It is nearly impossible to make the argument for bioweapons as defensive weapons of war. Their very nature makes them more suited to indiscriminate assaults on entire populations, in which civilians are not merely “casualties of war,” but the intended targets.
The Biological Weapons Convention, which came into force in 1975, prohibits the development of biological agents as weapons. Yet numerous “high-security pathogen labs” exist around the world for the purpose of studying dangerous pathogens. As of March 2023, there were over 100 biosafety level 3 and 4 labs worldwide, with many more in the pipeline.
It is not possible to know the extent to which this ostensibly non-military research can or will be used for military purposes, but it defies credulity to imagine that the answer is “none of it.” Moreover, the very existence of such research creates population-level risks, due to the possibility of the accidental release of deadly pathogens.
Notably, the bulk of this research is funded by governments, raising an important question: In the absence of the state, would this kind of research—and in particular, research with the purpose of weaponizing pathogens—exist at all?
Of course, it is impossible to answer this question with certainty. But there are good reasons to believe that it would not, or that if such research did somehow spring from the marketplace, it would be at a vastly smaller scale than what we see today:
1. Military aggression is expensive.
This goes without saying. What is less widely acknowledged, however, is that markets characterized by voluntary transactions produce curbs on any expenses that are not justified by social demand.
What does this mean for national defense? It means that military spending that the public is not willing to pay for—voluntarily—doesn’t happen.
In free systems such as those described by Murray Rothbard, David Friedman, Robert Murphy, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, among others, defense against aggression is produced privately, usually through some form of insurance. Since insurance companies would be competing against each other for customers, they would all have a powerful incentive to keep costs as low as possible while still providing the desired service.
It is unlikely that very many people, when asked to pay for it out of their own pockets, would choose to spend the kind of money that is necessary to support large-scale acts of military aggression against other countries or populations.
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2. Liability for aggression is also expensive.
Likewise, in a system of privately provided defense, providers would be legally accountable for the consequences of their actions. There would be no single entity granted a monopoly of force, and thereby immunity from the legal consequences ordinary people must face.
What this means is that acts of aggression now become doubly expensive: a government, spending money it has taken by force, is shielded from legal action by its unique status, and thus need not worry much about economizing. Companies competing with each other for honest business do not have this luxury.
Private companies have neither a virtually unlimited stream of forced revenue nor immunity from prosecution for their acts of aggression. The cost of engaging in such acts, when competing with companies that do not engage in them, would likely be prohibitive. Any insurance/defense companies that took an aggressive military approach would quickly go out of business.
3. What does this mean for bioweapons and related research?
Defenders of research into deadly pathogens will argue that this type of work has legitimate purposes beyond the development of bioweapons, and of course they are correct. However, what they cannot demonstrate is that such research is “worth” the investment it requires.
Why not? Because they have no standard by which to evaluate their claim.
The key question here is: Worth it to whom? It is indeed possible that the research currently being conducted into deadly pathogens is “worth it” for those who made the decision to fund it with other people’s money. But all we can say with any certainty is that these people valued putting other people’s money into bioweapons research more than they valued other projects to which they might have allocated it. They most certainly did not value it enough to put up their own money.
More to the point: The people whose money was used for this venture had absolutely no say in the matter. The fact that the money was spent in this way tells us nothing at all about their preferences, and therefore, nothing at all about the value such projects have for society.
In a marketplace based on coercion, there is no way to know what the best uses for resources are; no way to know how much one investment is valued by society over another investment.
What might things look like in a society where nobody had this kind of coercive power? What might this kind of research look like in a society where people must spend their own money for the things that they want?
Given the high costs of aggressive behavior in such a society, it is more than likely that the production of bioweapons, and indeed, any research into dangerous pathogens, would be much more of a rarity than in our current society. We cannot say for certain that they would not exist at all, but in a world in which individuals decide for themselves how their resources are allocated, and in which individuals are held accountable for their own actions, we can be certain that such research, and such weapons, would be much less likely to arise.
Bretigne Shaffer is a former journalist who now writes fiction and commentary and hosts a podcast. She blogs at Bretigne, and her fiction writing can be found at Fantastical Contraption.
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