J. Gregory Wharton has brought up a point I have long been wanting to discuss. I have frequently faulted my Objectivist-oriented friends for their willingness to condone violations of individual rights that frequently occur in the foreign policy of the United States (and all other modern) governments. To take the most blatant example: Bombing civilians in enemy nations. Here we have a case where the U.S. government (and all other modern governments, I add) willfully tries to murder people who have committed no crime. Now I have heard several different ways to defend such behavior, and I don't find any of them convincing. The first way goes like this: the dictator who provoked the war is the one who is _really_ responsible for the deaths of civilians that Americans bomb, because he made the bombing necessary. I have two replies: first, the dictator does not make it "necessary," but merely convenient, easier. The people dropping the bombs still have the choice as to whether they will kill innocents to attain their goal. Second, I don't know anyone who will pursue this logic to its conclusion. Would it be legitimate to kidnap and torture to death the child of a murderer in order to make him turn himself in? Undoubtably this might be more effective than methods that refrained from torturing the child; but what about the rights of the child? Indeed, we might consider even the polar case where it really _is_ necessary to violate the rights of the child to catch his murderer-father. Would it then become permissible to torture or kill the innocent child? Would it "really" be his father who is to blame for our murdering him? Seems unlikely. The second way goes something like this: rights arise in a certain context, the context in which peaceful, mutually beneficial interaction is possible. A wartime situation does not satisfy such conditions; therefore we may do whatever is most efficient in achieving our goal, including murdering as many innocent civilians as necessary. There are several layers to my reply to this. 1. Now on the roughly Aristotelian reading of Rand, treating people justly (of which not violating their rights is a species) is not merely instrumental to one's well-being, but indeed is a _part_ of one's well-being. Life not mean life at any price, but "life on a human level"; it is only life possessing certain attributes which is really valuable, not merely biological survival. Now if we adhere to this (plausible, both textually and philosophically) interpretation of Rand, the question of when to abandon the virtue of respecting individual rights is far from easy. If indeed the really valuable life is of necessity a just life, then the claim that we should quit respecting others' individual rights when it ceases to be in our interest is an empty box. I don't want to pursue my merely biological survival, which does indeed dictate that I sometimes murder innocent people; I want to pursue a truly human life, which requires that I be a just person and respect the rights of others. We use reasoning like this all of the time when we have the opportunity to steal things without any chance of being caught; namely, my self-interest is primarily in being the kind of person I think I ought to be, and only secondarily in having the _things_ I want to have. And this kind of reasoning applies fairly well to the case of war: It would indeed promote my raw biological survival to murder the innocent whenever it is convenient, but a life of that kind would not be worth continuing. 2. There is a second reading of Rand, which I uncharitably refer to as the Stirnerian reading. On this view, virtues such as justice (and as a corollary, respecting others' rights) are indeed _purely_ instrumental. If justice fails to promote our continued survival, then so much the worse for justice. Now this view makes it very easy to justify killing innocent people when it is convenient; but it also leads to a number of other implausible conclusions. For example: this view would indeed counsel stealing when we could certainly get away with it; and if the chance to commit the perfect crime that would "set us for life" were to come along, then it would counsel us to commit it, however many innocent bodies we walked over. Indeed, it has more everyday implications as well: since we take risks all of the time (e.g., driving to work), then we should also be willing to take small risks if the payoff is large enough. Basically this view counsels violating others' rights when the chance of punishment is low and the severity of punishment is small. But notice that this really winds up obliterating the very idea of individual rights; for the reason that I should not treat you in certain ways must never be that you have a _right_ to just treatment, but that it would harm _me_. In which case, your rights do no work; I treat you the same as if you didn't have them. Interpretations like this are what give Rand a bad name; and I don't think there is much textual support for it, though it does give the only really sound basis for ignoring the rights of innocents in our foreign policy. Which gets me to the thrust of all this. I frequently here statements like: "America's self-interest is the _only_ basis on which foreign policy should be conducted." (Indeed, Objectivists are far from the only group that likes to say this.) And unless we take this in a _very_ specialized context, which understands the just treatment of others as an integral part of one's own self-interest, this strikes me as a blanket prescription for our government to violate the rights of people in other countries when it is convenient. It sounds good when it is used to keep our government from intervening still more than it does; but a far better prescription would be to say that insofar as a government is justified in the first place, it should promote our self-interest _without_ violating the rights of anyone in any nation. And when we take this criterion seriously, we will see that the great injustice done by the American government has not been to charge into altruistic crusades, but to heedlessly violate the rights of innocents in the process.