaos of gang rule, i.e., rule by brute force, into the perpetual tribal warfare of prehistorical savages.“ (“The Nature of Government”, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand, emphasis added.)

So, it is “organized protection against force” that is the goal of government. Government is not primarily “organized revenge” or even “organized retaliation”. Government exists for purposes of protection. Only actions by government that protect against force are justified. But, what about the person already murdered? How can he be protected by government? Clearly, the dead cannot be protected, only the currently living. Whatever government does to the murderer is done to protect the currently living, not for the sake of the deceased.

I see only two ways that a government can provide “organized protection against force” in the case of murder, which is generally considered to be the worst crime:

(1) Government establishes a penalty for murder, and that penalty is always imposed, so that everyone is discouraged from committing murder. Government imposes a penalty to protect the currently living from being murdered in the future. The only way that penalty will work is if it is, in fact, imposed whenever a murder is committed. The government is threatening the use of force to protect the currently living. The threat of force by the government is not against any particular individual, but against everyone in society. Another way to look at it is that government promises or declares that anyone who violates individual rights by initiating physical force will be met with force.

(2) Government actually uses force to prohibit future crimes being committed by a specifically identified murderer. Government is actually imposing the force, rather than merely threatening the use of force, to protect the currently living from that particular, identified, murderer.

The first is the “deterrent” or “general deterrence” argument for punishment. The second I’d call the “restraintist” argument for punishment, although I think some legal philosophers might say this is “specific deterrence”.

I should note that I can somewhat see a third basis for how government can provide “organized protection against force”. It would be very understandable that the family and friends of the murdered person would want to enact revenge on the murderer by killing him. I doubt that this feeling is rational, but it is very understandable. It’s also very likely to take place if there is no organized government. By having an organized system of punishment, government can provide friends and family members of the victim with sufficient emotional satisfaction that they might be less inclined to seek revenge. I think this “retributivist” basis might just be a form of “deterrence”, in the sense that it discourages the victim’s friends and family members from seeking revenge against the killer.

Another point to note is that I don’t think the first two, and maybe not even the third, possible bases on which government imposes “organized protection against force”, are necessarily mutually exclusive.

Unfortunately, Rand does not give much in the way of detail about how government, and in particular, the police, will protect individual rights, other than to say that the police represent a delegated and organized use of force in self-defense against criminals. The logical implication seems to be that the police are not just defending the victim, who, in the case of murder, is beyond help, but everyone else in society that could be the criminal’s next victim. A further logical implication is that this organized use of force by police is in the form of incarceration, which serves the purpose of restraining the particular criminal from future crimes, and/or deterring future crime by others.

The Basis of Punishment of Criminals For Murray Rothbard

If my interpretation of the Randian basis for punishment, as lying primarily in “deterrence” and “restraint” is correct, then Murray Rothbard would disagree with Rand. (At the very least, I disagree with Rothbard about the basis of punishment.)

Rothbard explicitly states that retributivism is the basis of punishment of criminals:

“It should be evident that our theory of proportional punishment: that people may be punished by losing their rights to the extent that they have invaded the rights of others, is frankly a retributive theory of punishment, a ‘tooth (or two teeth) for a tooth’ theory.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Murray N. Rothbard, Chapter 13, “Punishment and Proportionality”)

Rothbard does say that the purpose of using force in retaliation is self-defense:

“Many people, when confronted with the libertarian legal system, are concerned with this problem: would somebody be allowed to ‘take the law into his own hands’? Would the victim, or a friend of the victim, be allowed to exact justice personally on the criminal? The answer is, of course, Yes, since all rights of punishment derive from the victim’s right of self-defense.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Murray N. Rothbard, Chapter 13, “Punishment and Proportionality”)

But, in many cases, the principle of “an eye for an eye” does not seem to have anything to do with anyone’s defense, whether that be the victim, or other people that the criminal might victimize in the future. The retributivist focuses on the punishment aspect, rather than the defense of others, and this seems true for Rothbard. For instance, he says that a person who has been assaulted should have the right to beat up his attacker in return:

“In the question of bodily assault, where restitution does not even apply, we can again employ our criterion of proportionate punishment; so that if A has beaten up B in a certain way, then B has the right to beat up A (or have him beaten up by judicial employees) to rather more than the same extent.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Murray N. Rothbard, Chapter 13, “Punishment and Proportionality”)

Although the threat of getting beat up might, to a certain extent, serve a deterrence effect, this is not why Rothbard advocates it. Instead, it is because he thinks the perpetrator of a crime should have the same done to him. (“A tooth for a tooth.”) To me, this seems completely senseless. How does the victim beating the shit out of his attacker, after the fact, help the situation? Also, how would this prevent the victim from being beat up in the future? With incarceration, the attacker is put in jail for a period of time, which better ensures the victim’s safety.

Rothbard does address the “deterrence” viewpoint, and another major modern school of thought, regarding the purpose of incarceration, which is the “rehabilitation” viewpoint. His critique of the “deterrence” viewpoint is that it would involve the use of levels of punishment that most people would regard as inappropriate or unfair. So, for instance, most people would regard shoplifting as a minor crime, and that the punishment should be very light. But, Rothbard says that if shoplifting were legal, then many more people would commit the crime of shoplifting than if the crime of murder were legal. He says this is because more people have “…a far greater built-in inner objection to themselves committing murder than they have to petty shoplifting, and would be far less apt to commit the grosser crime.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Murray N. Rothbard, Chapter 13, “Punishment and Proportionality”)

As far as I can tell, Rothbard provides no evidence that people would be more likely to commit shoplifting than murder if the two were legal. This does seem likely to me too, but I have no basis for saying that, other than I like to think that most people are not prone to commit murder. If there were no laws, isn’t it likely that people would kill or steal when they thought it would suit them? Does it even matter what they’d do if there were no laws? If we have a theory of rights based on the fundamental right to life, like Ayn Rand’s philosophy, then doesn’t that philosophical system say that murder must be worse than shoplifting, precisely because the former is an assault on the fundamental basis of rights? So, wouldn’t that be the basis of a system of proportionality, in which murder is punished more harshly than shoplifting? This would only seem to be a problem for someone with a utilitarian philosophical basis, which is what Rothbard is criticizing when he criticizes the deterrence school:

“Deterrence was the principle put forth by utilitarianism, as part of its aggressive dismissal of principles of justice and natural law, and the replacement of these allegedly metaphysical principles by hard practicality. The practical goal of punishments was then supposed to be to deter further crime, either by the criminal himself or by other members of society. But this criterion of deterrence implies schemas of punishment which almost everyone would consider grossly unjust.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Murray N. Rothbard, Chapter 13, “Punishment and Proportionality”, emphasis added.)

Clearly, Ayn Rand is not a utilitarian, but, as already discussed, her views on rights and the nature of government would suggest that “deterrence” is part of the purpose of incarceration of criminals. Incarceration would be for the purpose of protecting the rights of people living in society, as well as the original victim, if he is still alive.

Rothbard also dismisses the “rehabilitation” viewpoint because it would seem to lead to absurd results, like incarcerating someone for shoplifting for longer than a murderer, if it is determined that the murderer has been successfully rehabilitated and will not commit more crimes:

“…in our case of Smith and Jones, suppose that the mass murderer Smith is, according to our board of ‘experts’, rapidly rehabilitated. He is released in three weeks, to the plaudits of the supposedly successful reformers. In the meanwhile, Jones, the fruit-stealer, persists in being incorrigible and clearly un-rehabilitated, at least in the eyes of the expert board. According to the logic of the principle, he must stay incarcerated indefinitely, perhaps for the rest of his life…”(The Ethics of Liberty, Murray N. Rothbard, Chapter 13, “Punishment and Proportionality”)

Although I cannot find support in Ayn Rand’s writing for this, I believe “rehabilitation” does play a role in the length of incarceration of someone convicted of a crime, but not quite in the way that I think this term is used by philosophers of law. I think that the possibility that the convict can “rehabilitate” himself, due to the possession of a volitional consciousness means that the length of a prison sentence may be less than the convict’s life. Since people possess volition, even a murderer can change his thought patterns and his actions for the better in the future. I disagree that the government or society can “rehabilitate” a convict, but I think that the convict can “rehabilitate” himself. Lesser crimes, besides murder, are therefore likely to carry less than a life sentence, given the fact of human volition. I think the possibility of self-rehabilitation by the convict is a major factor to consider when weighing the proportionality of the punishment in relation to the crime. The fact of volition must be weighed, as much as possible, against the possibility that a person found guilty of a minor crime might go on to commit more serious crimes in the future, while at the same time, recognizing that the commission of a minor crime might be a “fluke” or a one-time event that would not be repeated by the convict. Additionally, someone found guilty of a murder, who is facing a life sentence, is likely to lie to get out of prison early, so making the determination that he is truly rehabilitated is not going to be easy.

Admittedly, unlike the retributivist system of crime and punishment proposed by Rothbard, determining the extent of the punishment in particular circumstances, along the lines I have proposed, would be more difficult. “An eye for an eye” has the advantage of being easy to implement. If someone is beat up, then they get to beat up their attacker, which makes assessing the punishment easy, albeit ridiculous and irrational.

A Comparison and Contrast of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard On Warfare

Ayn Rand on Warfare

As far as I can tell, Ayn Rand did not write much about when a nation has a right to use organized physical force, on a mass-level, against other nations or other armed groups.

Her essay, “The Roots of War” discusses how Statism is the fundamental source of war in modern times. In that essay, she does not explicitly deal with when, and to what extent, a free or semi-free nation may use its military force. She does make it clear that a free nation should have a military, and that sometimes it should be used:

“Needless to say, unilateral pacifism is merely an invitation to aggression. Just as an individual has the right of self-defense, so has a free country if attacked. But this does not give its government the right to draft men into military service-which is the most blatantly statist violation of a man’s right to his own life. There is no contradiction between the moral and the practical: a volunteer army is the most efficient army, as many military authorities have testified. A free country has never lacked volunteers when attacked by a foreign aggressor. But not many men would volunteer for such ventures as Korea or Vietnam. Without drafted armies, the foreign policies of statist or mixed economies would not be possible.” (“The Roots of War”, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Ayn Rand, emphasis added.)

Determining when an individual can use force in self-defense can be quite difficult by itself. It becomes even more complicated when the issue is “scaled up” to a nation-wide or world-wide level.

Since I cannot find anything from Rand’s explicit writings on the conditions under which a country can use military force, I want to start by looking at her writing on when an individual can use physical force.

One passage that I have found helpful in making the distinction between the use of physical force in an improper way verses the use of physical force in a moral manner comes from her essay “The Objectivist Ethics”. In that essay, she discusses what is the difference between the use of physical force “in retaliation” and the use of physical force as an “initiation”:

“The ethical principle involved is simple and clear-cut: it is the difference between murder and self-defense. A holdup man seeks to gain a value, wealth, by killing his victim; the victim does not grow richer by killing a holdup man. The principle is: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force.” (The Objectivist Ethics, Ayn Rand)

For Rand, whether force is “retaliatory”, which is moral, or an “initiation”, and therefore immoral, turns on her view of values, and who is entitled to those values. For Rand, a value is that which one acts to gain and or keep, with the ultimate value being “man’s life”:

“The Objectivist ethics holds man’s life as the standard of value- and his own life as the ethical purpose of every individual man.” (The Objectivist Ethics, Ayn Rand)

So, one must hold “man’s life” as the standard, and the purpose of holding that standard for each individual man is his own life. Values are those things which one must have in order to live. Thanks to their rational faculty, human beings can create these values in much greater quantities than they would exist in nature. (For instance, agricultural technology creates much more food per acre of land than would typically be found growing in a similarly sized area of natural land.)

If each man holds his own life as his ethical purpose, then the values he creates, are for himself and for maintaining his own life. In the case of using physical force, whether that force takes the form of a punch, a bullet, or a bomb, it is an “initiation of physical force”, if one is attempting to obtain the values which others have created for their own sustenance. It is “retaliatory force” if one is merely attempting to keep what one has created for oneself.

Something that is not quite captured by the quote from Rand above is the case of someone not trying to gain the values of others, like a bank robber. Some people are simply trying to destroy the values of others, such as a terrorist who kills for some obscure political reason, or a “serial murderer”, who may kill not because they gain any particular value, in any rational sense, from it, but to satisfy some psychological craving. In that case, I think she would still consider this to be an initiation of physical force because they seek to deprive others of their values. So, I think you could expand the concept of an initiation of physical force to include both the use of physical force to gain the values of others, and also to destroy the values of others.

At any rate, Rand’s point is clear. It is not the physical act, the use of physical force, that makes something an “initiation of physical force” versus “retaliatory force”. The action itself may look the same, and the context in which it occurs will determine whether it is “initiation” or “retaliation”. For instance, you cannot merely see a man shoot another man and conclude with certainty that the man who fired the bullet has initiated physical force. You would need to know something about the conditions under which that occurred. For instance, if it was revealed that the person who was shot was wearing a vest of explosives under his jacket, and had just expressed an intention to go detonate it in a crowded movie theater, the shooter is quite probably acting in retaliation against an initiation of physical force. In that case, the man wearing the hidden explosive vest has taken affirmative steps to kill a large number of people by putting together the explosive vest, putting it on, walking towards the movie theater, and expressing an intent to use the bomb. He has initiated the use of physical force. (Although the act is not completed yet.) He has started the use of physical force, and that physical force is directed at the destruction of other people’s values, in this case, their very lives.

For Rand, a nation or a society is nothing but a number of individuals:

“A nation, like any other group, is only a number of individuals and can have no rights other than the rights of its individual citizens.” (“Collectivized ‘Rights’” Ayn Rand, http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-rand-ideas/collectivized-rights.html )

Therefore, a nation and its military has no greater rights than the rights of its individual citizens. What would be an initiation of physical force for an individual would be an initiation for a nation. Similarly, retaliatory force for a nation is physical force that is not aimed at gaining the values of others or depriving others of their values, but at protecting the values of the nation’s citizens.

Murray Rothbard on Warfare

Murray Rothbard seems to hold similar views to those of Rand when it comes to the state as nothing but a collection of individuals.

Additionally, he would hold that all states, insofar as they hold the exclusive right to the use of retaliatory physical force in a given geographic area, are illegitimate, but I am not looking to address his advocacy of “anarcho-capitalism” here. I am instead considering his views on warfare, within the existing framework of nations, as he does in Chapter 25 of his book, The Ethics of Liberty.

For instance, early in Chapter 25 of his book, Rothbard says:

“To be more concrete, if Jones finds that his property is being stolen by Smith, Jones has the right to repel him and try to catch him; but Jones has no right to repel him by bombing a building and murdering innocent people or to catch him by spraying machine gun fire into an innocent crowd. If he does this, he is as much (or more of) a criminal aggressor as Smith is.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard, Chapter 25, Pg 190)

But, what if Smith deliberately hides in a crowd of people, and fires his gun at Jones? Can Jones fire back? Whose fault is it if Jones accidentally hits a bystander during the course of returning fire on Smith, when Smith deliberately used other people as cover? Rothbard does not address the issue.

Rothbard then “scales up” his individual scenario to a group of individuals:

“The same criteria hold if Smith and Jones each have men on his side, i.e. if ‘war’ breaks out between Smith and his henchmen and Jones and his bodyguards. If Smith and a group of henchmen aggress against Jones, and Jones and his bodyguards pursue the Smith gang to their lair, we may cheer Jones on in his endeavor; and we, and others in society interested in repelling aggression, may contribute financially or personally to Jones’s cause. But Jones and his men have no right, any more than does Smith, to aggress against anyone else in the course of their “just war”: to steal others’ property in order to finance their pursuit, to conscript others into their posse by use of violence, or to kill others in the course of their struggle to capture the Smith forces. If Jones and his men should do any of these things, they become criminals as fully as Smith, and they too become subject to whatever sanctions are meted out against criminality. In fact, if Smith’s crime was theft, and Jones should use conscription to catch him, or should kill innocent people in the pursuit, then Jones becomes more of a criminal than Smith, for such crimes against another person as enslavement and murder are surely far worse than theft.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard, Chapter 25, Pg 190)

Rothbard never seems to want to address, in Chapter 25 of “The Ethics of Liberty”, to what degree, if at all, you can risk the lives of innocent people in defending yourself. If you cannot risk the lives of others at all, then there are very few cases where even clear-cut acts of self-defense are justified. A bullet could always go astray and hit an innocent bystander.

For Rothbard, exactly who has violated rights, if you are forced to defend yourself, shoot an attacker, and, for instance, the bullet goes through your attacker and hits someone behind him? Common law legal systems would likely limit culpability to what is ‘foreseeable’, or some other similar concept. This is the idea that whether you commit a rights violation has something to do with your intent, and/or what you could have expected to be the reasonable probable result of your actions. So, if a bullet goes through your attacker, makes a weird series of ricochets, and hits someone you didn’t even know was behind your attacker, you are probably going to be excused from any sort of legal culpability. (It should go, almost without saying, that nothing I say here should be construed as legal advice.)

My point is, your intentions, your state of mind, to some extent, matters when you use force. Why does your state of mind matter? I think Ayn Rand would say it’s because it points to your purpose in using force. If your purpose in using force is to protect your values, that is different from using force to destroy another person’s values, or to gain another person’s values:

“The ethical principle involved is simple and clear-cut: it is the difference between murder and self-defense. A holdup man seeks to gain a value, wealth, by killing his victim; the victim does not grow richer by killing a holdup man. The principle is: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force.” (The Objectivist Ethics, Ayn Rand, emphasis added.)

Accidentally shooting a bystander while defending yourself from a robber is not an attempt to obtain values. This is not to say that all such accidental shootings of bystanders should be completely excused by the legal system. Maybe some particularly reckless acts in self-defense should cause some level of criminal liability, but the level of culpability is probably not the same.

When you shoot a hold up man in self-defense, and accidentally shoot someone else, your level of culpability is lesser (although possibly not completely excused). Why? because you were not seeking ‘to gain a value’. You were seeking to protect a value. Your intentions when using force matter.

What does this all have to do with warfare? It gives us guidance on how to look at uses of force by certain countries. If a country is attempting to kill enemy soldiers and accidentally kills civilians in the process, this is not the same level of culpability as intentionally targeting civilians, because the country is not seeking to destroy values. Furthermore, it may even completely excuse the unintentional killing of civilians, in some circumstances.

Go back to the individual level for a moment. Imagine if a criminal shoots at you with a baby strapped to his chest. You have no ability to take cover, and you cannot safely run away without getting shot, so you shoot back and kill the baby in the process of shooting the robber. Have you violated the baby’s rights? I think the answer is very circumstantial, but I can see a set of circumstances where you would have no other choice. (It’s an extreme, ‘lifeboat scenario’, admittedly.) In that case, the fault lies with the person who strapped a baby to his chest and then tried to kill you, leaving you with no other choice but to die, or shoot back.

More fundamentally, how is the risk that you might hit an innocent bystander in an act of self-defense different from the possibility that, for instance, your car might suffer a mechanical breakdown while you’re driving it, go out of control, and hit a pedestrian? Both are actions aimed at enhancing or promoting your life. Both could have unintentional and even unforeseeable, deadly consequences for innocent third parties. I do not think that others have a right to be 100% risk-free from your actions. If that were the case, then things like airplanes would have to be illegal. It’s always possible an airplane will malfunction, fall from the sky, and kill a family in their home. Airline companies, to a certain extent, put us all at risk of death from crashing airplanes.

All other people have a right to is that you will not: (a) intentionally use force to deprive them of values, nor will you: (b) use force in such a way that it would be reasonably foreseeable that the force would deprive them of their values. (Examples of such unreasonable uses of force would be things such as: driving a car at 80 mph through a neighborhood street where children are about, target shooting with your gun in a field that children are playing in, etc.)

Expand the situation of the criminal using a baby strapped to his chest as a human shield to the national level. If an organization of terrorists hides behind civilians, and then fires rockets at your country, can your army shoot back with rockets? Again, it’s going to be very circumstantial. Sometimes, the army might be able to stop the attacks in some other way, such as an anti-missile system. But, sometimes, the army may have to fire missiles back, and, in the process, unintentionally kill civilians. In that case, the fault lies with the terrorists, not with the army. The terrorists are no different than the criminal who tries to murder you while using another person as a human shield. The responsibility for the death of any innocents lies with the terrorists. For Rand, I believe the initiation of physical force, the rights violation, lies with the person who used other people as cover while committing acts of violence.

Rothbard, on the other hand, does not seem to agree with this. For instance, he considers all nuclear weapons to be illegitimate:

“…a particularly libertarian reply is that while the bow and arrow, and even the rifle, can be pinpointed, if the will be there, against actual criminals, that modern nuclear weapons cannot. Here is a crucial difference in kind. Of course, the bow and arrow could be used for aggressive purposes, but it could also be pinpointed to use only against aggressors. Nuclear weapons, even ‘conventional’ aerial bombs, cannot be. These weapons are ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction. (The only exception would be the extremely rare case where a mass of people who were all criminals inhabited a vast geographical area.) We must, therefore, conclude that the use of nuclear or similar weapons, or the threat thereof, is a crime against humanity for which there can be no justification.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard, Chapter 25, Pg 190, emphasis added.)

First, it must be noted that this seems like a suicidal viewpoint. In a world where countries like China and Russia have nuclear weapons, to say nothing of North Korea and Iran, Rothbard’s apparent call for unilateral nuclear disarmament by freer Western nations would mean we’d be subject to nuclear annihilation at the whim of some dictator. But, more fundamentally, who has initiated physical force here? Is it the United States for threatening to obliterate North Korea should that totalitarian dictatorship attempt to harm our citizens, or is it the madmen (and women) in charge of that country? Does the United States gain a value in destroying North Korea’s ability to wage war against us, or does the United States merely preserve the values of its people -that is their lives, liberty and property?

(As an aside, I think Rothbard also forgets about a use of nuclear weapons that would not involve the death of innocent civilians. Imagine an island nation, in say, the East China Sea, that was being invaded by a much larger nation from the mainland. That invasion force would come in the form of a floating armada of ships. What if the island nation were to use nuclear weapons to obliterate the invasion force while it was still in the water? No civilians would be harmed, and the possession of nuclear weapons by that island nation would serve as a deterrent to invasion.)

Rothbard is also fairly explicit that all modern warfare is illegitimate:

“All State wars, therefore, involve increased aggression against the State’s own taxpayers, and almost all State wars (all, in modern warfare) involve the maximum aggression (murder) against the innocent civilians ruled by the enemy State.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard, Chapter 25, Pg 193)

At root, I think the difference between Rothbard and Rand on the legitimacy of certain acts of warfare by freer nations comes down to Rothbard either misunderstanding, or explicitly rejecting, the fact that the distinction between an “initiation of physical force” and “retaliatory physical force” lies in what values are, and what ultimate purpose they serve. I think Rothbard desired to create a “libertarian” view of Rand’s non-initiation of physical force principle that is severed from Rand’s underlying view of values, and the standard of “man’s life”. I started reading Rothbard’s book, “The Ethics of Liberty” prior to October 7, 2023, but those events caused me to want to write something about his views on warfare in particular. In the future, I will turn back to a comparison and contrast of other features of his book to the ideas of Ayn Rand.