Anthony Gregory wrote:

AG: if you believe it is ethical to drop atomic bombs on innocent people, you are categorically not a libertarian.

It's not the case that Hiroshima was a city of only innocents that America bombed for sport: From Wikipedia:

At the time of its bombing, Hiroshima was a city of considerable industrial and military significance. Some military camps were located nearby such as the headquarters of the Fifth Division and Field Marshal Shunroku Hata's 2nd General Army Headquarters, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan. Hiroshima was a major supply and logistics base for the Japanese military. The city was a communications center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops. [...] The city was mobilized for "all-out" war, with thousands of conscripted women, children and Koreans working in military offices, military factories and building demolition and with women and children training to resist any invading force. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki ]

You seem to again be posing the moral question of whether it is ever permissible in war to take any actions that can be known in advance will cause the deaths of innocents. When you posed that question in our earlier conversation, I asked you:

So if we know that resisting a military invasion of America would cause one innocent death, we're not allowed to resist?

I'm still waiting for an answer. If you say no, you look silly.  If you say yes, then you have to confront the hard facts from the article I excerpted at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/knowinghumans?p=187. In particular, this:

Several American historians led by Robert Newman have insisted vigorously that any assessment of the end of the Pacific war must include the horrifying consequences of each continued day of the war for the Asian populations trapped within Japan's conquests. Newman calculates that between a quarter million and 400,000 Asians, overwhelmingly noncombatants, were dying each month the war continued. Newman et al. challenge whether an assessment of Truman's decision can highlight only the deaths of noncombatant civilians in the aggressor nation while ignoring much larger death tolls among noncombatant civilians in the victim nations.

And also:

The Japan War Ministry's Special Order of August 4, 1944 required that Japanese forces immediately execute all Allied POW's, numbering over 100,000, in the event of any invasion of the Japanese home islands. [http://pekingduck.org/archives/002772.php]

The Truman library in Independence, MO, has the original Japanese order stating they would execute all prisoners of war if America invaded. [http://www.bataansurvivor.com/content/surrender_liberation_and_repatriation/3.php

Quoting the Japanese Vice Minister of War on its policy regarding the "final disposition" of prisoners:

Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups or however it is done, with mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, decapitation, or what, dispose of them as the situation dictates. In any case it is the aim not to allow the escape of a single one, to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces. [ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bataan/filmmore/ps_order.html ]

It's very easy to sit in Berkeley in 2005 and pontificate about the deaths of innocents in Japan sixty years ago. It's another thing altogether to sit in the Oval Office in August 1945 and confront an array of choices, each of which involves the certain deaths of at least thousands of innocents. Truman made a choice that saved hundreds of thousands of innocents, and a similar number of Japanese combatants. He put the lives of all these people ahead of his own selfish interest in having the cleanest possible hands. You could learn from such an example of moral courage.

Mark Stroberg wrote:

MS> Brian honestly believes that you can swap "numbers for numbers" of dead and conclude that, in a given situation, if there are less dead than another situation, the first situation is the preferred scenario, regardless of who the dead are, or the reasons why they were killed. <MS

I never said that a single net life saved justifies any possible reason for killing any set of humans. Instead, I'm saying that sometimes in a war the net savings of innocent lives can be so great that it can justify efforts that themselves kill innocents despite all reasonable efforts to avoid it.

Anthony Gregory wrote:

AG> So, by Holtz's standard, woult it be "libertarian" to murder a rich man, plunder his estate and use the wealth to save the lives of dozens of people in the Third World by paying for their escape from tyranny? <AG

Nope, because if the innocents can be saved by plundering this man's estate, then they can be saved by a much more equitable taxation policy. Oh, and the part about murdering the man is sophomoric silliness. You might as well throw in some imaginary torture while you're at it.