Atheist Ethicist: Air Strikes in Libya

Atheist Ethicist has written a blog post on the air strikes against Libya. He tentatively supports them by making an analogy between governments and households. Thus far there has been one comment against the strikes on the basis that it would be validating Bush's doctrine of unilateral, preemptive war.

On this last point I would disagree. First we should point out that many people who look at foreign policy actually see genuine preemption as being legitimate, but the example of the invasion of Iraq as being invalid. The justification for preemption comes from self defense. If someone threatens you with a gun, you don't need to wait until they actually shoot to attack them in order to defend yourself. The point here is that in order for preemption to be valid, you must be reasonably certain that the enemy actually intends to attack you.

Furthermore, the action wasn't based on preemption. It was justified on the basis of protecting the citizens of Libya. This is more like carrying out a policy that was in place under George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton with regard to Iraq. The charge of this attack is in any way unilateral is entirely without basis. It was in fact approved by the Security Council of the United Nations.

That having been said I am not sure I agree with the argument made in favor of the attack. I find the analogy to be imperfect, but I suppose we should work with it. If we are to take the example of a household we must acknowledge that the house is in a neighborhood far different from the ones that we are used to. There is no government or police for us to report the action to. Instead what we have is a something somewhat less substantial than a neighborhood association. This association has no power to tax, and the decisions that the association makes are not enforcible in any court or by any government. The only weight that any of these decisions carry is moral. Any decision that the association makes must depend on the actions of individual households for actual enforcement.

Now let us suppose that a patriarch has abused his authority in a neighboring household. What are our rights and responsibilities. We have a right to defend others. Since there is a neighborhood association provided there is little risk to ourselves it would be preferable to go through that association rather than acting alone. However, I would argue that there is no obligation to invade the neighbor's home, especially as this does entail risk. Even if the neighborhood association says that invasion of the home is justified, that would not have the effect of making invasion of the home a moral requirement. I would argue that if we have evidence of abuse, we have an obligation to report it. We have an obligation to oppose the abuse should the issue come to a vote.

To my knowledge the United Nations has never asserted that any nation has a moral obligation to invade any other nation. So the U.S. would be well within its rights to abstain from this conduct. To sum up, if we accept the analogy, we have an obligation to take the issue of human rights violations up in the United Nations and to oppose these violations should the issue come up for a vote. The moral issues regarding how we should behave if a vote is taken on whether or not military action taken against Libya is justified. Opposing such a measure could be an unjust action taken against the people of Libya.

Now we have the issue of what sort of actions are justified by our own government, or to use the analogy the patriarch of our own family. We can even use this analogy under a democracy, since a patriarch may be elected, or we might even compare the majority to a patriarch. In order to support the invasion of the neighboring home, our patriarch is forcibly depriving members of his household of their wages and paying other members of the household to risk their lives by invading the neighboring house. Is he justified in acting this way? I would argue that the patriarch can allow members of his household to financially support this action, but he shouldn't force them to contribute if they don't want to. I should add that he has no business whatsoever in forcing members of his household to risk their lives to invade the home. That would be the equivalent of a draft.

This is a decision that the patriarch would have to carefully consider. Allowing members of the household to participate in such an invasion might result in retaliatory action taken against the household. There would be no guarantee that if they succeeded in replacing the patriarch that the new patriarch wouldn't also abuse members of the house or support unjustified invasions of neighboring households.

So what we have here is that if our government wants to engage in action of this sort, they should be required to support it through donations rather than taxation. Taxation to support such an effort cannot be seen as a necessary evil since our government could survive very well without fighting this war. Libya poses little or no danger to the national sovereignty or territorial integrity of the U.S. The strongest objection to maintaining a no fly zone is a pragmatic one. This action is more likely to endanger Americans than to contribute to their security and freedom.