I had to think about this one a while, and I’m still not sure I’ve come up with the right answer, but at least I have an answer.
The fallacy of division, as I understand it, is the assumption that the members of a group or the elements of a set have all the characteristics of the group as a whole. Examples of the fallacy would be assuming that because 4 is an even number, then 1 and 3 must be even numbers, since together they comprise 4, or that all Asian-Americans are rich, since Asian-Americans overall are richer than white Americans. In this case, you are saying that Lemur’s position, and perhaps mine, is fallacious, because it assumes that what is right or wrong for the state is also right or wrong for the individual, because the state is comprised of individuals.
I can’t speak for Lemur, but I say that the position that what is right or wrong for the individual is also right or wrong for the state does not rest only on the assumption that the constituents of the state have all the characteristics of the state as a whole. It rests more on the assumption that the morality or unmorality of an action is determined by that action’s consequences and intentions, not by who is doing the action. How much of morality is consequence and how much is intention is an almost endlessly debatable question to which I have no ready answer, but I do believe that between the two of them you should have everything you need to make moral judgments, without referring to the identity of the moral actor. For example, if you judge the enslavement of human beings to be a moral evil, whose intentions and consequences both are presumably undesirable, it should not be necessary to inquire whether the slavemaster is white, black, male, female, individual, corporate, or governmental in order to make that judgment. It is wrong regardless of the identity of the slavemaster. That is why I, and many others, are viscerally averse to anything that smacks of a moral “double standard,” where moral judgments differ according to the identity of the actor even when the intentions and consequences are the same.
Obviously, there are many that do not hold to my moral beliefs. Christians, for example, can only hold to their belief that God is all-good by using a radically different standard of “goodness” for God than they would apply to humans. However, the fact that my moral views differ from those of America’s dominant religion does not mean that they are logically fallacious.
As to the specific examples you gave of conduct you considered right for government that an individual “couldn’t, even in principle,” I think I can address many of them by relying on the old Jeffersonian principle, that a government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. I believe that Kim Jong Il in North Korea has exactly as much moral right as I do to make law, draft people, or do any of the things you mentioned: none. Neither of us has the consent of the governed. Gerhard Schroeder and the Bundestag deputies do have some moral right to do the things you listed, in Germany, because they at least arguably have the consent of the Germans to govern. They do not have the moral right to do so in France or America, because the French and Americans have not consented to be governed by Schroeder and the Bundestag. If some group were unwise enough to give me consent to govern them, I as an individual would have as much moral right as the corporate State to make law, annex territory, or whatnot on their behalf.
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It seems to me that there are lots of things that the state can (morally correctly) do that an individual couldn’t, even in principle. For example:[list][li]the military draft[/li][/quote]
We disagree on this: I consider the military draft to be morally wrong in any circumstance.
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[li]issue search warrants[]regulate interstate/international commerce[]tax[/li][/quote]
All of these are things that I agree the individual has no moral right to do, because the people searched, regulated, and taxed have not given him consent to do so. The government, in certain countries, can legitimately claim that the people have given it consent to do these things. Defining “consent” can be tricky, as even in a democratic country there is always somebody dissatisfied with the government, but however tenuous the government’s claim to the consent of the governed, it is usually better founded than any individual’s would be.
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[li]annex territory[/li][/quote]
This is a particularly good example of an action whose morality depends on the consent of the governed. Most people would agree that the United States has no moral right to annex Canada or Mexico, because neither the Canadians nor the Mexicans want to be annexed.
On a more personal level, my home city recently tried to annex a neighboring community, the majority of whose inhabitants did not wish to be annexed. I voted against the annexation proposal, even though it would likely have brought economic benefits to my home city, because we did not have the consent of the governed.
Indeed the state is a different type of entity, but for me the whole point of morality is that its rules depend on the intentions and consequences of actions, not on what type of entity is doing the action.