War and the Morality of Americans

by Joseph Potter, LewRockwell.com

Murray Rothbard began his book Man, Economy, and State with the fact that the first truth to be discovered about human action is that it can be undertaken only by an individual human actor. Only humans have human ends and can act to obtain those ends. This means that "states", "collectives", or other "groups" can do things only by the actions of individual humans. It is using a metaphor to say that the American military invaded Canada in 1812. There is nothing wrong with using the metaphor as long as we understand that it was really an invasion of many individual humans who are each responsible for their own actions.

Lew Rockwell once pointed out that the ancient view of the state was that there are special laws of morality that apply to the state, and that the state was above the sort of judgment we might render in regards to the actions of an individual human being. This allowed the state to kill, steal, rape, pillage, or dominate in any manner it chose while still remaining "moral" since different rules applied to the state. The liberal tradition abolished this notion and replaced it with the idea that no state should act in any way that was not in accordance to the moral standards expected of the individual human.

"Yet the liberal tradition gradually abolished the idea of caste and special legal privilege. It asserted, more generally, that no group possesses a special license to lord it over others. St. Augustine might have been the first to observe that the moral status of Alexander the Great's conquests was more egregious than the pirate's depredations. The pirate molests the sea, but the emperor molests the world." (Lew Rockwell)

Hayek wrote that justice is the application of the same rules to everyone regardless of their station in life. He saw injustice as using different sets of rules for different classes of people. For example, the class of Americans called military men have no more right to kill innocent women and children than you or I do in our private lives.

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