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.