Social justice warriors often suppose that since they are advancing “justice” they are entitled to do whatever they deem necessary to defend their cause. Any atrocity they commit should be viewed sympathetically because, after all, they are on the side of the angels. In the public discourse on crime and punishment, they argue that if the criminal is a victim of “systemic racism” this means he should always be understood primarily as a victim of injustice who deserves compassion. As reported in a recent case,

The Democratic mayor of the city where a Ukrainian refugee was allegedly stabbed to death by a known criminal has called for “compassion” for the suspect.… Ms Lyles said that Charlotte “must do better” for people like Mr Brown, who is homeless, as they “need help and have no place to go.”

This is a modern iteration of the influential discourse surrounding the crimes of another Mr. Brown—the abolitionist hero John Brown. Slavery violates the right to self-ownership, and therefore, as many abolitionists saw it, that would justify waging a defensive war against slavery. The deeds and misdeeds of John Brown are said to be best understood in light of the fact that he was a virtuous man engaged in the justified cause of punishing slaveowners and setting slaves free. The argument is that it does not matter that he happened to kill innocent people either by mistake or because they happened to be present at the time of his attack—that is all to be subsumed within the overall righteousness of his crusade against slavery. As the Battlefield Trust reports,

Born in Torrington, Connecticut, John Brown belonged to a devout family with extreme anti-slavery views.

…

In response to the sacking of Lawrence, Kansas, John Brown led a small band of men to Pottawatomie Creek on May 24, 1856. The men dragged five unarmed men and boys, believed to be slavery proponents, from their homes and brutally murdered them. Afterwards, Brown raided Missouri – freeing eleven slaves and killing the slave owner.

What the Battlefield Trust does not mention is that the unarmed men and boys in Kansas who were “believed to be slavery proponents” were not slave owners. They were, however, farmers from Tennessee, which was a slave state, and on that basis John Brown’s band wrongly assumed that they were likely to be slavery proponents. The mother of the slain boys later wrote to John Brown:

…you can now appreciate my distress, in Kansas, when you then and there entered my house at midnight and arrested my husband and two boys and took them out of the yard and in cold blood shot them dead in my hearing, you cant say you done it to free our slaves, we had none and never expected to own one, but has only made me a poor disconsolate widow with helpless children while I feel for your folly.

In these types of cases, people often wrongly assume that once the cause is deemed to be righteous any steps taken to further that cause are, necessarily, ethically and morally sound. In addition to many other problems with that reasoning, it overlooks the doctrine of proportionality, which is an important principle of justice. Proportionality reflects the classical ideal that the punishment should always fit the crime. Even without getting into a debate on the rights and wrongs of both sides of a debate, the principle of proportionality marks the boundary of what is considered reasonable conduct in the exercise of one’s own rights and the furtherance of what one believes to be a justified cause. Proportionality plays a particularly important role in delineating the boundaries of self-defense, because beyond a certain point what started out as self-defense may amount to an act of aggression—when it becomes all out of proportion to the initial attack. Without any notion of reasonableness or proportionality, there would be no principled limits to the exercise of one’s own rights. The right to self-defense would entitle a homeowner to summarily execute any trespasser who happened to tread onto his property.

In the Ethics of Liberty, Murray Rothbard argues that any form of violent defense must be proportionate, otherwise the victim of a crime turns into an aggressor himself. No one can claim to uphold the non-aggression principle while he brazenly commits acts of aggression against others cloaked in the mantle of defense. First, violent defense must always be in response to a “clear and present” danger which is usually lacking in the cases under discussion. Even supposing there had been any danger, as argued by the progressives who see “systemic racism” as an ever-present form of “structural violence,” the next question that must be considered is “how far does the right of violent defense go?” Rothbard’s principle of proportionality holds that “the criminal loses his rights to the extent that he deprives another of his rights.” 

He illustrates this with the example of a storekeeper who claims “the right to kill a lad as punishment for snatching a piece of his bubblegum.” A storekeeper who decides to execute a mere shoplifter is himself an aggressor: “the storekeeper has become a far greater criminal than the thief, for he has killed or wounded his victim—a far graver invasion of another’s rights than the original shoplifting.” In this example, the shoplifter has not used physical violence, nor threatened explicitly or implicitly to use violence—the extent of violence in each case is not a theoretical matter but is entirely fact dependent. Further, it should be noted that proportionality is not the same as “equal,” as quite clearly the impact of a crime cannot be measured in such a way as to ensure that the retaliation or punishment is “equal.” Rothbard gives many examples where the appropriate punishment may well be greater than the crime, without being thereby disproportionate.

Readers will be aware that in Rothbard’s philosophy, “racism” is not a moral wrong because the only moral wrongs in his libertarian system are violations of property rights. But even if one were to accept the premise of the social justice warriors that “racism” is a moral wrong, under the principle of proportionality it would never be justified for a “victim” of racism to retaliate against “structural harm” by attacking the person or property of another. That would be grotesquely out of proportion, to use Rothbard’s terminology.

It is irrelevant, therefore, that a criminal may feel that “the system” has been unfair to him. Even if we were to suppose that to be true, for the sake of argument, it still would not justify acts of aggression against others. The same reasoning applies to slavery as a moral wrong. Although slavery in the West was abolished in the nineteenth century, there are still progressive liberals today who argue that the “legacies” of slavery still subsist, and that this justifies the victims of such legacies in violating the property rights of others. Again, even if that argument were to be accepted as valid, it would still be grotesquely disproportionate to commit acts of aggression against others.

To be clear, it is not argued here that the social justice warriors are correct to view themselves as righteous crusaders, nor is it suggested that the only thing wrong with them is their lack of proportionality and if only they would act proportionately their evil worldview would become good. The argument is, rather, that even if one were to assume their premise to be sound (to be clear, that is not my own view), it would still be wrong for them to rely on that premise as an excuse to violate the rights of others. Even taken on their own terms, those who use their own righteousness as an excuse to commit crimes against others are grotesquely outrageous.