Hobbesian Libertarian Update

Yglesias, Fontana Labs, and Farrell have already dealt with this reprehensible Alan Dershowitz column, which goes entirely off the moral rails with its claim that “[t]he Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit.” I think the problem with the idea that genocide is perfectly justifiable as long you provide 24-hour notice and your victims are physically capable of becoming refugees is obvious, but Matt gets to the heart of the matter:

This amounts, in essence, to granting a license to purge civilian populations from any geographical area. Crucially, it employs a very strange definition of “voluntarily.” “Your money or your life,” says the mugger. I voluntarily (?) refuse to fork over the cash and get shot, but it’s okay to kill me because I could have given up the money. That seems wrong.

Similarly, decent people take the view that it’s wrong for Hezbollah to take a bunch of basically un-aimable rockets and point them in the direction of Israeli cities and hope they kill some people. Instead of doing that, Hezbollah could identify some legitimate targets inside the city in question, then state that they’ll be targeting those facilities but their rockets have extremely poor aim and so civilians have 48 hours to leave the city, and then start firing the rockets. This alternative procedure would, I think, alter the situation not at all.

Essentially, Dershowitz is advocating a Hobbesian standard of what constitutes consent–if you consent at the point of a gun, it’s still consent. The incompatibility of this definition with any kind of liberal democratic practices is manifest.

At this point, it’s worth remembering Tara McKelvey’s superb article about academics who developed all kinds of strained arguments to defend (American) torture. As you may remember, Dershowitz is a prominent player there as well…

UPDATE: And Digby is correct to note that this logic is the same as Ward Churchill’s “Little Eichmanns” argument. See also Billmon.