At what point do soldiers bear personal responsibility for their actions?

Inspired by this thread in the Pit, I’m wanting to ask a question. Stipulating that a war is unjustified, at what point do you hold an individual soldier personally responsible for her actions when her actions consist of following orders that her government issued to her?

I want to establish two extremes that I think everyone can agree on:

  1. The soldier provides food and medicine to civilians in the countryside. I doubt that even the most hardened pacifist would consider the soldier who follows this order to be acting in an unethical fashion. (If you personally would blame her, please explain why).
  2. The soldier engages in a deliberate and total massacre of civilians in a village. I doubt that even the most hardened nationalist would consider teh soldier who follows this order to be acting in an unethical fashion (again, if you personally would blame her, please explain why).

Given these two extremes, there’s clearly some sort of criterion that differentiates them such that following one order is ethical and following the other is unethical. What criterion do you use? In answering, I’d like you to consider whether you can think of counterexamples–i.e., orders that might technically fit your criterion for a legal order but where you would have trouble defending a soldier for following them.

Personally, if the war is unjust, then any order which has a non-negligible risk of harming a civilian is one that I hold a soldier morally culpable for following. At the point where the war is unjust, the soldier has a positive ethical duty not to harm civilians. And this is a bare minimum: depending on the unjust war, I am likely to hold the soldier morally culpable for fighting at all.

Daniel

Well, here’s the thing. A moral code is one that is self-imposed. If a person is operating under a moral obligation or sanction, it is between him and his own conscience, plus the intercession and guidance of a just and living God, should that God be invited through the gift of free will to play a role in this process.

This being so, I am not answerable to your moral code, and you are not answerable to mine.

What we are answerable to in the here and now is the law, and it might be more productive to debate what soldiers ought to be legally responsible for.

In a sense, you’re not answerable to my moral code–but in another sense, you are, inasmuch as I’ll be trying to get the law changed to match my moral code (to a degree–I’ll let certain acts I consider immoral, e.g., marital infidelity, be legal inasmuch as I think that the law’s interference will create more problems than it’ll solve).

In any case, this is a question about moral codes, so I’d prefer to keep this as the question. If you’d like to ask about legal codes, I’d prefer you open a different thread to discuss it.

Daniel

When they commit a “crime against humanity” even when “just following orders”. The soldier cannot choose or decide whether or not a war is “unjust”. It’s wrong even to ask him to consider this, in fact, we can’t have soldies making this decison. Soldiers* are expected to- by their Oath and by International law- to follow orders no matter what- excepting ONLY “crimes against humanity”. Crimes against humanity do not include making war, no matter how “unjust” one single citizen may consider that war.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  • Of course- some soldiers sign on as “concientious objectors” and that’s a somewhat different case.

I’m a little confused by this. Did you mean ethical?

Wrong. Soldiers, at least in the United States’ military, are required to disobey unlawful orders.

Not all orders are lawful and you should not follow unlawful orders.
Any order to rape or torture would be unlawful.
An order to should unarmed civilians would be unlawful.
An order to shoot prisoners is almost always unlawful. (Yes, hard to believe there are a handful of real and extreme cases where the were in possibly in the right for doing so, it involved frontline prisoners and a sudden push from the enemy that risked encirclement. I still think it was wrong, but it was justifiable.)

Orders to take precautions in an urban environment where guerillas, rebels and terrorist have been picking off soldiers is a huge ugly grey area and proof that war is hell. Soldiers get jumpy and they have deadly weapons. Bad things happen. The orders to go into the dangerous area are not unlawful or not unlawful enough to disobey. Now it becomes an issue for the individual soldier. Do I disobey and get court marshaled in all likelihood. They probably don’t have the intelligence data the commander has and it is very difficult to not follow orders.

Any soldier who tortures a prisoner under orders is willfully following an unlawful order and not only should refuse to do so but should do everything in there power to report the infraction up the chain of command. This would even include letters to Senators and Congressman.

An order to blow up a town with civilians in it seems to now be criminal now that we have sophisticated weapons to make pinpoint strikes. I won’t condemn the use of the atomic bombs or Dresden but I would question the destruction of a city if done now.

Jim

Is this requirement directly part of the Consitution? Unless it is, (I’m going to guess it’s part of Regulations, right?)- then it is superceded by various Treaties the US has signed and the Senate has ratified. Remember- Constitution, Treaties, Bills, Regs- that makes Military regs come 4th.

And “illegal” does not nessesarily mean “crime against humanity”- Col North shredding those documents was “illegal” but it wasn’t a “crime against humanity”, thus “I was following orders” was a defence. (He also had Congressional immunity for his testimony, so that helped a lot, too).

Thus, US Soldiers are NOT required to follow orders which would lead them to commit a “crime vs humanity”. Indeed, were not some of the dudes at that Iraqi prison convicted in a Court Martial? Weren’t some of those at My Lai? “I was just following orders” didn’t save them- nor should it.

I hold an individual soldier personally, morally responsible for any of the following actions during an unjust war:

  1. Enlisting after the war has started (assuming a reasonable amount of prior info)
  2. Re-enlisting
  3. Following any illegal order

This is, of course, a question of competing moral obligations. Which obligation is paramount, when ordered to shoot a car that may or may not be full of civilians, your obligation to follow orders, or to not kill people? Gut instinct, for me, says the latter obligation is more important, but upon reflection, I don’t think so. I believe that a soldier is morally obligated to follow legal orders, even if one believes they are personally misguided. That is precisely the contract they make with the military before signing up and it is the tenet of honor upon which our military relies–it is precisely this situation for which you’ve promised to follow legal orders without question (which is one big reason why I wouldn’t join, I like being morally free to make my own decisions).

I would make an exception for clear-cut cases of systemic genocide. If the military begins conducting genocide, you probably have a moral obligation to desert, if not directly sabotage the effort.

Thus, if a soldier is given an order that is not a crime against humanity, as defined by law, but is against his personal moral beliefs, his only acceptable choice is to disobey the order and accept the punishment. If one is unwilling to accept this one should refuse to serve.

Not all laws are directly part of the Constitution.

Huh, what? It’s, IIRC, part of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a code of law enacted by the Congress and signed into law by the President.

Thank you for pointing out the obvious.

Wrong. It was illegal and “I was just following [illegal] orders” is not a defense.

Would you care to be consistent?

The punishment won’t exist if the order is actually unlawful. Being tried by any court isn’t a punishment–it’s a venue to determine if the accused has committed a crime.

Look, folks. There are other illegal orders besides orders to commit a crime against humanity.

I neglected to mention something to you regarding this assertion of yours. There’s no “comes in fourth” or “comes in first” in that list. They’re of equal value.

Thankfully that doesn’t make sense as that’s the wrong wording. My apologies to you for that.

What I was trying to say but mangled it by shortening it way too much was:

There’s a proverb I really like that I think applies: no matter how far you’ve gone down the wrong road, turn back.

Yes, you’ve signed a contract to follow orders, even orders that carry a non-negligible risk of killing civilians. However, if it comes to a choice between killing innocent people or breaking your word, I think you have a dilemma in which either way you act will be unethical. Killing innocent people is far more unethical than breaking your word.

Does this mean the military will break down? If it does, then it means the military is predicated on rquiring people to kill innocents. While such an odious institution may be necessary in a necessary war, I’m asking folks to stipulate that we’re discussing an unnecessary war; in this situation, I think that, at whatever point you realize that you’re in an unnecessary war, you’ve got the strongest moral obligation possible to take no acts thatcarry a non-negligible risk of killing civilians, at the very least.

That means you must not shoot at the car. That means that, yes, you must put the lives of yourself and your companions in danger. That’s an awful thing to have to do, but when you made the decision to join the army, you made the decision to risk your life. The civilians in that car have not made any such decision. Your moral obligation is to disobey an order that puts them at risk.

Daniel

Hmm. I can’t speak for anyone else, but if I were in the military, and were given an order that, while legal, went against my moral code, then I would not follow it - and I would accept the punishment for not doing so, whatever it was. Yes, I know that will likely be different were I actually there and in that position, but I believe that my moral code supersedes the orders of the military. However, I would not complain about the punishment; I would have disobeyed orders, and as such I rightfully agree I should be punished. If the order is later found to be illegal, then fine and good; I was right not to take part. If not, then once I got out of the military (which could be quite soon, depending on the punishment) I would be involved in campaigning to change the regulations of the military so that it is illegal.

I would’ve never suspected you of being a fundamentalist Christian, Leftie. :wink:

I’d personally never what the laws to match my moral code - as morals are the province of philosophy and religion, not government. Laws ought to be light enough to allow everyone to follow their own moral code, but heavy enough to impose a set of basic ethics that allow us to function as a society.

No, indeed, very few are. In fact, besides Laws, there are also Regulations, which are not usually passed into Law by Congress- they are written by the Agency to intepret Laws passed by Congress.

I think I misunderstood you. You are saying that soldier is required by the UCMJ to NOT obey a order that is illegal? :smack: (Those pesky double negatives …) :smack:

In the checkpoint scenario, it isn’t clear to me why keeping one’s word is a lesser obligation. Why is killing someone who may or may not be innocent more unethical than breaking an oath you made follow that exact order? The point of the oath is to make clear that it isn’t your decision to make, for very good reasons: you don’t have all the information, you are (usually) younger and less mature than your commanders, and many ethical commands, in order to successful, have to be able to assume complete loyalty.

Breaking the oath in order to avoid killing someone who is definitely innocent is probably moral, I agree (at that is why such an order would be unlawful). But if the person wasn’t innocent, it is probably immoral, as I’d think you’d agree. So the question is, in this Schrodinger’s cat checkpoint case, what is the most ethical action? I think it’s got to be keeping your word. But, in fairness, I think this is an enormously complicated ethical situation.

No, it wouldn’t mean that the military is predicated on requiring people to kill innocents; this assumes that every order not followed related to killing innocents and was rightly not followed. Take the checkpoint scenario again. If some soldiers just started allowing cars to crash into checkpoints (some percentage of them surely would), there would be some very serious breakdowns in morale. If the military breaks down during an unjustified war, it isn’t going to magically reassemble when a justified war comes along.

I agree with the reasoning that Marines ought to be putting themselves at risk in this scenario. But I think that is a case for persuading the commanders to order this, not for Marines to disobey.

That’s correct. A Soldier is required to disobey an illegal order.

BTW, “disobey” is actually a negative of “obey.” Linguistically, it’s a lexical negative as opposed to “not obey,” a grammatical negative.