http://veritasnoctis.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-dissertation-is-completed-approved.html

As for “use” — well, I can use Yahoo as a blog provider (though I don’t recommend it), I can use the sun to power my solar battery, I can use medieval Iceland as an example. Are these metaphorical uses? They seem to me to be standard, non-metaphorical uses, even if they are not the paradigm case.

[W]hy should a killing using another human being as the means be considered less responsible than a killing using any other kind of means?

There seems to be some confusion here regarding the verb “use”. In the most literal sense I could imagine that one very physically strong person could “use” another smaller person as a blunt object with which to bludgeon a third person to death. In that sense your resulting discussion makes the most sense. But the use of “use” as we use it when referring to it here seems to make things different. In a less pressing example I suppose I could say that I “used” the guy running the copy machine in the other building to make a few dozen copies of something. Perhaps in that sense the analysis may make sense, but I honestly haven’t thought this through beyond my weird feeling.

My great concern with the claim of “murderer” here and the reasoning you’ve used to support it is that it seems like a chain of causation could go on forever. Is William Kristol (for example) a murderer because Obama may have considered what he argued when making his decision to tell his subordinates to carry out this attack? Is Irving Kristol a murderer because he raised his son in such a way that William’s head is full of such ideas that he would later argue ideas influentially enough that they would stick in the future president’s head when he made the call the let loose with the missiles? Where can such a chain end? Where do we draw the limits of responsibility?

The people who make the claim that the subordinates are free actors and should be held responsible for their crimes make a delimiting claim that gives us a clear line we can use for demarcation of responsibility. No, “Just following orders” excuses will cut it. This seems to be a point in favor of such a position. The problem that many might see with this position is that it seem to let the leaders who were responsible for giving the orders off the hook. I seem to remember a libertarian arguing that in a libertarian world Goebbels wouldn’t have justly suffered any retribution for his actions. Or something like that. That just seems to strike me as odd, if not just disconcerting.

A broader question concerning Obama: do you share David Friedman’s optimism about Obama to turn out to be a “libertarian” anti-Bush?

Welcome to the Presidency, you thug.