Liberty & Power: Group Blog
The Max Borders Controversy
The following is my response to comments made by Mark Brady and Bill Woolsey on the Max Borders' affair. To recap, as Matthew Barganier has noted, Borders said the following: "If boiling people alive best served the interests of the American people, then it would be neither be moral or immoral."
In response to Bill, Borders' wording about boiling people alive was more than "bad public relations." It was appalling regardless of context and strikes against the grain of every liberal tradition I understand and respect. It also shows a certain callousness and insensitivity which represents a dangerous, but increasingly important, strain among some "Team America" libertarians and many, many conservatives post 9-11.
I fully agree with Mark Brady that the quotation (in whatever context) is dangerously anti-cosmopolitan and dare I say jingoistic or, at the very least, encourages attitudes of that type. Many of us, including Mark, were first attracted to this movement in great part because it embraced universalism and respect for the dignity of individuals wherever they lived.
As to Bill's broader point, I do not think I ripped the quotation unfairly out of context (though I provided the necessary links so others could read all of Borders' comments). The fact that he made the statement at all shows a certain cavalier attitude which invites criticism.
Bill interprets Borders' view as a "contrarian notion that those who reject respecting the rights of some persons, have no rights that the person whose rights they reject is obligated to respect. And there seems to be some notion that those who live in communities where the rights of some persons are not enforced what no rights that the persons whose rights are not enforced have an obligation."
I do share this specific contractarian notion (nor particularly fathom what it entails) but let me address both of those points.
As to the first, there are thousands of criminals in the United States who "reject respecting the rights of some persons." That is why so many are in prison in the first place. Since they do not respect my rights, does this mean that it is not immoral to boil them alive? If we lived in a society that did not condemn such an act as immoral, it would certainly not be a liberal one in any recognizable sense.
Perhaps, as the second section of this quotation indicates, Borders believes that it is not necessarily immoral to condemn the act of boiling people alive who are in "communities where the rights of some persons are not enforced."
Let me point out first, of course, that no society on earth (certainly not ours) fully enforces the rights of all individuals. The thousands of Americans who have lost their property through eminent domain to build shopping malls or have been thrown in jail for using or selling drugs are proof enough of that. Therefore, we have already flunked the test of respecting rights. To be sure, we are better than most societies but....that still leaves remarkably far from approximating the ideal.
Leaving aside morality, making it open season on foreign rights violators who do not live in societies which respect rights is not a very effective way to promote pro-liberty ideas in the world. If we do not lead by example, why should anyone bother to take what we have to say seriously?
To this day, for example, the United States has still not lived down the black mark of intentionally "boiling alive" thousands of non-combatants (including infants) at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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