There are two means through which entities who find themselves in conflict (be it a conflict of interests, a conflict of opinion, or any other form of disharmony in their interaction) can resolve this conflict: reason or force, persuasion or coercion. Force, then, is any attempt to resolve a conflict through some means other than reason -- and it need not be simply physical violence. When human beings do not of their own wills choose their actions from among the morally valid choices available to them, they are experiencing force. Steal a man's wallet and you take his choices from him. You have initiated force even if you are a pickpocket and not an armed mugger.

This does not mean that an individual who, through his or her own choices and actions, must make a decision from among equally unattractive options is being coerced. This illogic is used by the envious to construe the simple fact of having more as the use of force against the poor(er), who are assumed to be ennobled by the mere fact of having less. This does not follow. If I, through my own choices (or even through factors outside my control, such as illness) lack the money to purchase the goods and services I require, another person who takes advantage of my misfortune to take my home or my car in exchange for food or medicine is not coercing me, even though the choice is an unpleasant one. I still make it based on my reason; I follow a thought process that tells me I must take some action, however unpalatable, and I choose the action I believe to be the "best" from among those available.

Likewise, when a nation experiences economic and resource pressures, a neighboring country who refuses to trade with the first nation is not using force by refusing to trade -- because trade must be mutual and voluntary. The two nations can only deal with each other through force (war) or through persuasion (negotiation for trade). Neither has the right to initiate force against the other; that is, to make the governing body of the other take an action at which that governing body does not arrive of its own free will, however distasteful the action may be.

Life owes you nothing save what you earn through your own actions. You are born with the inalienable property right to yourself and your actions and the products thereof -- and nothing more. This is true for individuals and remains true when individuals gather together and are arbitrarily classified as groups.

Physical force is coercion exercised by a physical agency, such as punching a man or shooting him or stealing his property. Initiating force means to START the use of force against an innocent individual, one who has not himself started its use against others.

Since men do not automatically come to the same conclusions, no code of ethics can escape the present issue. The moralist has to tell men how to act when they disagree (assuming they do not simply go their separate ways). In essence, there are only two viewpoints on this issue, because there are only two basic methods by which one can deal with a dispute. The methods are reason or force; seeking to persuade others to share one's ideas voluntarily, or coercing others into doing what one wishes regardless of their ideas.

When you use force, therefore, you attack a person's body (or seize his property) and thereby negate and dismiss as irrelevant his mind (and his conclusions and wishes).

The function of the mind is to perceive reality by performing a process of identification, and integrating the identified evidence into a context in accordance with the rule of an objective methodology (reasoning). This process presupposes a sovereign, volitional consciousness and must be performed egoistically, individualistically, and independently. It cannot, therefore, be forced.

To initiate force -- to, essentially, order a man to accept a conclusion against his own judgment -- is to order him to accept as true something that, according to what he knows, is not true (is either arbitrary or false). This amounts to ordering him to believe a contradiction; it is like demanding him to believe read is green, or 2 + 2 equals 5. One can torture an individual and force him to say these things, but one cannot make him truly believe them. Volition pertains to the act of initiating and sustaining the process of thought. A creature of volitional consciousness -- man -- cannot will himself to accept as true that which he sees to be baseless or mistaken.

Force thus makes a man act against his judgment. The virtue of rationality requires one to think, and then to be guided by his conclusions in action. Force clashes with both these requirements. Force used to change a man's mind acts to stop his mind (and thus make it inoperative as the source of his action). Force used to change a man's action shoves his mind (and thus its process of cognition) into the trash heap of the purposeless.

He who initiates force to change another's mind, therefore, works to detach his victim's consciousness from reality and therefore from life. He who initiates force to change another's action works to detach his consciousness from life and therefore from reality.   

-- Leonard Peikoff:

Legally, our society places a great deal of value on proportionate force -- the idea that force used in retaliation for initiated force must be equal to, but not greater than, the level of aggression employed by the instigator. The law and morality are often different, however, and this is a case in which our legal system is wrong.

When you initiate force, you remove the relationship or interaction from the realm of reason. You take that interaction or relationship into a theater where only force is a viable course of action. One cannot reason with a mugger or dissuade through rhetoric a would-be rapist.

Morally, then, the initiator relinquishes through his actions any claim to the respect or regard the defender would otherwise grant a fellow human being. Individuals who value reason and objective morality respect one another's sovereignty. In so doing they are recognizing the inalienable ownership of the self with which each of us is born. This is axiomatic, for if you do not own you, who does? Relativists, solipsists, and those who affect the pretense of wisdom and self-knowledge may respond to this declaration with the nihilistic query, "What is the self?" This, of course, is a meaningless evasion.

The respect for individual sovereignty is immediately invalidated by the initiation of force. As you have no right to violate the sovereignty of another who has not used force against you -- you do not have the right to initiate force -- he or she is justified in taking any action in response to your aggression.

Why is this? Only our ability to reason enables us to comprehend concepts like parity of force. The defender does not and cannot trust the aggressor to respect parity of force. A person who demonstrates a willingness to use force against you demonstrates a lack of respect for your sovereignty. By what rationale, then, could the defender limit his or her response to the attack by merely stopping the initial force? Leaving an aggressor able to resume the attack, or initiate another attack later, is simply illogical, for the attacker has given us evidence of his or her nature. As the Randian axiom goes, A is A. A thing is itself, constrained and defined by its nature. An individual who is willing to aggress once may become willing to aggress again if left capable to do so.

The defender is under no obligation, morally, to live under the sword of Damocles. Your sovereignty as an individual means that you have the inalienable right to enjoy your life and the products of your labors as you see fit. No one has the right to threaten you. There is no more credible threat of future aggression than the fact of past aggression.

Morally, then, a defender is justified in crushing his or her attacker utterly in an effort to remove the future threat such an aggressor will always represent. Our legal system does not recognize this. Our legal system would limit defenders to only that force necessary to stop the initial attack. This fails to recognize the moral violation that takes place when force is initiated. Such a principle would have us live our lives as cowards, running from these violations rather than dealing with them emphatically and finally. Following such a doctrine we do live physically intact if we can manage to successfully defend against and escape initiated force, but our quality of life suffers greatly -- for we must believe, wrongly, that moral equivalency exists between the defender and the attacker.

That is the crux of this matter: an attacker and a defender are not morally equivalent. An individual or a nation willing to initiate force relinquishes his, her, or its claim to the moral respect owed by others to a sovereign entity. Any actions taken in response to initiated force are morally justified because the initiator does not have the moral right to use force.

The false moral equivalence between attacker and defender is closely related to the vile moral relativism one must possess to be able to utter the simplistic statement, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

The difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist is found in the character of the methods of each, as much if not more than in the stated goals of each. Freedom fighters target the arms of those oppressing them -- military personnel, infrastructure used to deliver and facilitate force, political figures associated with the regime engaged in the oppression, etc. Terrorists, by contrast, target civilians specifically and deliberately.

Terrorists seek to create political change through creating fear and chaos purposefully. That fear is delivered not simply to the political figures associated with the terrorists' discontent, nor even to the arms of that entity, but to the populace of the targeted community or nation.

Declarations such as "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" are merely a means of evading our responsibility to exercise sound moral judgment in what we do and what we believe.

Moral judgments are not always easy to make, nor are the contexts in which they are made often simple. This does not, however, render unknowable the true nature of something viewed from those angles. When three blind men feel different parts of an elephant and come away with three different definitions of what an elephant is, this does not mean they are all equally right from their different perspectives -- the elephant remains what it is regardless of the lack of knowledge of those attempting to perceive it. The task before us, and before the blind men, is to apply logic to the data available in order to determine what is the true nature of the elephant before us, to the best of our abilities.

Some point to the fire bombing of Dresden or the atomic bombings of Japan as examples of terrorism precisely because these attacks were taken against civilians. These allegations fail to recognize the moral contrast between initiated and retaliatory force. A nation that commits aggression against another -- that starts a war -- initiates force and thus removes its relationship with the other nation(s) from the realm of persuasion, of reason. Any actions taken by the attacked nation(s), whose goal is to stop the aggression and remove the threat presented by the aggressor nation, are morally justified if they accomplish that goal. This could be interpreted as political pressure, yes -- but in the case of initiated force, it is a retaliatory pressure that would not be needed (and would not have been taken) had the other nation not decided to use force.

The firebombing of Dresden could be argued as an atrocity, a terrorist action. It was taken in reprisal for Germany's actions, but I could still see the argument holding if one can successfully demonstrate that A) the firebombing did not contribute to stopping the war; and (more importantly) B) the firebombing was not expected to stop the war. I honestly do not know if cogent arguments establishing this could be made, as I do believe any action taken against the aggressing nation is justified, but it would be interesting to see.

Of course, this opens a more difficult area of debate, in that those engaged in terrorist activities can claim their actions are justified as acts of retaliatory force, whose pressure is designed to stop the aggression of whomever the terrorists ultimate targets may be. We must then endure the lengthy process of trying to establish, rationally and reasonably, "who started it," and why, and whether the actions taken were justified.

These issues can, as I've said, be complex, but they are by no means unknowable. It is not simply a matter of perspective, of labels -- it is a question of evaluating the character of all actions taken in the context in which they occurred. Right and wrong are not relative any more than reality itself is relative. Our failure to perceive something does not change its nature.

There is a critical component to force that I've not yet touched on here, however: preemptive force. Preemptive force is not initiated force. It is retaliatory in nature in that the preempting entity is reacting to the credible threat of force. If I stand in the middle of a shopping mall and shout out, "I am taking you all hostage!" with a rifle slung over my shoulder, a passing armed guard would be morally justified to shoot me dead (though our legal system would demand that he place himself and others in greater danger by waiting for me to point my rifle at someone, I suppose).

Moral relativists will surely take issue with this, railing against the concept of preemptive retaliatory force on the grounds that we are taking action based on something we merely think. To be morally justified, our actions must be based on sound logic applied to credible evidence. That we must exercise sound judgment does not mean we cannot or should not exercise it. Force should not be used lightly. When we take preemptive action we must be very sure of our logic and of the data to which it was and is applied. This does not mean we should take no action until it is too late -- until the initiated force against us has been taken completely, greatly reducing our chances of stopping it while remaining unharmed. Action beats reaction and always will.

Yes, our perception of what constitutes initiated force is the hinge on which arguments over force turn. But this does not mean we should not act based on those perceptions. It simply means that we must apply logic to our perceptions as ruthlessly and consistently as possible in an effort to prevent error.

One of the most fundamental mistakes made by moral relativists and those who are uncomfortable with their inconsistent and conflicted philosophies is that of thinking that no philosophy can be valid unless it produces individuals incapable of error, whose decision processes are free of the need to exercise judgment or discrimination and whose conclusions are always and unfailingly incorrect. Human beings, however, will never be perfectly consistent. They will make mistakes. We must not let this fact paralyze us.

Remember that what we choose to do, and what we posses the moral authority to do, do not have to be the same thing. We all choose our options from the ranges available to us. Some of us recognize the outer limits of those ranges, and some of us wonder what they may be. But morality, being objective rather than subjective in nature, does not change -- its principles are logically discoverable and immutable.

A fundamental moral principle represents a range from within which you may choose justified moral actions. The choice is just that -- yours to make, neither mandated nor granted by some external agency. You may choose to take the most extreme option, but most often you will not. This is because most people are motivated as much by emotions such as compassion and mercy as by the logic so essential to making proper choices. Some decry this discretion as some form of subjectivity, demanding the easier interpretation of moral absolutes as commandments set in stone that apply regardless of context and in the absence of discretion. Those who seek this will forever be disappointed; morality and real life do not work that way.

Moral action in real life requires three things: context, judgment, and rationality. Remove any one of these from the equation and the course you chart through life surely will smash you on the rocks.