Suppose an aggressor is threatening your life and the only way to defend yourself and avoid being killed involves killing innocent people as “collateral damage”. (For example, a pirate ship is about to fire its cannons on your ship, and the only way to defend yourself involves destroying the pirate ship first with your cannons, even though you know there are innocent hostages on that ship who will die together with the pirates.)
In this case, is your act of killing innocent hostages justified, or are you responsible for your action? (i.e. do the victims’ heirs have a legitimately enforcible claim on your life)
Joseph Stalin or George Bush would probably wonder why you were even asking such an irrelevent question.
It sounds like you are expecting libertarianism to hold a single universally objective standard by which actions can be justified or not. Unfortunately, none exists and that is not what intelligent libertarianism is about. In your scenario, you would be committing an act of murder but in the end, nobody would probably find out you did it so… who cares?
This is a scenario no different from when you are a hostage and the hostagetaker threatens to kill you, unless you yourself kill one of the hostages (eg gladiators). In that case it is he who is the murderer regardless of the action you take.
Morally speaking you should try not go along with the hostagetaker’s or pirate’s game (but this has nothing to do with libertarianism), however no court would have grounds to prosecute you if you did, as no objective ethics can under any circumstances require you to become a martyr.
BTW, your pirate scenario is extremely unlikely. If you are going to try to justify “collateral damage” in state waged wars with it we are going to have a problem.
By anyone. (Maybe I should have said “justifiable”.)
It sounds like you are expecting libertarianism to hold a single universally objective standard by which actions can be justified or not. Unfortunately, none exists
I disagree strongly. Either there exist universal ethic rules (i.e. rules that are always valid, with no exception) or “anything goes”, i.e. your ethic is as good as anyone else’s, i.e. there can be no ethic.
How do I know that? Suppose you accept the idea that a rule can have exceptions. Then I can invent any crazy ethic rule. Of course, you would then try to reduce it ad absurdum, by showing that there exists a scenario where the rule, if applied, has consequences which I myself could not accept, and therefore I would be contradict myself. But then I could respond “ah but my rule does not apply to that case”. So you would never be able to reduce me to contradiction, and my crazy ethic would be as good as yours.
Libertarianism is merely a political philosophy, not a formal ethical system. The confusion is understandable because many people derive libertarianism from their ethical system, but libertarianism can be derived from opposing ethical systems, epistemologies, personal values, etc…
I said “libertarianism”, not “non-aggression principle”. They are not logically equivalent. If you affirm the NAP, then you are a libertarian. It is not the case that, if you are a libertarian, then you affirm the NAP.
After some thought, the scenario seems to me equivalent to the situation where A says to B: “Kill C, otherwise I will kill you”. If B does kill C, B is not responsible (A is).
For the same reason, I think in the original scenario the person who fires is not responsible for killing the hostages. (At least, I can see no relevant difference between the two scenarios.)
As others have said, this really should be directed at the NAP, rather than the political philosophy of libertarianism.
That said, under the NAP you have every right to defend yourself from the pirates in the situation that you laid out. The pirates are clearly agressing against your property and your life, as well as the lives and liberty of the hostages they have aboard. In this case, if you fired at the pirate ship, you would be using violence defensively rather than agressively. Now, since this is all about defending your own life and property, you may decide that you’d rather give up your life rather than see the hostages killed. That’s up to any one individual, and thier own personal moral codes. But regardless, you have the right to either choose to defend yourself or not. The murder of the hostages would be on thier captors hands for directly placing them in a situation where they could be killed by the use of otherwise completely legitimate force.
This, of course, is based on a very specific and unlikely scenerio where your present us with absolutely certain outcomes. The situation may change if, for example, you’re a bounty hunter and are actively seeking the pirates, and decide to, unprovoked, blow thier ship out of the water regardless of the hostages aboard.
After some thought, the scenario seems to me equivalent to the situation where A says to B: “Kill C, otherwise I will kill you”. If B does kill C, B is not responsible (A is).
For the same reason, I think in the original scenario the person who fires is not responsible for killing the hostages. (At least, I can see no relevant difference between the two scenarios.)
I think this scenerio and the original are two different situations. In the first, you (B) are directly attacking A who has happened to put C in harms way should you defend yourself. In your second scenerio, B is being threatened with violence by A, but B must attack C without at the same time attacking A. Since B doesn’t own C’s life, it would violate the NAP to do so, and B would technically be responsible for C’s death. However, it would be up to C’s heirs to decide whether to attempt to prosecute B or A.
I agree with the statement that you can kill them if you feel the need in order to protect your life. There’s no way of telling that the pirates wouldn’t have killed the hostages anyway or that they wouldn’t have kept putting people in the same situation in which they put you.
Since B doesn’t own C’s life, it would violate the NAP to do so, and B would technically be responsible for C’s death.
The part in bold does not follow and is indeed false in my opinion. It is true that NAP is being violated; but is not B who is violating the NAP; it is A who is violating it. The reason is that B is not acting of his own free will; (He is not free because he is under threat of invasive acts by someone else). So B is a mere instrument of A. The only one who is acting of his own free will, i.e. the only one who is not coerced by someone else, is A, and therefore A is the only one responsible.
The part in bold does not follow and is indeed false in my opinion. It is true that NAP is being violated; but is not B who is violating the NAP; it is A who is violating it. The reason is that B is not acting of his own free will; (He is not free because he is under threat of invasive acts by someone else). So B is a mere instrument of A. The only one who is acting of his own free will, i.e. the only one who is not coerced by someone else, is A, and therefore A is the only one responsible.
What you’re talking about there are mitigating circumstances, not actual free will. B is entirely acting of his own free will, unless A is somehow in control of his mind, or physically forcing his body. B can either choose to violate C’s right to life in order to preserve his own, or choose to not do so and loose his own life. Note that in both cases, both B and C continue to have the right to live. B’s does not trump C’s. Now, after the fact, it’s certainly understandable that someone would forgive B for thier actions, given the duress he was under, and you can throw lots of “what ifs” in there, but it doesn’t change the nature of the dilemma.
The pirate ship problem, however, involves A putting C in harms way while directly assaulting B. If B acts defensively to kill A, and A puts C in the path of that defensive force, then A is clearly the responsible party.
as one of the few here who believes in objective morality, I think, that everybody has a right to defend themselves but not at the expense of others, innocent people in this case. Hostages are not “collateral damage” (it’s a double speak), they are victims of an agression. Your agression, even if you tried defending yourself against pirates. Sure, the pirates put hostages in danger in a first place, so they would be procecuded in first (if anyone lived after such “defense”), at least, according to my logic.