Well, be careful about when you decide to disobey orders. If you disobey a lawful order in combat then the maximum penalty under the Uniform Code of Military Justice is death.
And while we haven’t executed people for these types of offenses since WWII, the punishment today would still be severe and would probably entail you spending most of your natural life in prison.
Hyuk hyuk hyuk. I don’t see a coherent distinction between ethics and morals in this situation, but if it enables you to participate meaningfully in the conversation, please feel free to substitute “ethic” in the the passage you quoted for “moral.” The difference between fundamentalist Christians and myself is very real, but not relevant to this discussion.
It’s much more unethical, because the consequences of following the order are far more severe than the consequences of disobeying the order.
Will morale break down in this case? That’s fine: we’re stipulating that it’s an unnecessary war, and in this case, the morale of the troops is not a moral concern, inasmuch as it won’t help to achieve a moral end. Build morale around only entering necessary wars, and we can talk.
Daniel
Keep in mind however that in general the military does not expect enlisted men to make complex legal decisions while in the heat of battle. While an enlisted man is only required to obey lawful orders, if the situation is such that the determination of the order’s legality are difficult for a layman such as an enlisted man, in general that enlisted man would not be punished for following such an order if the officer’s order is later found to be unlawful.
But to be honest and practical, the actions of our military courts of late demonstrates that punishment will be meted out if your’s a noncom, maybe not if you’re an officer. Rank really does have it’s privileges in the military justice system!
No, the ethical outcome would depend on whether or not the person was innocent. We’re talking about the decision that has to be made before that knowledge. (Unless you’re talking about knowlingly killing someone innocent, which is presumably an illegal order, and hence irrelevant).
Yes, I read that point the first time you made it, and I addressed it.
Unless you believe there are no justified wars, but that’s another debate entirely.
I disagree that the ethics of the situation depend on whether the person is innocent. In the given situation, you have to make your decision with incomplete knowledge, and the ethics of your decision are based on the incomplete knowledge, not on hypothetical omniscience. This is an established ethical principle, showing up in such places as felony-murder laws and in the äccidental death"defense at trial.
I don’t believe you addressed adequately: references to “magically rebuilding itself” aren’t very substantial. My point is that morale should not be based around a generic acceptance of the military: good morale should be predicated on a war’s justice. I don’t want morale to be good in an unjust war: I want morale in an unjust war to be so abysmal that continued execution of the war becomes impossible.
If you’re claiming that the perception of the justice of a war has no effect on morale, then we can discuss that as an issue; to me, it seems so patently false that it’s uncontroversial. Lemme know if I’m wrong.
Daniel
I’m not contradicting that principle. In fact, I wholeheartedly agree with it. I was merely pointing out that, given either set of facts, the consequences of the action could be net good or bad–since you don’t know the facts, you cannot assume it will be bad. Your argument assumes the person is innocent. Given that the person may or may not be innocent, your higher obligation is to keep your promise because so much else depends on it.
I think morale was the wrong choice of word. The military depends on its honor code to be able to function. I challenge you to find a single military commander that disagrees with this. That code demands that a soldier follow legal orders faithfully, as that soldier promised to do. If that code goes by the wayside, it doesn’t magically (as in, automatically because you want it to) reappear when you want it back.
Then- what’s “an illegal order”? An order to disobey an law, no matter how trivial? “Private, park there in that Passenger Loading zone!” “No SIR, that’s illgeal”? 
Yes, that’s an unlawful order.
To be honest and practical, evidence has its privilege in the military justice system. I’m guessing that you’re alluding to those lying guards who got punished for abusing prisoners although they asserted that they were ordered to do it. (a) No evidence that they were ordered to do it, (b) plenty of evidence that they were already disobeying lawful orders, and © they were aware of their duty to disobey any unlawful order had such been issued anyway.
No. If the person is not innocent and you disobey, then you’ve broken your word, and people who chose to be in a war MAY die as a result. If the person is innocent and you obey, then you’ve not broken your word, and people who did not choose to be in a way WILL die as a result.
Your higher obligation is to not risk the lives of people who didn’t choose to be there.
Ah. That makes more sense.
HOWEVER, I’m suggesting that soldiers are morally obligated to think as follows:
The top-level distinction–between a just and an unjust war–ought to be the deciding factor in what a soldier decides. A soldier who believes that she’s caught up in an unjust war is morally obligated to disobey any order that has a non-negligible risk of being unjust.
This provides a code of honor that will function in a just war and not in an unjust war.
Daniel
Presonally, I can only hold a soldier responsible if he knowingly follows an order that he knows to be illegal. If you allow soldiers to use their moral thermometer to make decisions then you risk a complete breakdown of the chain of command, which can lead to failure and loss of lives. On eof the reasons you have a chain of command is that at various levels they can se more of the forest for the trees.
If you cannot handle that then you should not be in the military.
Well, i’d be in the UK Armed forces, and i’m pretty sure they don’t kill deserters and disobeyers nowadays.
But if they did? Fine. I’d be scared shitless, but if I followed an order contrary to my moral code, then I would have no other option than to disobey it. Life in prison, death, whatever, if I followed the order I don’t see how I could live with myself anyway. I wouldn’t want to be killed/jailed, obviously, but that would be the punishment for my actions and so I would accept that. I’m against the death penalty, so I’d probably be campaigning against it while in my cell, but apart from that i’d pretty much just accept the punishment.
I draw a distinction between ethical and moral behavior, though they often overlap.
Murdering someone is both unethical and immoral. You have become a worse person for doing it (moral side - subjectively speaking) and you have decreased the overall ability for society to function as a whole. (ethical side - objective.)
Laws should try and prevent things like theft and murder, because society can’t function if we’re all too busy watching over our shoulders. It’s basically along the lines of Liberal’s “freedom from coercion” really.
However, laws shouldn’t intrude in the domain of whether or not you’re a good person, as everyone’s definition of a good person is different.
I’ll also point out that killing != murder, and I don’t have a problem with a soldier carrying out lawful orders and as a consequence, killing soldiers of another power.
If the person is not innocent and you disobey, your action would have net evil consequences. So, the decision not to shoot could have net good or evil results. Hence, the standard of greatest good doesn’t help you make the decision.
This is a very good example of why you cannot evaluate the ethics of an action based solely on its consequences. At some point, you have to consider intent. Since the intent, regardless of the results, is to either unjustly break your promise, or justly kill in self-defense, the moral action is to follow the order.
I suppose you could eschew discussion of intent by arguing about the probability of each consequence and making your decision based on some moral-mathematical formula, but it’s going to have the same problems that any purely utilitarian standard has. I think a better analysis (if we’re only looking at consequences) is that given two actions, one of which may or may not be just, and one which is definitely unjust, you choose the one which may or may not be just.
(Not to mention that the scenario above is even more complicated than you spell out. Even the innocent person is partly culpable if they get shot at a checkpoint. They’ve likely made some pretty huge errors in judgement to get to that point. Plus, the people who chose to be in the war made that decision on the assumption that their comrades wouldn’t abandon them. When you break your contract by disobeying, you also nullify their responsibility stemming from volunteering to go. And, since my standard says that re-enlistment or enlistment during a unjust war is immoral, the only people we’re debating about are those that are not in an unjust war by choice.
I’m not quite sure how this algorithm works, so let me give you some scenarios, and you tell me whether they qualify for A or B:
I’m a medic at a mobile hospital during an unjustified war (a phrase which we really should define). A Special Forces soldier comes in with a critical shrapnel wound that only I know how to treat. Do I follow the order to save him/her?
Tanks are rolling in to quell an uprising in a small village during an unjustified war. I have been ordered to clear land mines along the way. I know there are landmines there and that the people who trust me will die if I do not clear them, am I obligated to disobey?
Insurgents have kidnapped a GI from your company during an unjust war. You are ordered to rescue him/her, using lethal force only if fired upon. Do you follow the order?
In some sense, the answers to above depend on how unjust the war is–or rather, why it is unjust. If a German soldier during WWII chose not to de-mine a field through which Panzers would travel, my moral instincts say that’s probably just. But the same scenario played out in the Iraq war, or Vietnam (both of which I consider to be unjust on balance) has a different moral result.
Here’s the bottom line:
No one is going to join the Armed Forces if they think that in any situation their fellow soldiers might just desert them. Since there is so much disagreement about which wars are just and which aren’t, you say bye-bye to the Armed Forces. This is an unacceptable moral result, given that the Army can and has done so much good.
I disagree. This is partly a propaganda mission if executed by the combatants of an unjust war. In order to be completely ethically sound, it needs to be left to outside agencies such as UN or Red Symbol, IMHO.
Note that this does not mean I rank it with the second example, just that it is not completely ethically in the clear.
I believe that any (non-Hippocratic? is that a valid phrase?) action by the aggressor side in an unjust war is itself unjust, like I said in the other thread.
In the first case, I believe that you may ethically treat the wound: the person’s death is immediately in front of you. Having treated the wound, you’ve got an ethical obligation to remove yourself from making that choice in the future if at all possible.
In the second case, you’ve got an ethical obligation to refuse the order. By “quell the uprising,” you mean those tank drivers are going to invade the village and kill people. This carries an extremely high danger of killing civilians. You may not assist them in doing so. Your ethical obligation is to refuse the order and tell folks that you’re not going to do it.
In the third case, I’d say it depends on what you know of how the insurgents treat their prisoners. If your GI friend is likely to be tortured, then you may go on a rescue mission. If your GI friend is likely to be treated according to the Geneva Convention, then you may not. Note, however, that since he was kidnapped by folks who chose to be there, this is not as strongly contraindicated than acts which endanger civilians.
I do not require an ethical choice to be made based on perfect precognition. However, I believe that a person shares in responsibility for the predictable outcomes of his or her choices. Ethical obligations require that you make guesses as to what will happen, and weigh those guesses, and act accordingly.
Daniel
C’mon, Monty, don’t ask me to not conect the dots. I see Rumsfeld and Attorney General Slimeball Gonzales setting up precedent for torture. I hear Bush and Cheney vigorously defending it. I read allegations from former Bush staffers that there were officers and CIA staff right down the line who were under orders to torture, and yet, somehow, I am to believe those soldiers who were in the prison with those CIA staff acted independently. I’m sorry, that’s a preposterous assumption to ask me to make. I am simply not that gullible.
I see. So when Charles Graner abused prisoners as a guard in Pennsylvania prisons, long before he ever got to Iraq, somehow that too is the fault of Rumsfeld, Cheney and the CIA?
Connect the dots, indeed.
That’s all well and good, but you’ve just given me your gut reaction in each case. I’m not really looking to explore your personal moral compass, but rather try to find a set of ethical guidelines for how soldiers ought to conduct themselves in an unjust war. Your answers above don’t even follow your own algorithm, and they include many more ad hoc and contradictory criteria.