Anthony Gregory wrote:

AG> if you believe it is ethical to drop atomic bombs on innocent people <AG

BH> It's not the case that Hiroshima was a city of only innocents that America bombed for sport. <BH

AG> It doesn't matter that Hiroshima was not "a city of only innocents." I never said it was. Nor did I say it was "bombed for sport." <AG

I didn't say you said those things.  What you did was deliberately choose broad wording that included both the actions I supported and other actions I would oppose, in order to taint the former with the latter.  This tactic of yours suggests that you're reluctant to confront my actual position on its own merits.

AG> Of course, "America" didn't bomb Hiroshima. The U.S. government is not the same thing as America <AG

Wow, thanks for clearing that up. I'll have to re-think my whole position now.... :-)

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

AG> The resistence itself would cause an innocent death that the invasion wouldn't? Can you explain how such a circumstance would come about? <AG

Are you seriously denying that a resisted invasion typically results in more innocent deaths than an unresisted one?  Perhaps you're only thinking about an invader intent on exterminating all the innocents who would be put at risk by resistance.  Or perhaps you're only thinking of a resistance that uses clubs and knives instead of artillery and bombs. Or perhaps you're ignorant of the higher levels of civilian deaths in, for example, the nations that offered more instead of less resistance to Nazi invasion.

AG> If you believe all this, you are not a libertarian. Truman clearly initiated force on innocent people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To call this "an example of moral courage" is an obscenity. Such bean-counting of human lives is not what the non-aggression principle is all about. <AG

This is not an argument, this is just an assertion that you still don't agree with me that minimizing the net infringement of people's liberty is more important than having the cleanest possible hands.  I'm sure neither of us will change the other's mind on this matter, so I'm happy to let the record of this debate stand as is.

AG> You seem determined to find ways to justify the initiation of large amounts of force. <AG

It is indeed logically possible that I secretly enjoy the initiation of force for its own sake, and that when I use reason and evidence to rebut your arguments it's just to advance my secret agenda.  But this theory of yours is unfalsifiable in the absence of mind-reading technology, and so your use of it comes close to an admission that you can't rebut my arguments when taken at face value.

AG> So would it be "libertarian" even to tax him? <AG

Like many (most?) libertarians, I do not agree that taxation is never justified under any possible circumstances.

Aggression doesn't end up minimized if the strategy for minimizing it is just for liberty-lovers to promote "aggression virginity" by the example of their abstinence. Anarchists claim that if we're ever willing to initiate force to maximize liberty, then what we're maximizing cannot truly count as liberty. They assume that the landscape of attainable levels of liberty has no local maxima, i.e. that an investment in force initiation could never lead to a net reduction in the overall incidence of force initiation. This assumption is in my judgment obviously false, and is what distinguishes non-aggression anarchists from anti-aggression libertarians. Pure libertarians say it's more important to minimize aggression than to merely request abstinence from it.