Here in Alabama, the capture of Eric Robert Rudolph is big news. Rudolph is alleged to have bombed an abortion clinic in Birmingham in 1998, killing an off-duty police officer and permanently injuring a nurse. Since that time, he mocked federal officials who spent millions of dollars scouring the hills of western North Carolina searching for him. Tired of living on the lam, Rudolph himself chose the time and place of his capture.
The news coverage is intense. By contemporary PC standards, Rudolph has become this year’s Face of Evil, replacing Saddam from last year, Osama from the year before, and McVeigh from the year before that. The story dominates the press. Even the insufferable Paul Finebaum – a local sports columnist – conducted an interview with the widow of the slain police officer on his sports talk show, replete with the obligatory crocodile tears and saccharine. (Listen to the interview here.)
If guilty, Rudolph should pay for his actions. (He pleaded not guilty in initial court hearings earlier this week.) He violated a precept long enshrined in common law later codified by positive law. This precept states that one cannot commit evil in order to achieve what one considers to be the greater good. Abortion is a practice that should be of concern to all libertarians because it represents another legal attack on the human person – pre-born babies, in this case. However, efforts to stop this bloody practice are not legitimate when they violate others' property rights or when they inflict violence on third parties.
That one cannot do evil to achieve good is a principle central to Western civilization. Its roots go back at least as far as Aristotle and are a central theme of the Gospels (cf. Matthew 26:51–54). It underlies much of the Christian just-war theory as explained by Aquinas, and it buttressed much of the intellectual opposition to the recent war in Iraq by libertarian thinkers.
It is also a precept that is routinely violated by the state when it conducts any activity, including the imposition of taxes, the enforcement of regulations, or the dropping of bombs. Each activity involves the infliction of violence on others in order to achieve what the state considers to be the greater good. The results of Rudolph's alleged actions are no different from that of the state's, except that the destruction resulting from the state's actions occurs on a vastly larger scale. Indeed, the loss of innocent human life in Iraq makes the "collateral damage" that occurred in Birmingham pale in comparison. Both actions violate the precept that one cannot do evil to bring about good. The difference is one of degree, not one of kind.
It should be obvious that such results would never be tolerated in the private sector, where property rights are respected and where activities based on voluntary exchange create the interdependencies that form the basis for civilization itself. Why is the state routinely exempted from the standards demanded of market participants?
Rudolph is today's Face of Evil not because he violated this precept, because it is violated regularly. His biggest infraction was violating the state's monopoly power over its violation. For that he must pay, if only to be made an example of, because of the bad precedent it sets.
June 5, 2003
