One can imagine a just war between a state representing individuals who want to be free and left alone and, on the other side, a tyrannical state aggressor intent on subjecting and looting the libertarian country. If the libertarians win, liberty would increase in the world. But reality is never so simple and war instead typically reinforces, on all sides, the power of the state and the idea that the individual must submit to the collective. War does not bring out the best in all people (contrary to what state propaganda suggests, including the parading women soldiers in Moscow shown on the featured image of this post).
An interesting Wall Street Journal story about the successful resistance of a small Ukrainian town illustrates how war arouses primitive instincts (Yaroslav Trofimov, “A Ukrainian Town Deals Russia One of the War’s Most Decisive Routs,” March 16), although I admit it is not the most tragic illustration in the history of warfare:
Russian soldiers took over villagers’ homes in Rakove and created a sniper position on a roof. They looked for sacks to fill with soil for fortifications, burned hay to create a smoke screen and demanded food.
A local woman who agreed to cook for the Russians is now under investigation, said Mr. Dombrovsky. “A traitor—she did it for money,” he said. “I don’t think the village will forgive her and let her live here.”
In the practice of war if not generally in tribal morality, a traitor is anybody who takes another side than his tribe’s. But note the other element in the story: she did it for money! I suspect that Mr. Dombrovsky would not have been happier if she had done it for free, perhaps “for the cause,” and with a big smile. At any rate, money is apparently an aggravating factor (even if paid in deeply depreciated rubles), which corresponds to the reigning orthodoxy among our own academic philosophers.
A moral case can be made that coerced cooperation with the violent aggressors of one’s neighbor is acceptable, but not cooperation for the purpose of obtaining personal benefits. But then, isn’t avoiding harm a personal benefit? Does it matter that Mr. Dombrovsky, who is a special forces commander, is presumably paid himself? What if the woman had cooked for free and was only paid a tip afterwards ?
We don’t know enough about this case to make any serious ethical analysis, but I would bet that Mr. Dombovsky’s comment reflected a generalized suspicion toward individualist behavior on free markets. If that is true, we are not dealing with the pure war case of a group of libertarians defending themselves against aggressors, but with two more or less authoritarian camps. Not surprisingly, dealing with actual cases is more complicated than with stylized models.
All that seems to confirm the classical-liberal or libertarian idea that an individual usually acts in his own personal interest and that only a minimal ethics—James Buchanan would say “an ethics of reciprocity”—should be recognized as a necessary constraint on personal behavior in a free society. (See my review of Buchanan Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative in the forthcoming Spring issue of Regulation.)
Female Russian soldiers of the Military University of the Russian Defense Ministry march along the Red Square during the Victory Day military parade to mark the 72nd anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in the 1941-1945 Great Patriotic War, the Eastern Front of World War II, in Moscow, Russia, 9 May 2017.
READER COMMENTS
Ghost
Mar 17 2022 at 12:29pm
Second sentence: “increase” should be “decrease” (unless you are making a point so subtle as to be beyond my comprehension!..)
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 17 2022 at 1:59pm
Thanks, Ghost (first time I say this in my life)! “The latter” referred to “the libertarian country.” When I was writing, I saw the potential problem. which is that the latter is also the former in the first mention of the two sides. I’ll think about whether or not if is worth changing.
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 17 2022 at 2:07pm
I finally changed it. There is no point making the reader stumble on a logical puzzle.
Henry
Mar 17 2022 at 1:25pm
On the other hand, perhaps a monetary motive might at times exonerate someone working with the occupying power. I imagine that in 1945 a Parisian prostitute was forgiven whereas a woman who simply fell in love with a handsome Fritzie got her hair shorn.
Whenever a people experience a foreign conqueror, some will be co-opted, some will actively resist, and most will keep a low profile.
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 17 2022 at 2:02pm
Henry: Great (and intriguing) point in your first paragraph!
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 17 2022 at 3:48pm
This reminds me of a monsignor of the Catholic seminary I attended in my teenage years. In a speech to a few hundred of us boys, he asked not to forget that we say “falling in love, not climbing in love.”
Craig
Mar 17 2022 at 2:05pm
What if she were a mechanic and repaired their tanks? In US law treason itself is limited to physically fighting the war of course, but there is still the concept of trading with the enemy. I suppose there are degrees, as there are with most crimes, and indeed if she were in front of a hearing she could attempt to plead duress of some sorts, but at the end of the day, without knowing much more than what I have read here, the facts as suggested reek of a collaborator.
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 17 2022 at 3:43pm
Craig: Your comment opens a new area of inquiry. In a Hayekian perspective as in a law-and-economics approach, the common law is efficient. Neglecting the fact that there is probably little common law left in criminal law, one would expect (as you suggest) the law to efficiently cut the Gordian knot of whether the cook is guilty of treason or not. The problem with war anyway is that the law is often not enforced and violated.
Moreover, does the law recognize opportunity cost? What you don’t earn compared to your preferred alternative is a cost as much as what you lose. The opportunity cost of the cook’s time was what she could have earned during the time she cooked for the Russians or the value (in her own preferences) of what she would have enjoyed doing in the same time (cooking for her herself or her family, for example)? Back to the original question: Why would we blame her for being paid her (opportunity) cost? Also note Henry’s point above.
Craig
Mar 17 2022 at 11:13pm
Well I’d suggest the point is that the occupying force should pay its own opportunity cost and make one of its own soldiers cook instead of otherwise being engaged in other military activities.
One might ask from whence this duty of loyalty comes from? The US has a constitutional clause on treason, but notwithstanding the rejection of the concept of a subject in favor of the concept of a citizen, the concept of allegiance is really if you think about it a vestigial trait of feudal social relationships, ie the liege lord would be a person one might owe a ligeance. The concept becomes interwoven with the concept of being a ‘natural born citizen’
“Ligeantia est vinculum fidei….As the ligatures or strings do knit together the joints of all the parts of the body, so doth ligeance join together the Sovereign and all his subjects, quasi uno ligamine.” – Calvin’s Case
Figured you might enjoy the Latin.
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 18 2022 at 11:45am
Craig: The main body of your comment raises what is, since Plato and Antigone, the essential philosophical question about political power. Your first paragraph is economics and easier to deal with. The Russian commander (or at least his bosses) wants to minimize his battalion’s opportunity cost (which is the same as maximizing “profits” or net benefits). Exploiting the advantages of the division of labor is one essential means. He is not going to divert a man to cooking who is more efficient at blowing up things than at cooking, while he has under his hands a woman who is (by hypothesis) more efficient at cooking that at blowing up things; in other words, the opportunity costs to have his his brute doing the cooking is higher than the opportunity cost of “hiring” the woman to do it.
Vivian Darkbloom
Mar 17 2022 at 2:34pm
“But note the other element in the story: she did it for money! I suspect that Mr. Dombrovsky would not have been happier if she had done it for free, perhaps “for the cause,” and with a big smile.”
If I try (not too hard) to put myself into the mind of Mr. Dombrovsky I would imagine that the purpose of the phrase she did it for money was merely his way to express that her actions were voluntary rather than involuntary. In other words, she didn’t do what she did because the Russians threatened her that if she didn’t do it…. This rather realistic possibility does not seem to enter into your analysis. I’m pretty sure he would have been just as displeased (if not more so) if she had voluntarily done the cooking for free but the crucial point is that this was not part of the underlying facts.
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 17 2022 at 4:07pm
Vivian: But then, consider Henry’s counterpoint above. Was the woman lover of a Germain officer in Paris more to blame (as the women like her actually were) than the prostitute who sold her services to another German officer? Is the answer that a quicky did not do as much to help the German occupying forces as a hot bowl of soup would do to help Russian invaders? Or is it that doing something voluntarily for the money is not really worse that doing it voluntarily for other considerations? Why did not the Ukrainian officer did not simply say, “She did it voluntarily”? My point: money does not deserve its bad reputation.
Vivian Darkbloom
Mar 17 2022 at 4:16pm
As far as I know, the woman involved was not French and the soldier not German, nor was the woman in love (as far as we know) with any of the Russian soldiers. And, the stereotypical characterisation of wartime French woman was largely about a lengthy occupation, not about a country currently in the throes of violent conflict, as is Ukraine.
Regarding the actual limited facts before us: The phrase you quote seems to me to be a sort of Rohrshach test that says more about those interpreting it than the person who uttered it. I think you reading way too much into this….
Everett
Mar 21 2022 at 3:25pm
Think about it this way Pierre:
She was forced to do it. <- no blame attaches
She did it for money! <- blame attaches, expel her!
She did it for free!! <- blame attaches, string her up!!
Everett
Mar 21 2022 at 3:27pm
And then of course the fourth option:
She poisoned their food!!! <- Hero of Ukraine!!!
David Seltzer
Mar 17 2022 at 4:31pm
Hypothetical question. She is given a choice, receive money or be brutally coerced to cook for the Russians. Given those horrible options, would the village forgive her? If she takes the money, no matter how insignificant, she could contribute it to the village’s needs.
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 18 2022 at 10:59am
David: That’s not an unrealistic hypothesis. The occupiers had an interest in having a less reluctant cooperation, and for that purpose to offer her money. But they and she presumably knew that if she did not accept the offer, she would be forced to cooperate anyway.
In the case of very reluctant cooperation, the need to divert one soldier to watching her while she was cooking would have been more pressing, lest she poisons the food or taint it. On the other hand, as you point out, if she were paid, she could launder her cooperation by giving it, or part of it, to the resistance.
The problem, therefore, is not “money” but the “net” cooperation.
Mactoul
Mar 17 2022 at 9:03pm
Libertarian state is an oxymoron.
Libertarianism being a positive denial of the political nature of man. As the slogan went Lose the We!
Hence, a libertarian would find authoritarianism rampant everywhere in the real world. A pity that life fails to live up to libertarian ideals.
I wish some libertarian would engage with Russell Kirk’s fierce critique of libertarianism as given out in The chirping sect.
T Boyle
Mar 22 2022 at 6:22pm
Emphatically disagree with your first and second sentences.
Many people – along with you, I think – seem to believe that libertarianism is a philosophy that rejects the state. It doesn’t: that’s anarchism. Libertarianism is not the same as anarchism; they bear a family resemblance at first glance, but that’s all.
Libertarianism is a philosophy of the state: it is a guideline for how to run a state in a way that will make it “successful in the long run,” i.e., that will maximize the long-term total welfare of the citizens or maximize the long-term wealth of the state itself (those goals seem to overlap a good deal). It advocates that the state should take active steps to offset the natural tendency of power to accumulate – especially through the institutions of the state itself – in a relatively few places. It guides that there should be a rebuttable presumption that decisions should be made by the individuals directly involved, because they have the best information about the issues involved, and as little as possible by centralized authority (which does not, and where the payoffs to corruption are especially large). Notice that this is a rebuttable presumption: there are familiar rebuttals: pollution being a standard one. We even have some guidelines telling us when rebuttal is likely to be appropriate, from Coase’s observations about transaction costs.
Libertarianism is not popular. Most people prefer to see their values and prejudices validated by others – and imposed on others by force if necessary. People are naturally communitarian – as is democracy itself (often mistaken for a form of liberty, democracy is in fact a mechanism for collective decision-making and has no philosophical limits to its scope). Usually, the state must maintain libertarian philosophies against the preferences of the people. This is why the US has a Bill of Rights, of course: it is there, not to protect the people from the state, but to try to protect sound state policies from the people.
In wartime, when the state is weak (yes, weak), its ability to sustain libertarian policies is limited. In addition, transaction costs are likely to be very high in wartime. We do not much liberty during wartime – nor are we likely to see citizens (or the state) doing especially well, either. Libertarian policies are near the top of a state’s Maslow’s pyramid, not down near the bottom.
Anarchism, of course, is a philosophy that rejects the state. It claims that a state is neither necessary nor desirable. This philosophy is most likely to see its realization when the state is weak. Its generally poor reputation derives from two facts: first, people are naturally communitarian; second, living conditions when the state is weak are generally pretty awful. It also fails intellectually because it cannot address the basic game theory problem: in an anarchist world, who will oppose the leader who wishes to impose herself as the State – and has a mob behind her? (“Private armies” do not solve this problem; they are the source of it.)
Pierre Simard
Mar 17 2022 at 9:31pm
La guerre est une affaire d’État; sans l’État il n’y aurait ni guerre, ni traître.
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 18 2022 at 11:06am
Pierre: If by “state” you mean any sort of authority that imposes a prohibitive cost to non-obedience, you are right, nearly be definition. If instead you mean only “organized political power,” it’s another matter: much anthropological evidence indicates that primitive tribes were engaging in wars before the state.
Comments are closed.