Hi Zen,

I think that Rand misspoke here. This may be because she was not an attorney. She clearly believed that people had the right to self defense even in a civil society or Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead would not make any sense.

What I think she meant is that in a rational civil society you delegate the right to use non-immediate retaliatory self defense (this is straight from Locke). For example, you cannot wait a year to extract revenge for someone assaulting you (e.g., punching, shooting, knifing you). However, you have the right to use reasonable (proportionally appropriate) force to an immediate threat. This means you can punch someone who is threatening to punch you if there is no easy way to extract yourself from the situation. You cannot shoot someone for just trespassing on your land if they do not present any danger to you. In my opinion, this what she meant by retaliatory self defense.

I think you are correct, and this passage is easily misunderstood. Rand was very much in favor of the right to self-defense, as a corollary to the even more fundamental right to life itself. Regarding this quote, in context, she is giving her rationale for a legitimate Government. We delegate to the Government has the right of coercion when it is retaliation, when it is protecting our natural rights against those who would take them away. This is legitimate only because we have that right of self-defense. So to deny self-defense is also to deny the morality of the Government's use of force.

I think here she is thinking more about pre-meditated after-the-fact crimes of vengeance. She is not saying we do not have the right to immediate self-defense. These words are directed more to people who are acting out a personal vendetta (he killed my brother), or trying to get back property (he has a car just like mine that was stolen), vigilantes acting in the unstable heat of anger without any due process of law or objective standard. This is where the Government and rule of law is needed.

This distinction (between retaliatory force and self defense) is why I argued for firearms training for those purchasing guns. Objective rules of what constitutes self defense is critical to establishing proper criminal law. Even making this distinction, and even for those who represent the government, it is difficult to keep the "victims" of self defense from staging "demonstrations" against it (i.e. the situation in Israel today).